guitar<--->???<--->chipamp

[ultrachrome]

I'm a drummer who's picking up guitar for the first time. My primary goal with learning guitar is to improve my ability to communicate with the guitarists I play with.

I'm looking to pull together a simple practice amp for cheap to get me by until I can decide what I want to build or buy as I know nothing about guitars or amps.

A friend's giving me a pair of Peavey 15's that I'm going to throw into a simple open-backed cab and I have a spare BrianGT revA LM3875 running of a 25-0-25 330VA transformer.

How do I interface the guitar and amp? DI box? guitar preamp?

I'd also like to build something like the tonemender at runoffgroove for some basic control.

Any direction would be great.

[PeteMcK]

as a preamp:
http://www.runoffgroove.com/professor.html

The 'Peppermill' isn't bad too...

[ultrachrome]

Excellent. Thanks for the recommendation.

I just built the Ruby from the same site. The peavey 15's turned out to be 12's. But I was able to drop them in my old dipole H-frame.

The ruby runs them in parallel and they play plenty loud for my current use.

[aletheian]

if you are looing to just play clean, you could just rig up a simple jfet buffer before the gainclone, anf the guitar pickups should have quite enough juice to drive the thing to full volume. You could just use a distortion pedal in front of that is you want to get dirty.