Choosing the Best Guitar for Beginners
When looking for your first guitar it is important to remember that you are making an investment. The first inclination for many beginning guitar players is to choose the cheapest guitar they can find. They are probably thinking, as I was, that they should spend as little as possible in case they decide later that they aren’t cut out to be a guitar player.
The first guitar I ever played was bought by my brother and cost about $100 with an amp. My brother and I became discouraged very quickly when everything we played on that guitar sounded awful no matter how much we practiced. The worst part was that we couldn’t resell the guitar to anyone because they didn’t want a piece of junk either. My brother just wasted his money.
Don’t buy a cheap guitar because you will not want to play it very long and no one will buy it from you if you decide to quit.
Choose a guitar that is around the mid price range. As a beginner, you don’t need something with all the bells and whistles but it should be of good quality. In my experience, brand names (not knock-offs made by the same company) sound the best and are the most durable. They also have the best resell value. Pawn shops are overloaded with no-name guitars that are covered with dust.
You’ll enjoy learning to play on an instrument that has good quality sound too. There is a huge difference in sound between a cheap guitar and a medium priced one, even to a beginner’s ear.
Tips for choosing the Best Guitar:
• Go with a brand name, not a knock-off made by the same company or someone else. Fender, Ibanez, and Yamaha are some good brand names.
• Get something durable with good quality wood. The kind of wood used for the guitar is a good indication of the sound quality you can expect. Good woods for the neck are maple and mahogany, and for the body Alder, mahogany, basswood, maple, agathis.
• Check for good intonation and unwanted pick-up noise. Intonation is the guitar’s ability to maintain tune the entire length of the scale. A good way to test intonation is to play each string open and fretted at the twelfth fret of the fingerboard. Whether the guitar is in tune or not, each string should produce the same note when it is fretted as when it is open at this point on the guitar.
• Check what your favorite musicians are playing on. You can find less expensive versions of their guitars with the same brand name. Different brands and types of guitars work better for different styles of music. Get one that will work well with your kind of music by checking what the pros are using.
• Get something with a comfortable shape. Something that looks cool but has a weird shape can be difficult to get used to and harder to play.
