Amp Wattage and Speaker Size

The Amp wattage (watt) reflects how loud the amp goes. For home practise around 5-15 watt is perfect, after that you’re starting to enchrone in small gig volume. If you’re using a Valve amp it’s worth thinking about headroom. If you’re using a 5 watt amp and trying to play it loudly, you will just get ‘break up’ and not clean, so it would be more sensible to buy a louder amp and run it at a quieter volume, this also works the opposite way. If you want a crunchy sound, buying a smaller wattage and running it at the top volume will let you achieve this sound at a home appropriate volume. 

Most amps come with 10” or 12” speakers to help capture the full dynamic range of your guitar, though some amps feature smaller or larger ones! We would use 1 x 12” to explain something has 1 12” speaker in or 4 x 10” to explain it has 4 10” speakers in the cab! 

Amp Channels

An amp channel is like a sound of the amp, having multiple channels gives you access to different sounds, clean/gain/lead etc. You can use a footswitch on lots of amps to change channels midsong to change your guitar sound to reflect your playing.