Hi All, Iām a beginner and just completed Grade 1 and really enjoying it, soā¦ I also had an electric guitar for Christmas and needed an amp, after endless hours on āyou tubeā reviews I chose the NU-X Mighty Space, plugged in the guitar and boom!-completely overwhelmed by the complexity and choice-I know that I hate complex choices and this was a complete nightmare ( I also sold about Ā£5kās worth of cameras as I found I just couldnāt choose which one to use and just kept one favourite), so back to Amazon it went!
Next chapter-please forgive the long winded tale!, again āyou tubeā and ordered the Positive Grid Spark 2-Oh no!!! -6 weeks after my initial purchase Iām still unable to even get a half decent sound out of the bloody thing-endless scrolling through the app, twiddling buttons until Iām ready to hoof the sodding amp out of the bedroom window.
I am praying the kind people of Justins community can suggest a remedy as Iām about to hit the Amazon 30 day return button, yours sincerely, a very frustrated Simon.
Where are you located? Maybe someone can come over and help set it up with you?
Consider just a plain, simple amp. I have a Behringer. It has a speaker and few knobs.
Eventually, you can upgrade or add some type of software system on top of it if you need gobs of options.
My problem was not being overwhelmed, but being a geek, I found all the options pulled me away from actually playing guitar.
my opinion is different than most folks.
Iām not into high tech stuff, so I go with sounds good and is simple to operate.
Many amps out there that comply with this and which amp may depend on the style of music your going after.
For me, I ended up with three amps. To me, I like them all and they are all different flavors.
For sure the one Iād recommend is get a used (gotta be used as theyāre obsolete) red stripe peavey bandit. Goes from crystal clean to near fizz distortion if ya want. + anything in between.
Itās a loud 80w solid state amp. However it can play at bedroom levels too. By putting the vol. on about .5 and then maybe still turning your guitar down a bit too.
This really is a great amp that many folks have experienced (check utubes for demos). They should be available on both sides of the world as some were made in USA, others were made in China.
Last good thing about them is theyāre affordable. Got mine for $200 a couple years ago, they may be up to 250 now a days.
Then thereās tube amps. Many available and some kinda cheaper too. Like mono price I think.
My 2 flavors are a Supro Blues king 12. Now a days theyāre call Dela Kings. They come in a 5w or 15w versions. Again, a versital amp. Chiming cleans to fizz and any thing in between.
Likely my best sounding amp is a Fender Princeton Reverb amp reissue.
This is a great sounding amp. Again check out the utubes on them. They are real pricey and have one feature that may be a downside. It has only Volume control. No master vol. So ya canāt control the pre amp with the vol and the overall loudness with the master volume. It can be played quite but will be crystal clean. If ya want dirt with this amp, at a reasonable vol. Ya gotta put a pedal in ft. on it. This amp also has no loop, no nothing. Vol. treble and bass. Thatās what ya control your tone with. Abeit it does have one of the sweetest reverb and tremolo circuits available.
Point of all my babbling is.
Get a good amp. Few controls. Master volume, pre volume, TMB, reverb and tremolo if ya can get it. Thatās all ya get. You can get great tones with these types of amps. And, thereās no overwhelming menu of thousands of choices.
What they donāt do is. Whatever all them menu type amps do. No different cabs, no choice of type of reverb, delay, chorus, whatever. No choices as to how to connect all your audio electronics together. All that aināt there.
They are just amps w/o any bells and whistles.
This works for me. Perhaps it could work for you?
My son-in-law, who before marriage and parenthood was a gigging guitarist, had a Spark and ended up selling it for the same reason - couldnāt get a decent tone out of it. (Tbf, he was used to gigging with a Marshall half stack, so he was probably setting a pretty high bar!)
Get yourself an Orange Crush 35RT and forget about any Fx until you can play well enough to need them. Itās a simple decent sounding analogue Solid state amp that can easily be turned down to bedroom levels or cranked enough for an open mic or small pub gig. You wonāt regret it!
When I bought my first electric a few years ago, I bought a Fender LT25 amp. It had a lot of preset amp sims in it, plus the software would let you tweak them. It was all I needed for bedroom playing.
But now, I rarely turn it on. I use amp sims in Reaper and run my guitar directly into it via a PreSonus USB audio interface. It makes it easier to record and play around with effects if I want.
As a recently retired, high tech guy, simple is always better. Only add complexity as you need it.
Thank you all for the great advice, I think that I am going to make a trip to a local music store and see if I can get some further help, itās a bit of a long journey but it will be worth it Iām sure, again thanks for taking the time and trouble to reply!.
A review on the Orange amp:-
count me as a proponent for a simple amp with few controls on it as a beginner. I specifically avoided any modeling amps that had an app and a million settings for my first one.
I ended up with a Fender Champion 40. Itās not the the simplest when it comes to the settings, but the fact that it has a ācleanā channel and an āeffectsā channel helps to separate the āeasy modeā out from the extra stuff I can grow into. The clean channel only has a few knobs to worry about. The second channel gives more stuff to mess with, but itās not too tough to figure out intuitively. Still, 99% of the time, Iām playing on the clean channel, anyway.
Later on I bought a NUX Mighty-Lite so I could have a teeny portable amp to travel with. It also has some handy built-in stuff like drum tracks, a metronome, and so on that I occasionally use at home when Iām not traveling.
Thatās brilliant, I just googled āa simple amp for beginnersā and the Fender Champion 2 came up, Iām watching a video on it now!, has to be the way to go foe, many thanks!
Trying a bunch of amps in person is really the way to go, in my opinion.
The music store staff are usually very knowledgeable and should be able to help you find an amp + settings that sound āgood enoughā for whatever your budget is.
Also, my 2 cents is if you are planning to play guitar for a long time, spend more money on your amp at the beginning - you will have a lot more fun playing with a good-sounding amp, which means youāll play more.
There are plenty of really good-sounding amps in the $600-$900 range. The Blackstar HT20, for example, sounded quite good in person, even at lower volumes, and retails for around $800.
Hi Simon, fellow beginner here, hanging out now in Grade 3. I too dislike complicated user interfaces. I have a Spark 40 (the original one) and tone aside, I never got the hang of the app. It made things more complex with little value-add (for me). And I had a career as an IT professional! Anyway, Iāve always like the sound of Vox amps, so I got the Vox Mini Go 10. It includes several amp models, including the AC-30. Itās not the latest-and-greatest, but I love it! Best of all - itās obvious how to control the thing. This may not be the amp for you, and itās certainly not the last amp Iāll buy, but it will be more than I need for quite a while. So one approach might be: what amp is used by musicians playing your favorite musicā¦see if that manufacturer have a practice amp modeling that (and other) amps, an have see if you like it.
such good taste 
Hi Simon !
Im just like you and wanted something simple to use
So I bought a Vox mv50 and a Vox cabinet ( a Black Cab BC108 )
Simple as that
just plug and play ! ( no modeling )
Its a pure pleasure to play wth it 
Weāre all different , and we all have different gears but thats an option you can have a look at
So you replaced one complex multi amp sim/pedal effects amp with another?
huh
One of the reasons I tend to recommend the Boss Katanaās is that, on the face of it, they are not much more complex than most other amps, but if you do want to to load up Boss Tone Studio and deep-dive into effects, you can (and it can save a fortune on buying pedals).
I had a Spark 40 and I found it unnecessarily complex to use and also struggled to get it to sound good on a lot of tones(and, for a roughly similar price to the Spark you can get a Katana 50 which sounds better and is more flexible).
On the other hand, a lot of people love the Spark range.
Equally, a lot of people find even the Katanaās difficult to navigate., In those cases, a simple 1 channel amp with limited controls might be a good approach.
The Orange Crush @DarrellW suggests would be good in that case.
If you can get to a store and try some stuff out as @coolAlias suggests, thatās probably the best. We are all different and the best way to find what works for you is to try it yourself.
Cheers,
Keith
The onyl downside with a traditional amp as a beginner is they are often limited in sound scope and dont have effects
This is fine if you like the sound and it does what you want, less good if you like jumping around to get the right sound for a particular track
The benefit of the spark is you can just search āSweet child of mineā sound and download itā¦
well iv`e had a Blackstar V10 for sometime simple to use and you can do more with it than I do,it has delay,reverb, and modulation, and 6 voices works for me
There is an overwhelming number of options so you need to simplify things. Try This
Go to the editor and try the amps without any effects. Do you like any of them? If you donāt then maybe the amp is not for you.
I Like
- Fender Deluxe Reverb. (this is a great Clean amp).
- Marshall Plexi 100 ( a nice higher gain amp)
Fora clean amp try the Fender deluxe Reverb and then add a distortion pedal. Try adding a some delay and reverb.
As for all the other effects I wouldnāt be worrying about those yet. To me all choruses, phasers and flangers etc all sound pretty similar. I am not a pedal expert.
Take a look at Shaneās demo. He only uses six amps mostly without effects. Can you get any of these amps setup to your liking?
The downside is youāll get 1,000 ācommunity contributedā versions of the tone, none of which actually sound quite right, and you have to decide which one to actually use.
Thatās an exaggeration, of course (although, not much, IME of owning the Spark 40), but if decision paralysis and confusion over options is a concern, itās not ideal.
The trouble is that the Spark ā1 gazillion tones in the cloudā or whatever they claim these days, are 99% community created and the vast majority are 
.
(Note I had the same issue with the Line 6 Amplifi - itās not Positive Gridās fault, per se. Itās the nature of relying on community uploads).
Cheers,
Keith
Agree,cameras can be like that also.I found a Marshall FX15r had enough to explore but simple in operation.in fact a Marshall was my 2nd amp back in ā65 lol