In an earlier thread on this forum http://www.guitartricks.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2164 we had some discussion about how much power you really need. You'd be surprised at how loud a small amp is! What gets scary, is the fact that it takes a ten-fold change in power to produce double (or half) the loudness!

In other words, a 50 Watt amp is going to be only twice as loud as a 5 Watt amp. ('Kinda makes you wonder why you'd want to spend all that coin on a bigger amp!). What makes the bigger amps totally unusable for anything but on-stage performance is the fact that a tube amp doesn't sound its best until its 'cranked'. A big amp at full power is going to hurt your hearing.

The reason a lot of players give for 'needing' a bigger amp is that they get drowned out by the drummer. Hello? Take away his miniature baseball bats and give him some lighter sticks! If everybody is using small amps, you avoid the 'volume wars' and you can get down to making [u]music[/u]. That's what you're there for, right?

I've finally got some time off from my job, so I can get some work done on the WeeBeastie 5 Watt amp I've been meaning to build for months now. I've already got a 60 Watt Ampeg VT-40 4x10 combo, and a 120 Watt Ampeg VT-22 2x12 combo, so I speak from experience when I talk about using high-power amps. I'm designing, and building, a [u]small[/u] amp because I believe its a better choice.