more important: guitar or amp?

O

OverlookFran

New member
on the surface, this may sound like a no brainer...but the more you think about it, its not as easy to make a good response.

the reason i ask is because i am in the process of hunting down a sweet boutique amp. but my guitar arsenal consists of a mexican tele and a custom built deluxe (which is amazing). but i wonder if i should just procure another solid guitar like a Gibson Howard Roberts, which I want, or shell out for a top notch amp.
i have a Twin that im less than satified with.

so:

chicken or egg time.

if you have an amazing guitar but a medicre amp...are you only sounding as good as your amp? vice versa.

im sure the easy answer is to get a great guitar and amp...but thats too easy. :)

thoughts?
 
I agree with Light. But if i have to answer "amp or guitar"...shit, just try different guitars with your amp, and then try your guitars with different amps, see which you like better. I can't see there being a a rule here.
 
After the hands of the player I feel a good guitar is more important than the amp. Yes, the amp can make a big difference, but you need to have a good instrument for the hands to interface with. Ideally, you get both a good guitar and a good amp, but since most of us fight with finances, I would say get the good guitar first.
 
Imo

There are 3 things that will lead to great sound...

1. A great guitar
2. A great amp
3. The ability to play

I would go in that order.. Since you already have 1 & 3 no doubt nailed I would go for #2....
 
I think it's the amp. As everyone has said, the player is the most important factor. Eric Clapton could make a crappy guitar sound much better through a crappy amp than I could.

I think a terrible guitar ran through a killer amp could manage to sound decent if not "good."

But a great guitar through a crappy amp would still sound crappy, IMO.

$.02
 
An amp is what makes your sound. You need a guitar that is comfortable and easy to play. Everyone wants to say its "in the fingers" but hitting a G chord is pretty much the same all around. That may apply to lead players, but not generally making music on a guitar. I'm not a lead player, and amp selection is very important in making recordings.

H2H
 
By the way, I can make an open G chord sound as good as Clapton on any given amp/guitar setup. If he disagrees, he's welcome to throw down with me ;)

H2H
 
I firmly believe it's the combination. I have several "killer" guitars that are NOT "killer" when plugged into the wrong amp. But I don't care to substitute axes because I love the ones I have...so I seek out amps that play nice. On the other hand, I have a 1963 Sears Silvertone Twin Twelve that always sounds good, no matter what I plug into it.
 
Guitar first, then amp.

No amount of polish in the amp is going to be able to overcome a bad basic sound.

So go get yourself the '59 Strat and '59 Bassman and stop worrying about it.

;)

foo
 
Hard2Hear said:
By the way, I can make an open G chord sound as good as Clapton on any given amp/guitar setup. If he disagrees, he's welcome to throw down with me ;)

H2H
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LOL! When you put it like that I kind of feel like a guitar god-- I can play a mean open G. :cool:
 
Guitar first. Just from personal experience (and out of sheer necessity).

My guitar is amazing. My amp...well, I'm looking forward to buying one I can tolerate. But at the very least...you can play a guitar without an amp. Doesn't work so well the other way.
 
amps and guitars are both important to your sound. if you have a sweet amp and you are plugging a lotus les paul knock off into it... you know what the weakest link is.

cheap guitars may not sustain, may go out of tune, may have bad electronics or might be unreliable.

cheap amps might not be powerful enough, they might not be able to get ANY good sound, they might also be unreliable.

you don't need a $20,000 PRS Dragon and a Bogner to have great tone... but you WILL get better results buying from a company with a reputible history in terms of reliability, usability, and customer loyalty.

you typically get what you pay for... to a point. a 300 dollar les paul should be suspect. "well what happened to it?" but after a few thousand dollars (depending on the type of guitar) you just start paying for frills or extreme rarity of the guitar, eventhough a good standard PRS might sound just as good...
 
OverlookFran said:
thats very philosophical. but lets talk shop here, not skills. what do you think?
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Well, I build guitars, not amps, so my answer is probably pretty predictable.

That being said, it is finding the right COMBNATION which will define YOUR sound, and anything else just doesn't matter. You don't even need a great guitar or amp, depending on the sound you want.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
I'm pretty sure its the guitar. I can plug my parker into anything and it sounds perty darn good to me. And the amp I use is a Roland JC because it IS such a neutral amp, it sounds like your guitar. Not suggesting that you should buy a roland JC but I am suggesting that you plug a few guitars into one to see how they sound through it. You will notice an extreme difference from one guitar to the next.
 
I'd say its the amp more than the guitar, but you still need both to be at a decent level. Saying that a great amp can make even the worst guitar sound better is a huge exaggeration, because if you have really weak or microphonic pickups it can never sound good. IMO the sound (excluding talent) is 60% amp 40% guitar
 
I own an amp that will make any guitar, from a $100 squire to a $100,000 '59 burst Les Paul, sound like ass. It's an old cheap Crate amp and it's the worst sonding amp ever made. Thats why I keep it. Just because.

H2H
 
From my own experience -
I've been playing bass for a long time, and I remember playing on an old Fender with rusty strings and a small amp. I couldn't really hear myself and that would affect my playing.
When I took that old Fender and plugged it into a nice big Fender amp, I could really hear my bass for the first time, and that made my playing alot better.
I would say - if you already have a guitar that you're comfortable with and can play for more than an hour without wanting to smash it on the floor than the thing you need is a good amp.
The thing is - your own technical abillity (which I'm sure is great) will be the first to determine the sound. Then it's the pickups and the guitar being tuned and calibrated and so on. Then it's the amp.
If your guitar is in bad shape, it would've been obvious to you that you need to fix it before you continue playing, so I'm guessing that's not the case. If you don't like your amp, take your guitar to a music store and try some other amps in the same price range and see if there's anything you like better. Maybe you could even trade the old amp and save some more money.
I'm using a small "Gorilla" amp with a used 20 year old bass and it's already beginning to sound distorted. That's becuase of the amp, not the guitar.
It's like having a bad apir of monitors to mix with. Even if you're using a Behringer in your signal chain, the first thing you would need is a good pair of monitors.

my $0.2
 
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