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What Is A Good Guitar For A Beginner?
By Peter | February 15, 2010
Choosing to begin to play the guitar can be a great decision, but when picking your first
guitar there are a few things that you should take into consideration. So what is a good guitar for a beginner? Firstly you’ll need to decide if you’d like to play an acoustic or an electric guitar.
In my opinion, for the beginning guitarist, an acoustic guitar makes more sense than the
electric variety. This is because of two things: The first is that, when playing an electric guitar through an amplifier, it can be fairly difficult for a beginner to make a nice clean sound. This means that technique will suffer and it can also be frustrating for the novice player. In addition, apart from the amplification problems just mentioned, electric guitars use light strings, which are generally easier to play than an acoustic. This means that if you firstly learn on an electric instrument and then decided to swap to an acoustic (and to really become proficient on the instrument, you
should learn how to play a lot of types of music on both varieties of guitar) it can be fairly difficult.
Clearly a beginner won’t need an excessively expensive guitar — the impressive sound quality from a high-end instrument will probably be lost on a beginner. However, it’s very important not to buy a cheap model; a cheap guitar can be very aggravating when the beginner is trying to make a good sound. They can also be hard to play, and if the instrument is too hard at first, many beginners will simply give up. As a general rule, try to buy one that doesn’t completely break the bank, but is at least on the higher end of your budget.
So a good guitar for a beginner really depends on the person it’s for. Always ensure that the guitar is a suitable size. For most adults this means that it should be a standard adult-sized guitar. However, if you’re buying an instrument for a child, you should look into smaller child-sized instruments [there are half size and three-quarter size guitars available].
Just as an additional tip, if you are a beginner, make sure you buy an electronic tuner. As your ear develops, you’ll no longer need this for tuning the guitar, but at first, before you can tune from ear it’s important to use this device to make sure the guitar is always well tuned; otherwise you’ll fall into bad habits and won’t be able to properly recognize notes.
Topics: Learning Guitar | No Comments »