# DIY portable guitar amp - easy easy



## Scotty (May 13, 2013)

Hey.. one time I came home and my brother was gone.. I go digging through all his stuff and checking out his projects.. he was hacking cigar box guitars and portable amps, etc.

The amp he made (out of my speakers!) was just the guts of a 9v computer speaker with its 1/8th jack replaced with a 1/4 jack and then fitted into a little treasure chest style music box.

I tried not to steal his and build my own and I want to say that plugging a guitar through a 1/4th to 1/8th adapter doesn't work. I do this with my computer and it works but has lag.

This will also work for a portable speaker and is very loud. He's got the 1/4th jack in it and then a 1/4th to 1/8th adapter for plugging an ipod and other stuff into.

For some reason he didn't think about making it portable.. he just didn't have an amp. So I was able to contribute to the project by adding a battery pack.

I was able to run this off a 7.2v battery pack with no problems.. even though he was using a 9v power supply. Rechargeable AA batteries are 1.2v*6 = 7.2v -- non rechargeable AA = 1.5v * 6 = 9v.
Maybe that is why 7.2v was fine.

We had a 20 year old 7.2v battery pack from an RC car that was bad. I stripped the batteries and tested each one to the find the 2 that were bad and replaced em for the 7.2v. We also had the 7.2v battery charger .. which puts out like 9v to charge the 7.2V. I then had a good battery pack and just cut the required plugin adapter from a cell phone and wired it to the good battery pack.

In the end.. thing runs off batteries and sounds fine to me. I've cranked it up as loud to try and blow it but couldn't. I have a low quality electric and have cheap tastes and a bad ear so it seemed OK to me.
This can be easily done and is very straight forward even with no technical skills.

You could also wire a MIC to your acoustic guitar and that would work as well.

I never bothered testing how long the battery would last because I had 20 year old batteries.. but it seemed decent. And too you could always hook up multiple 7.2v packs into parallel and get 2, 3, 4, etc times the battery capacity while still being 7.2v.

I also tried hooking up my guitar to one of those tape deck adapters in my truck and it didn't work.


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