Pio, I am a guitar and bass player, with conservatory studies and have played in blues, rock, jazz, big band and salsa bands. at some point I had a collection of 21 guitars including '50s Gibsons and many amps ( stacks, twins, digitals ones etc ). Ultimately I sold everything and only kept the essential pieces. about guitars I only have 2 Whereas, nothing can match the beauty my '65 Nylon guitar with brazilian rosewood body, ebony fretboad and thin cedar top, the only guitar I kept from that collection was a Fender American Deluxe Ash body Fat stratocaster. Fat because it has a humbucker and higher output single coils. This is what I recomend you. Great guitar, superb quality,a range of sound from twang, to quack, to crunch to scream. You can do country, funk, soul, jazz, rock, and even hard and metal with such a guitar. You can buy it new from online shops for ~$1600 or you can get it used from $700-$1000 from ebay. for an amp, you could get a quality tube amp. A Marshall stack, a Twin or a Mesa Boogie Mark IV. Nothing can match the beauty of the tones you can get from them. but to just play at home you don't need it. a practice amp would be more than enough. To play on a band and gig you can get something bigger, but to play at home, this is what I use. As I am a bassist too. I have for my home a bass amp, solid state, and unexpensive, 40W practice bass amp, that has an equalizer, so I can get a quite neutral uncolored tone out of it. that would cost you ~$200 and would be enough loud to annoy your wife's cats and some neighbors I use it mostly for bass, but to play guitar I plug a Boss FDR-1 Fender Deluxe Reverb pedal. It sounds close to the real Deluxe, close enough ( I had vintage ones, so believe me ) and costs only ~$80, you can obtain, jazz, country, funk and soul tones out of it, and cranking it up also rich american rock tones. for british and metal tones, you need a marshall, but as you are on an age to have a midlife crisis, you would look and sound ridiculous playing that stuff...