Quick Buying Guide The Rough Guide to Buying an Instrument 1. Instruments as Gifts 2. Which Instrument Should I Buy? 3. Acoustic Guitars 4. Electric Guitars 5. More On Electric Guitars 6. Basses 7. Amplifiers

Electric guitars and basses require amplification, and here is where the parents cringe, imagining the serenity of their household shattered by squealing feedback. Happily, modern practice amps solve this problem by providing both a low overall volume, and a headphone jack. Parents, let us repeat: headphone jack. When the guitar is plugged into the headphone jack, the speaker is shut off. In the headphones, the volume can go up to the point of discomfort, gratifying even the most power hungry teen. There is a wide variety of amplifiers available at very reasonable prices. Most practice amps cost less than $100, and feature a headphone jack, reverb (an echo-ey effect, like an auditorium) and distortion. Guitar amps come in two flavors: solid-state and tube. Tube amps are a holdover from by-gone days of yore, when vacuum tube were used for powering machinery. Musicians discovered that tube amps recreate their instrument's sound with a pleasing warmth and tone, and thus the vacuum tube has lived on well into the twenty-first century. Tube amps are more expensive, but eventually most guitarists rely on them for their preferred tone. Solid-state amps amplify the signal using circuitry. They are very bright and clean, and lack the warmth of the tube amps. They're also cheaper to make, so entry-level solid-state amps are common. A lot of brainpower and money has been spent trying to make solid-state amps sound like tube amps, so the difference between the two types has diminished over time. For a first amp, a solid-state amp is the best bet. Basses tend to use solid-state amplifiers. The entry-level versions are similar to the entry-level guitar amps, and feature the beloved headphone jack. Next: Quick Reference Buying Guide By Musical Genre ©2003-2004 Too Many Guitars.