Need a new amp, but don’t want to overspend? You’re in luck! You can get great sounds and features without blowing your budget. From affordable tube amps to wallet-friendly digital modeling amps, we have the best guitar amps under $500.
We’ve reviewed the best options for recording, gigging, and home practice, and have provided all the details below. There’s never been a better time to buy a budget guitar amp. Without further ado, here are the best guitar amps for 2023.
Boss Katana-100 MkII
Product Highlight: Killer sounding effects, with a convincing tube-like tone.
This solid-state 100W model is gig-ready, and like the rest of the range, boasts five amp characters (Clean, Crunch, Lead, Brown, and Acoustic). Being a Boss amp, you also get five independent digital effects sections thrown in (Booster, Mod, FX, Delay, and Reverb). All of these are savable across eight-tone setting memories.
Our testing proved that it’s the tonal control that really makes the Katana a top buy. It also has adjustable cab resonance options, Power Control and easily recordable mic’d cab-emulated outputs.
Supro Delta King 8
Product Highlight: All tube tone is stunning, with a foot-switchable boost. 1W offers dirt at sensible volumes.
Supro is one of the biggest names in tube amps. Professionals like Jimmy Page, Lenny Kravitz, Vernon Reid, and more all have played and repped Supro amps in their time. And the Delta King 8 is one of the best out there for those on a budget.
The Delta King 8 is a 1×8” 1-watt all-tube combo amp. The smallest sibling of Supro’s Delta King series, this amp is all about great tones at volumes that won’t get you in trouble. They say that there is beauty in simplicity – and we’d have to wholeheartedly agree.
An input volume, tone, master volume, and boost switch are all the Supro comes equipped with. Yet that is really all we needed to coax out some killer practice tones during testing. Crank both volume controls, and you’ve got one wailing watt of harmonic richness. Or ride both independently for some quiet gain tones or sweet cleans. We were a bit sad about the lack of reverb onboard, but for under 500 bucks, it is definitely one of the best guitar amps in 2023.
Yamaha THR10 II Wireless
Product Highlight: Wireless with a rich sound and rechargeable battery.
Yamaha’s toaster-sized THR amps are a complete joy to both use and listen to. The THR10 II Wireless specifically, sits just below its top-of-the-line 30-watt sibling, which is a bit pricey.
Despite the THR10 moniker, there are actually 20 watts on tap here, which is more than enough for practicing at home. Provided you and your chums are into one of the more serene musical genres, such as some forms of jazz, folk, or country, that’s possibly just enough oomph for band practice. However, unless you mic it up it’ll struggle with live performance.
No matter, Yamaha designed this amp to look good and sound great in the home. It’s fantastic at both. The appearance remains peerless for a desktop amp, and it will happily complement almost any style of domestic décor.
And the sounds? Yamaha’s music division robbed the brand’s home entertainment division of all its best ideas so that the pair of small 3.1” (8cm) full-range stereo speakers would sound their best. Which they do – this thing sounds incredible, with the driven sounds sounding especially impressive for such a small amp.
Boss Katana Air 20/30 Wireless
Product Highlight: Not only stylish, but this product also offers a huge variety of tones and effects. Bundled with a wireless transmitter, it can also be battery-operated.
What makes this one of the best guitar amps for 2023? The Katana Air is a desktop amp developed in the same vein as Yamaha’s pioneering THR series. It features a dark yet attractive look that some may favor over Yamaha’s slightly more showy aesthetic.
Just like Yamaha, Boss (a sister brand of Roland) is held in extremely high regard for the quality of its modeling. And the Katana Air doesn’t disappoint. Its five amp characters don’t sound like many, but they actually provide the full gamut of tones from sparkly cleans to modern ultra-high gain. There’s also an Acoustic Character setting for acoustic/electric playing. It also has fifty available effects to shape your tone. And we all know how good Boss effects are.
Like the THR, the Katana Air can be operated wirelessly for tether-free playing. Unlike the Yamaha the transmitter is bundled with the amp, which saves quite a wedge of extra cash. However, although the Katana Air can run on battery power, you’ll need to feed it a ready supply of AAs as it doesn’t have a rechargeable battery built-in.
There’s Bluetooth for streaming music from other devices and a Boss Tone Studio smartphone amp that takes a lot of the complexity out of configuring it. As well as saving you from having to reach for the physical controls.
The Katana Air also has a phone/recording out with cab simulation for silent practice or recording your best efforts. It’s even possible to alter the mic position on the cab sim using the phone app.
Orange Micro Dark
Product Highlight: Incredibly lightweight, with an effect loop for patching outboard gear.
This is possibly the world’s only bona fide metal amp that can fit inside a guitar case. The Micro Dark is nevertheless packed with features that include volume, gain, and shape controls, a 1/4-inch headphone output, speaker output (minimum 8-ohm load), and an effect loop.
The tiny unit boasts a preamp driven by a single 12AX7 tube and a 20-watt solid-state power amplifier that pumps out impressively loud volume levels, with a mammoth bass thump and harmonically rich grind.
The shape control produces a variety of tones by sweeping across a wide midrange sweet spot that can also enhance treble and bass as desired.
The effect loop, meanwhile, enables guitarists to patch a studio multi-effects unit, reverb, delay, or modulation pedal in between the preamp and power amp sections to produce truly professional-quality tones with low noise and impressive definition and articulation that sound particularly huge when recorded.
We found the Micro Dark to be a surprisingly versatile and powerful “secret” weapon for metal guitarists who love highly saturated grind but are tired of grinding their spinal discs lifting heavy equipment. This is definitely one of the best guitar amps for 2023.
Positive Grid Spark Guitar Amp
Product Highlight: A seemingly endless tonal range with a big sound.
Positive Grid is relatively new, but don’t count that against it. They’ve taken the guitar amp world by storm of late with their incredible BIAS tone engine.
It features access to over 10,000 tones with the companion app, as well as 30 amp models and 40 effects already onboard. We found the Spark to be more than capable of covering any genre we could think of during our testing. USB inputs and outputs are standard, allowing you to turn your Spark into a guitar audio interface for easy recording, and Bluetooth is included to make streaming music as easy as pie.
One of this amp’s best benefits is the learning tools it offers. ‘Auto Chords’ will find chord charts for any song you choose and send them straight to the app for you, and ‘Smart Jam’ will learn your style of playing, and generate an accompanying backing track that will play along to you.
Fender Mustang LT25
Product Highlight: Portable, easy to operate, with a wide range of tones.
Fender is no noob when it comes to modeling amps and its Mustang series has always been impressive in terms of features, sound quality, and ease of use. The LT25 is a portable modeling combo featuring an eight-inch speaker, 20 amp models, 25 effects, USB connectivity, and an auxiliary input.
You’ll find 30 presets on-board presets, easily selectable using the large encoder to the right of the amp’s screen. These presets can be tweaked and your custom profile saved with ease.
There are plenty of Fender’s typically smooth, bright, and clean sounds on offer here, but we loved the chunkier high-gain emulations on offer too.
In terms of effects, you get everything from compression and gates, through to octave, auto-wah, delays, and reverbs. If you’re a beginner or a student, for this price, you can’t go wrong. This is definitely one of the best guitar amps to purchase in 2023.
Blackstar HT1R MkII
Product Highlight: Genuine valve tones for less and USB recording output.
We love the cuddly little HT1R MkII, especially in Surf Green or silvery Bronco Grey.
It may look a cutie but there’s some real grit here waiting to be unleashed. The HT1R has an output rated at just one watt, yet it’s still surprisingly loud. It just doesn’t have the muscle to rattle your neighbors’ windows or their false teeth. What it does have is the potential for beautiful driven tones.
There are two channels. Select the overdrive channel and you can dial in anything from an articulate crunch to high-gain madness. Swap to the clean channel for American sparkle or chimey Brit tones. Both channels respond exceptionally well to dynamic playing.
The HT1R MkII was born to live at home yet can act as a perfectly behaved studio guest too. Recording big, full, high-gain tones sounds like a job for a powerful combo or stack, but a small amp can get the job done with just as much character and a lot less bother. You can either mic up the little Blackstar or take a direct feed via USB.
If you crave the sound of a real valve power amp in a home setting then the HT1R MkII is well worth a look. There’s also a head version if you need something even smaller for recording over USB, or if you fancy hooking it up to a cab.
And with this last pick, we round out our list of the best guitar amps to purchase in 2023. if you are looking for an electric guitar to go with your amp, this is our list of the best electric guitars under $200.
*Disclosure: There are some affiliate links below and as an Amazon associate, I may earn from qualifying purchases. However, these are all products I highly recommend. I won’t put anything on this page that I haven’t verified and/or personally used.
