Guitar Amplifier using Op-Amp

Today I made a simple guitar amp. I based my design around the 741 op amp chip. There are a lot of ways to make a guitar amp but this one is quite easy and involves only a couple of components. First you will need a 741 op amp chip. One resistor with a value of 470Ω and a 470Ω potentiometer/rheostat. You will also need two nine volt batteries, one acting as the positive supply rail and the other acting as the negative supply rail. An op amp needs both supplies because it amplifies signals that involve positive and negative voltage signals. The last three components you will need is a quarter inch guitar jack, a guitar and a guitar chord.

I have attached the schematic for building this circuit so I will just go into the theory of our guitar amplifier. First the 470Ω resistor is used to be compared to the value of our 470Ω rheostat. We set the amplifier as a non-inverting amplifier so when we turn the rheostat the gain of the signal will increase instead of increasing negatively. A signal is generated from the guitar that is very small and must be amplified. The signal is created by a device usually being an inductor in the guitar that takes the sound signals that you strum and converts it to electricity. Once we increase the amplitude of the guitar signal we send it to a speaker. Now we have audible sound from the guitar. Turning the rheostat to the left (< resistance) lowers the gain and makes the audio cleaner while turning the rheostat to the right(> resistance) saturates the signal and creates a cool distortion sound. Have fun building this one!