Doesn ' t look like it , crybaby . <| sep |> Amp is short for amplifier . It is basically a piece of electronics that takes the extremely low level analogue electrical signal that is generated by your guitars pickups and amplifies it to varying degrees of volume . There are two primary types transistor and tube . The wattage of an amplifier roughly corresponds to the degree to which they can amplify i . e . how loud it can get . Tube amps range from 5 watts to 100 watts . 5 watts or less is more than enough for your bedroom or house , 25 watts will be enough to play with a loud drummer in a practice space , 100 watts will fill a concert hall . Transistor amps , in general , are much louder at lower wattages than tube amps . Cab is short for cabinet . A speaker cabinet is a box , often of wood , that contains one or more speakers . Common guitar speaker sizes are 8 inch , 10 inch and 12 inch . Speakers generally have an ohm rating 4 ohm , 8 ohm , 16 ohm that must correspond to the ohm rating from the accompanying amplifier . Failing to match ohms can cause damage to your amplifier or even dangerous amounts of electricity grounding in unexpected ways . The size and number of speakers contribute to the volume bigger speakers are louder , more speakers are louder . A combo is a combination of both the amplifier and the cab within a single enclosure . An amp on it ' s own is often called a head . A head has no speaker and must be pared with a cab in fact , don ' t even turn it on unless it is plugged into a cab with the right ohm rating . A combo often has one , sometimes two speakers but can often also be plugged into a separate cab . Once you get the volume question answered e . g . how many watts , how big of a speaker you get into personal preference territory . Every manufacturer , every amp , every speaker , every combination of wattage , every different kind of tube leads to a slightly different sound . Guitar players spend an extraordinary amount of time debating and perfecting the minute differentiators in that sound . Orange is a wellregarded amp manufacturer . They are popular amongst blues and rock players classic rock and they do a good job of getting highly saturated another way of saying distorted or overdriven . Their cabs are also wellregarded . My opinion is that they have a very particular sound which some people love and other people don ' t . Orange make a huge range of amp heads , amp cabs and combos with a wide variety of wattages and speaker sizes .