All Amped About Guitar Amps: Which One Goes Where?

An important part of creating your own home recording studio requires understanding how the amp works, but more importantly, what job each type of amp has. This is, however, a simple concept to understand. For example, electric guitars require the use of an electric guitar amp whereas electric bass guitars require the bass amp. Acoustic-electric guitars use acoustic amplifiers, and, of course, acoustic guitars do not use amps. This basic information, however, is not all that is needed for a successful amp set up. Let's take a closer look.

Amps are a very tricky subject as there are just so many out there. The basic idea of them is to take the ultra low voltage coming from the pickups and bring them up to line level. Seems simple, but there is a lot that goes into how that signal is boosted.

The main two types of amps are tube and solid state. Tube amplifiers are the grand daddies of amplifiers and use vacuum tubes as their main amplifier. Solid state amplifiers use modern chips in place of the tubes. The difference is that tubes tend to add a warmth and smoothness to the sound but can also add a good amount of noise too. Solid state amps are more clean and solid, but can sound cold. All amps, whether for guitar, bass, or acoustic work the same but differ in where they focus their characteristics. This is not to say that you should plug a guitar into a bass amp. Sometime it will work, and sometimes it just won't.

The Relationship between Electric Guitars and Electric Guitar Amps

Electric guitars work on pickups. A pickup works by using a magnet that is wrapped in wire. The magnetic field rides just through the strings so when the string is strummed or plucked, it alters the magnetic field and produces an electrical signal at the same frequency as the note being played. The "tone" of the pickup is determined by how many times the wire is wound around the magnet. A standard electric pickup is wrapped around 5000 times, which is nothing to sneeze at.

A Humbucker pickup uses 2 of these wrappings to reduce the amount of noise that can be produced by the pickup. This, obviously, increases the quality of any guitar using Humbucker pickups.

Bass Electric Guitars and Their Amps

Bass guitars work pretty much the same way that an electric guitar does. The reason for a bass sounding so deep is the fact that they use thicker strings, which vibrate at a lower frequency by nature. Specifically, a bass amp is specially designed to focus on the lower frequency spectrum and boost it. A normal guitar amp focuses more on the mid to high frequency spectrum.

Furthermore, a guitar wire is wound around 5000 times using #42 wire. The more times it is wound, or the more tightly wound it is, the more the lower frequencies get tapered off. To exaggerate this effect, a bass uses thicker wire as well. Sometimes the pickup is split so that it looks like a z on the body. This way the two higher strings have a boosted sound and the lower ones produce a thicker sound because of the unique shape.

Acoustic-Electric Guitars and Acoustic Guitar Amps

Acoustic-Electric guitars and their amps work entirely different from electric guitars and amps as they use what is called a "piezo pickup."

A piezo pickup is essentially a dynamic microphone that only reacts when the string is plucked. This creates a more natural sound in relation to the actual acoustic sound. Today, even some electric guitars have piezo pickups added to them because they are so unique.

Now that you have the know how, you should also know that some amps are inter-compatible between guitars. What you can't know, however, is how well one guitar type, like a Fender, will be compatible with a different brand, like Line6, as I mentioned above. As Soundetta.com has suggested many times, ample amount of research can benefit you in decision making but I still insist that there is nothing better than pulling up a seat in your local guitar store with your girl in one hand and line into one amp at a time. Rock on.