I've been playing for four and a half months now and i'm good enough to start doing some amplified jamming with my friends. I'm looking for any tips on beginner amps and mikes that sound good but wont break the bank.

It is designed to model the old Vox sound, so is a little "rock guitar" for some people's tastes, but I love it. (I play an old Armaco M131 with a Shure R44D (Dynamic controlled whatjimadoobrit) element.)

I have also discovered a surprisingly good cheap DI option:

I recently purchased a Behringer GI100 -- a DI box with 4x12 speaker simulator (£30 ukp). At the weekend I bought a back electret tie-clip mic to use with my MiniDisc player as a portable scratchpad. It had a FET preamp in it (Field Effect Transistor -- solid-state transistors with "graceful degradation" on the overdrive, effectively valve simulators) so I decided to cup it and see.

I plugged the mic into my GI-100 and that to my keyboard amp (effectively a PA combo) -- it came out hot and dirty. I took a little off the treble at the EQ and it was gggggggggrrrrrrrrrreat!

Then I realised the spring reverb was still cut in. When I switched it off the combination sounded a bit weak, but still all there. The mic itself cost me £10(ukp), so I was still blown away -- £40 in total, which is approximately $60 US, and I had that!

If you get to work with a PA that has built in reverb (and most these days do) then you're laughing.

Titch.