If you are playing in a band and you are playing live, you have a professional responsibility to make sure you have a quality rig to play through.

I play for a living, and am not independently wealthy. Still, I will not appear on stage without good gear. My music deserves more. So does yours.

Nothing will invalidate an otherwise steller performance than lousy sound. And nothings worse than playing shows where they give us an opener with lousy sound. They always CHASE THE CROWD! Sometimes they come back, sometimes not.

You won't be playing with many other bands if you're chasing their fans.

Here's what you need:

If you are the only guitar player or the rhythm player in a two guitar band you need a 50 tube watt amp. That means 2 6l6GC or EL84s. Not 4 EL84s. I've tried that. it was ugly.

If you are the lead guitarist in 2 guitar band, or the only guitar player in a band with a loud drummer and/or bassist you want a 100 watt tube amp. It’s NOT twice as loud as 50 watts. It’s perceptibly louder though. It “goes to 11." Two 50 watt amps will also work and you can run them in stereo.

The less features an amp has the more reliable it will generally be. And the easier it will be to get a good sound dialed in on stage. Complex channel switching amps seem convenient, but god forbid you lose that footswitch. Check for little details: I had a Mesa Boogie with a footswitch that had the buttons so close together it was physically impossible to step on just one without ballet training and point shoes (sadly, I lack both). I might have thought about that  when choosing an amp.

Save your pennies and get the pro versions of amplifiers, I’d go with a used professional amp over a new middle of the range amp for regular rock ‘n’ roll gigging. Examples: get a Fender reissue Twin, Bassman, or Super, or a Pro tube series, instead of a Hot Rod or Blues series amp which are more for home studio and blues jams at bars which tend to be at much more moderate volume levels. A pro Boogie will have a Mark designation (Mark 1, Mark 2c Reissue, etc.) otherwise (from experience) I wouldn’t trust it on tour.

ALL TUBE. NO DIGITAL. Digital feedback (intentional or not) will chase the bar and make you deaf.

This is the baseline for what you need. You can fine tune the tones and levels later by adjusting your speaker setup, which will be the subject of  future article.