I've in the past week grabbed myself a little Vox 3 watt mini amp for practice and I must say I am actually blown away by the result. It’s totally versatile with a variety of effects and tonal variety and to my surprise it’s actually my guitar amp of choice for recording, not only demos but actual releases.
I was actually pretty impressed at the options available before settling on the Vox. There are a lot of high quality and affordable options from manufacturers like Orange, Fender, Danelectro and Crate to name only a few and they’re truly affordable, I’m talking under $20 for some of the amps from Danelectro. I found a good review site that provides some detailed info on almost any practice amp on the market at practiceamp.net which made the process very easy.
The great thing about getting a good quality practice amp is obviously the mobility it gives you. When you have a guitar amp that weighs less than a real guitar and is no larger than a standard shoebox you don’t have any of the characteristic loading in issues that plague many of us when we want to set up for a gig or possibly a jam with full band.
I often play a Marshall JCM900 Stack and like it but there are times particularly when I need to practice that it is totally unrealistic, not only is it’s size a problem but most larger amps don’t actually sound great unless really cranked and that isn’t going to endear you to neighbors late in the evening or if you have got a young family like me.
There also are some options available for iPhone but after testing some of these out I was a small underwhelmed although I've heard some of the options available on the iPad are far better.
So take it from me if you're finding your bigger guitar amp not extremely realistic for practice try out a practice amp and take a look at the reviews at practiceamp.net it's a great website and really useful.
