Low cost guitar amplifier

I was actually very curious to understand how it is possible to build a low-price guitar amplifier, and browsing through my old numbers of MAKE I found some good schematics of simple designs to build such amplifiers with around 5$ of budget.

Yesterday I implemented a cracker box amplifier, such as the one described here on MAKE website. I decided to use a breadboard to be more flexible, overall it took me three hours - but it was worth: the clean sound is very good, distortion is reasonable. Everything is built on the low power LM386 amplifier, which does a real good job nearly for free!

Globally, the cost is around 17 euros (I bought the stuff from a nearby electronic market, probably it is possible to get lower prices...). Design depends from the people implementing it, on the left you can see mine! :-)

If you are interested in some additional figures, go check my website.