A perfect no-frills practice amp
"I purchased this amp as an amp to use at home for practicing or jamming with friends who come and visit. I live in an apartment and my only other rigs are higher powered rigs that would get me in a lot of trouble if I played them loud.
Tone:
To me, this is what naturally suffers in the practice amp world. In honesty, I have been putting off a practice amp purchase for this reason. I originally was attracted to this amp because the price was right and there's a similar Joyo practice amp for bass guitar as well, and in my years of playing, i've learned that if you replace the speaker of a guitar practice amp with a bass speaker, I get a much smoother, less brittle sounding practice amp. I bought both with the intention of frankenstein-ing the two together to make a really nice practice amp.
--so with that out of the way, when the amp arrived, I still wanted to test it out to see how it sounded anyways, just to confirm my bias. As it turned out, I was pleasantly surprised that this amp actually has a great response across the frequency spectrum. The speaker always seems like the bottleneck to me in tiny practice amps, and in this case, the speaker actually sounded a lot clearer with better bass response and no sharp, tinny highs like i was used to with practice amps. Honestly, the speaker alone makes this amp a completely worthwhile amp in my opinion. Outside of the speaker, you're also given a gain knob, tone knob and a drive button for tone. The gain knob can be pushed into slight drive, which is nice for a little grit, and you can use the volume knob to keep levels from getting out of control. The drive button is also a nice tube screamer-esque drive that sounds reasonable for a practice amp. The tone knob seems to be different than a standard high pass filter, as it seems to blend between a few different usable tones that would align with the knob setting; all the way back seems to have a bump in the low mids, leaves the bass as is, big cut on the mids and a slight treble reduction. All the way to the right seems to bump up the highs and high mids, the low mids are reduced and the bass is left alone. In the middle is just kind of a flat-ish eq response, so nothing is boosted or reduced. The gain and drive button work nicely with these, nothing getting too harsh or muffled.
If you are a tone-tweaker, this probably won't be attractive to you. However, if you'd like to be able to plug-n-play, this is a great option. There isn't a setting that is overly extreme or harsh, or over the top, which some people also may not like, but those same people most likely have some pedals for tone already, so any extensive tone-sculpting will have to come from pedals.
Size/portability:
this is a small practice amp, and size is as expected. you can throw it in a bag and it won't take up much space. The amp is powered by either an AC plug or 6 AA size batteries. Honestly, I have no interest in running this off batteries, so i can't comment on battery life. It's made of a hard plastic which seems like it can take some accidental knocks.
Other features:
-headphone jack for silent practice
-aux in for jamming along to mp3s or whatever you'd like. No Bluetooth that I'm aware of, but if that's a deal breaker for you, check out the joyo bantam amp series. they have a bluetooth in for wireless jamming. Those also function perfectly as practice amps as well, and also are a bit louder if you'd like a little more volume.
BASS VERSION:
Since I also bought the bass version of the amp, and I can't write a separate review for it, I'll add that the bass version is very similar to the guitar version. Great tone with a tone knob that is tailored for bass EQ curves. All very usable tones. The drive button is still there, and as a test, I plugged my bass into both the guitar and bass amp, and the drive on the guitar is a little heavier on the highs and mids, while the bass drive sounded more like an overdriven bass amp; a little warmer and not quite as high gain.
Final thoughts:
honestly, I think that this is a perfect no-frills practice amp. It's portable, lightweight, battery-powered and sounds great. I can't think of anything that it might be missing as far as features for a practice amp, although i could see future joyo practice amps including a line out with a cab ir function for recording, or going direct to the board if you're into that. That's also kind of an above and beyond thing for a practice amp though. If you want a small, portable, simple/easy-to-use plug-n-play amp, this amp is a great option. I'm very happy with it.
I'd recommend for anyone looking for:
-beginner's first amp
-an amp to quickly get to for working out ideas
-practice amp
-portable amp to bring for low volume jamming with friends
-portable amp to bring for away-from-home playing."
