Neighbor want us to play bluegrass at the park in the town square. He has banjo with pickups and I’ll play guitar. Most of the two channel acoustic amps I’ve seen have one instrument input and one mic input. But I’ve also read that it’s not recommended to play two instruments through one amp. Could someone help sort this out for me as I am new to performance playing? Amp recs or setup would be helpful and we need to keep everything simple, i.e. no mixers, etc. Thanks
Playing with 2 instruments directly into one amp means that you won’t have controls that are individual and it is likely to sound poor. You would also need some way to combine the output of the instruments in a way where they did not alter each other.
Use 2 amps. It is a lot simpler!!
One reasonable way you could get by with one amp: Make sure that you have effects and eq pedals individually for each instrument. Then you need a buffered combiner to “mix” the two pedal chains together. That output could then be fed to a CLEAN amp and you’d get something that wasn’t horrible and have some reasonable control over each instrument. Your statement above says this is too much complexity, so I am back to “just use 2 amps”. 
so why did I put “mix” in quotes? I am an electrical engineer and a “mixer” means something very different than what it means to an audio person.
A mic input will be expecting a smaller signal level than a guitar input, so do not put a guitar (or banjo) into a mic input.
Thanks for responding guys. I wrote in because after two minutes of research it seemed there wasn’t an easy solution. And I guess there isn’t. Banjo person has a Marshall acoustic; I don’t have an acoustic amp. Getting the Bose is just too much for entry level, sit on a park bench and play. I’m now thinking it’s bluegrass, why do we even need amps.
I used AER Alpha in such situation. All EQ flat on the amp. But my guitar has its own 3 band tone control.
Alexey - No doubt the AER is a fine amp, but $1000 and still need two amps. I mistakenly was thinking that it would be possible to use one amp that had two channels and no other gear.
AER has two inputs that we used in concert.
Do you have an electroacoustic guitar? Did you try plugging into the second channel? The manual says the jack input takes any source. Do you have something like a plugin in amp e.g. fender micro or nux mp3? If so you could connect headphone out to the aux in of the second channel.
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I would suggest a well priced PA system with a decent mixer and with at least eight inputs.