Electric Guitar Amplifier - The Brawn behind the Brains!
Having your own electric guitar is not enough. Electric guitar amplifiers are part of the deal, and you should always take this into consideration when buying electric guitars. Bear in mind your likely use of your equipment, and don't get talked into something that you don't need.
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The first musical instrument amplifiers were made for the guitar. Fender created amplifiers to go with their new breed of solid body guitar in the early 1950's. And straight away, effects such as reverb were added to enhance the sound of the guitar. Listen to much of the music from this era, and if a guitar was present, you will often hear the reverb being used.
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Electric guitar amplifiers come in two main varieties. There are combo arrangements where the amplifier head and the speakers are held in the same cabinet, and there are the variety where the amplifier head and the speakers are in separate cabinet. The classic rock amplifiers from Marshall usually came as the latter.
Many of the original guitar amps were run with vacuum tubes. These are more prone to breakage and do up the cost of the equipment due to maintenance. They did produce a unique sound, a sound that is still favoured by many artists. The other main type of amp head is driven by solid state circuits, which are more reliable but to do give the same quality of sound that their valve driven counterparts do.
In a live environment, many artists over the years have experimented with their equipment, in search of the perfect sound. It is not uncommon to find stacks of amplifiers one on top of another driven by one or more amplifier heads, in an attempt to achieve rock and roll nirvana. Typically one amp head would act as a slave to another to pre amplify the sound produced, and deliver an altered sound to the second amp. The quality of the final sound would be significantly different to that achieved through a single amp and speaker. This technique also allowed musicians to mix and match amp heads with different speakers to further experiment with deliverable sounds. None of this is available with a combo set of course, because the speakers are permanently linked to the amp head that drives it.
Those of you interested in an electric bass guitar my opt for a different amplifier arrangement to those playing standard six string guitars. The requirements for a bass tone would be different than those for lead or rhythm playing, where a more trebly sound would be required.
