Please check out the Line 6 Jam before you by. I bought one about 2 years ago and I have not seen another amp that is better for a beginner. It has backing tracks, can record. What ever you record to it can be changed.
Meaning you can slow it down, speed it up even change the
key it plays the song back in. You can change the speed or key of any of the songs prerecorded on the amp. It has onboard effects.
It has a jack for a guitar it also has a jack you can plug a bass, or piano or mic or another guitar or....... and use and record both at the same time. It only has room for 24 minutes of recorded music, but that's ok, because you can plug a SD card in the thing and write what ever you have recorded off to the SD card. Delete the current memory and you have another 24 minutes to play with. It will write to the SD card in a number of different formats. Of course you can bring anything you sent to the SD card back into memory.
I'm just scratching the surface of what this amp will do. It pushes 75 watts thru a 12" speaker. I have no connection to Line 6, they run about $400.00 new.