Almost as much as your guitar itself, your amplifier determines your tone, the range of sounds that you can make with your instrument. However, guitar amplifiers can be confusing because they come in a dizzying array of styles and types. This article will give you a lay-of-the-land of the four main amplifier types: solid state, tube, hybrid, and modeling.
Tube Amps
Back in the early days, the only guitar amplifiers were tube amplifiers. Listening to Hendrix, Clapton, Zeppelin? Johnny Cash or Chuck Berry? Tube amplifiers. These amplifiers use vacuum tubes to drive the power amplification, and the result is beautiful smooth tones and silky distortions. More than any other amps, tube amps respond dynamically to your playing: hit the strings a little harder, you can get a little more breakup. Play softer, and the tone is cleaner.
Tube amps are still the king when it comes to pure tone. There’s nothing else like them. They do, however, have several drawbacks. First of all, they’re expensive and touchy – you need to take good care of them, and they do, eventually, require replacement tubes. They need to warm up before you play them, and they need to cool down before you move them. Also, most tube amps are happiest turned all the way up, so you need to get an amp that’s the right size. A tube amp that sounds great at a club will often feel slightly neutered in your living room.
Solid State Amps
Solid state amps are the workhorses of the amplifier business. Less expensive and more robust than tube amps, they can produce great clean tones. They don’t react as dynamically to your playing as tube amps, however, and the distortion is lacking. Solid state amps create distortion not by overloading power tubes, like tube amps do, but by clipping the sound wave. The result is a choppy, harsh distortion that works well if you’re going for an 80s metal sound, but doesn’t work as well for blues or classic rock. But because of their low cost and pure clean tones, they’re often a great choice if you’re running through a digital effects processor.
Hybrid Amps
Because tube amps produce the best distortion, but solid state amps are great for clean tones, somebody had a great idea: why not use a solid state power stage, but use a tube preamp for distortion. The result is less expensive and less finicky than tube amps, and produces better distortion than solid state amps. However, these amps aren’t as cheap or reliable as solid-state amps, and tend to lack some of the beautiful tone dynamics of true tube amps, which get some of their tone from saturating the tubes in their power stages.
Modeling Amps
There’s a newcomer to the guitar amp field. These amps have a solid state base, but use digital signal processing to mimic a range of classic amp sounds. Sometimes this modeling can be pretty impressive, but a lot depends on the quality of the digital/analog converters. In the worst case, these amps don’t really let the sound of your guitar shine through. The technology is moving rapidly, however – when these amps first came out they were considered a gimmick by most serious musicians, but now they’re getting harder to ignore and you’ll see pros using them. The wide variety of tones, combined with the relatively low cost, make them a good choice for a first amp.
Conclusion
There are other factors you need to consider when buying an amp: how much power do you need? Do you want an effects loop? Do you want built-in reverb or chorus? Also, you need to always make sure your amp works well with your guitar. But knowing which type of amp you want is a great starting point when you walk into the guitar store and see dozens of choices. Happy playing!
