Best beginner guitar amps

This is the purchase people forget, and forgetting it is how a $200 budget turns into a guitar and a disappointment. An electric guitar with no amplifier is a quiet plank.

Both picks state their Starter Path band, and we have not played either — our method is on how we pick.

Why the headphone socket outranks everything

Look at when a beginner actually practices. After school, after work, after dinner — in the evening, in a house with other people, often through a wall from someone who did not choose this hobby.

An amp with a headphone socket can be played at any hour at full tilt, silently. An amp without one can be played when the household agrees. Twenty minutes every evening is around two and a half hours a week; forty minutes twice at the weekend is less than an hour and a half, in sessions the player may not feel like. The first schedule produces a guitarist.

This is the same argument that makes the electric quieter than the acoustic for household purposes, which surprises most people — we work through it in acoustic vs electric.

Why wattage is a red herring at this size

Wattage sells amplifiers and tells a beginner almost nothing. Loudness does not scale linearly with watts — a 20 watt amp is nowhere near twice as loud as a 10 watt one — and a bedroom needs a small fraction of either.

What wattage genuinely decides is whether an amp can keep up with a drummer, and that threshold sits far above anything on this page. Both picks here are explicitly practice amps. A player who joins a band will buy a bigger amp, and that is the correct order to do it in: nobody should spend band-amp money before they have a band.

The two picks

The Fender Frontman 10G#ad is the default first amp. Ten watts, a 6 inch speaker, two channels so clean and dirty are a knob apart, a headphone output and an aux input for playing along with a phone. Eight and a half pounds, and it does exactly what it says.

The Boss Katana Mini#ad is the more interesting box. Seven watts through a smaller 4 inch speaker, but with three amp voices, a genuine three-band analog tone stack rather than a single tone knob, a built-in tape-style delay, and AA battery power for around seven hours. Three pounds, so it genuinely travels.

The trade is specific: the Fender has the bigger speaker and the aux input; the Boss sounds better and goes anywhere. If the amp will sit on a desk next to a phone, take the Fender. If it will move around the house or leave it, take the Boss.

What to skip

The amp inside a very cheap starter bundle. At the bottom of the market the amplifier is frequently a buzzing speaker in a box with a volume knob, and it makes every note the beginner plays sound bad. They cannot tell whether it is them or the gear, which is the same trap as an out-of-tune guitar — see are cheap guitars worth it.

Anything without a headphone socket, for the reason above.

A big amp bought for the future. A 40 watt combo in a bedroom is never turned above two, which is exactly where most amps sound worst, and it is heavy, expensive and loud enough to be a household problem the first time it is turned up.

What you still need

A guitar cable, which is not usually included. Headphones — any closed-back pair works. And that is genuinely it: an electric guitar, an amp, a cable, a tuner and headphones is a complete setup.