Guitarists! What are the chances that, after plugging in your guitars and pedalboards for a gig at a venue, you find the amp sucks? Even worse, the amps they offer don't generate the tones you want? And when you finally suck it up, gave in and dealt with the amps at the venue, did you discover that you weren't performing at your finest because you were always wrangling with the amp while you are playing?

Sounds like you need a guitar amp that you can carry anywhere and never disappoint you! I have rounded together the top 3 best of the best guitar amps heads as recommended by me, your friendly neighbourhood guitarist-man Dave!

There are many reasons why I always choose not to run my rig through the amps they provide whenever I play live with my band, especially if we are performing at smaller gig venues. Even though nowadays I can just forgo using amps entirely and instead use my Fractal multieffects pedal and connect it straight to the front of the house mixer, nothing can still beat the feel of having a real amp pumping out the air and my guitar sounds blasting and reverberating directly to my face. So if I do choose to have an amp on stage, I'll always make sure the amp sounds, feels, and is able to accommodate my playing very well so that I can have a really good time performing.

So, why do I (sometimes) hate using amps they provide at gig places? Well......No. 1, not enough HEADROOM!

Headroom is the amount of volume you can get before distorting your sound. Most of the time, I would describe my playing style is very versatile in the sense that if I want to play clean tones, I really want clean tones, and if I want to freak the hell out of the audience with my nasty high gain tones, I can do so with ease at any given volume I want without worrying about my guitar tone sounding shitty and muddy. And often times, because most amps at every gig venue here in Malaysia, on average, are in pretty bad and beat-up condition because they are either too old or too often used and abused by guitarists of other bands, or worse, the amp's wattage doesn't suit the space. So as a general rule, I would be more lenient in using the amps they provide if:

1. They provide mid-high class tier amps (or flasghip models, which are wayyyyy better) as I know these kind of amps won't dissapoint
2. The amps they provide has good wattage and tones that would compliment my playings (as in if I want to play blues or hard rock in a small gig, and If I see a Peavey Transtube or a Peavey Bandit on the stage, I'll say "NOPE the f*&# out of there!")

Next, as a guitarist who regularly uses pedals, I frequently see amps on stage that are not at all pedal friendly.

Some amps don't even have an effects loop (or "FX loops," as some would call them. If you see "Send" and "Return" holes behind the amp, that's the one!) to plug my pedals in through. If this is the case, you'll have to run them into the front or input of your amp and hope for the best, which I hate if that situation happens to me. This is crucial for me because plugging in my multieffects pedal straight into the input of the amp will often result in horrible guitar tones that will come out of the speakers because there's already a preamp section in my multieffects pedal, so if using my preamp section in the pedal going through the amp's preamp section just doesn't make sense to me. So in order to combat this problem, most amp manufacturers provide the effects loop jacks at the back of the amp so that your pedals will bypass the amp's preamp section and hence sound more organic, more like how the pedal are supposed to sound.

And lastly, when I see the amp heads and the cabinets oddly paired, I know for sure I won't like how they will sound when they are played.

Think of it this way; You want to play metal music, but you see a 100-watt high gain amp head being paired with a 2x12" speaker cabinet that is meant to play mainly cleaner kinds of guitar tones, like a VOX speaker cab with Celestion G12M Greenback speakers... You know where this is going, right?

Most gig venue owners will use whatever amps or cabinets they have available for guitarists to use because, let's face it, we're not Joe Bonamassa or Kirk Hammett, who can simply demand which amp and speaker combo we want to use on stage. Although it would be cool and fun to just mix and match amp heads and cabs and see how it sounds, I would rather save that for the recording studio to experiment with and instead focus primarily on performing because most of the time I already know my guitar tone 99.9% of the time, so figuring out how to achieve my sound from weird amp combos would defeat the purpose of me trying to save time setting up and soundchecking.

Now, if you're a guitarist like me and dissatisfied with the guitar amplifiers you must use at gig venues, then, my friend, you need a guitar amp head! You should definitely check out my top 3 amp heads, which I'll now show you.