Electric Guitar Amp

[nayr]

Has anybody here built their own guitar amp? (this would be for home/backyard use and would never be used at concert levels)

I was thinking making one as a summer project for the girlfriend who plays electric. Something along the lines of four 7" or 8" RS woofers in a ported box with a lowpass filter.

I'm considering a Behringer V-AMP PRO (http://behringer.com/LX1-PRO/index.cfm?lang=eng) as the frontend. I will also need some sort of power amp. Any suggestions on how much power these would be happy with? Would a sub plate amp do the trick as I'm not going way up in the frequency range?

For ~$500 This seems like it would be a pretty "kickass" guitar amp for her to have fun with, but am I going way too far out here? Should I stay away from the RS drivers and go with some that are cheaper and need less power, or go pro?

Any suggestions or comments are appreciated.

[Dennis H]

Guitar amps/speakers are usually designed with a "tone", i.e. a tailored frequency response and intentional distortion of specific types (2nd order is popular). Flat, low-distortion response may not be what she wants.

[joecarrow]

Eminence has a whole line of "guitar" speakers. They're efficient, they have pleasing distortion profiles, and their frequency response is contoured in such a way that it compliments electric guitar in a certain style. With electric guitars the amp and speaker distortion are maybe more of a part of the sound than the guitar itself.

An alternate train of thought is to have a reasonably high fidelity PA speaker and amplifier that together introduce a minimum of their own distortion and then use something like the Behringer V-amp to simulate that artistic distortion.

The only way the RS line of drivers would be useful for something like this is to use a lot of them, maybe in a line source. Pro drivers and guitar amps hit 110 to 120 db without much trouble, the big stuff goes even louder.

Even if you don't want to play loud, there's the problem of frequency response. The RS drivers are only good up until around 2khz, then they sound horrible. Metal cone breakup makes your ears melt, paper cone breakup is Rock 'N Roll.

An electric guitar contains frequencies up past 15 khz, a sub plate amp doesn't do well with that. Even if you don't make it all the way up there, it would sound dull if you didn't get past 5khz.

Sorry if that's kind of disconnected, hopefully there's something helpful in there.

[nayr]

This is what the Behringer does, it models various guitar amps and cabinets, so she can play with all sorts of distortion variations and tones. Or she can bypass it completely and play with her guitar tone controls, or plug in an acoustic with pickups.

[nayr]

An alternate train of thought is to have a reasonably high fidelity PA speaker and amplifier that together introduce a minimum of their own distortion and then use something like the Behringer V-amp to simulate that artistic distortion.

This is what my original intent was, but then I noticed most guitar amps seemed to be nothing more then single or multiple 8" drivers and I thought there must not be much in the high frequencies. I suppose this is mostly from resonances and intentional distortion?

[joecarrow]

Is that $500 plus $250 for the V-amp, or $500 total? Would she want to possibly play with a drummer or in public with this rig? If she seriously doesn't need to go loud, there are a few hifi projects out there that could do alright.

Incidentally, some bass players prefer really neutral sounding PAs for their clean tone.

[nayr]

No, this would never be used in public, which is why I as looking at the RS drivers. My initial concept was monitors + a small rack, but she wants something self contained. Then I thought why do I even need tweeters at all and I could save a good chunk of money, but I guess that is not the case.

The $500 cost is total, factoring ebay prices, and some wood and finishing materials I already have. (the V-AMP goes for a bit over $100 on ebay for instance, and I don't mind buying used)