Choosing an Acoustic

I get this question often… What kind of an acoustic should I get? What brand? How do I know which is a good buy? The best thing to do is always to take a friend who knows what they are doing, but for our purposes here, I’ll give you the basics of choosing as a beginner and choosing as a pro.

Choosing as a beginner:

It seems like the main reason people quit at the beginning of playing guitar it because their fingers hurt and the guitar doesn’t sound good. The bottom line is that bad guitars hurt your fingers, making it twice as hard to build up the necessary calluses to make playing enjoyable. The other thing is that the necks have poor construction on cheaper guitars which makes the guitar sound bad for one primary reason… you get the guitar in tune (or so you think) and play your first “E” chord, and everything is fine. Then you play a “G” or “D” chord and suddenly it sounds out of tune again. Even if you don’t have a great ear and can’t hear what the problem is, you can instinctively feel it. This is endlessly frustrating because even if you can push past the pain of playing one of these guitars you never want to hear yourself play. If you don’t want to hear yourself and hear yourself improve because your guitar sounds bad, you never will play the thing.

So if you are a beginner who doesn’t have much cash to spend on the instrument, maybe only $200-$300, take heart, you actually can find a guitar that is enjoyable to play and sounds decent. The thing is, in that range, you will have to do some digging to find something decent. Take the Yamaha F1HC at Guitar Center for example. At $229 for a solid top acoustic these are hard to beat in the range. About one in fifty will be a pretty good guitar, so take your time. Sit down with the instrument in the store and (even if you make a fool of yourself) play it for a while. See if you can play with a minimum amount of discomfort. (Compare the comfort to playing a high-end guitar first) See if you can play different chords and it remains in tune (after the sales associate tunes it for you). If you take your time and play a lot of these you should be able to find something that is comfortable and quality enough to learn on without getting frustrated.

Here are a few that I’ve had a good luck with in helping people over the years.

Yamaha FG700S $199

Yamaha F1HC $229

Yamaha FG730S $299

Takamine GS300S $299

Mitchell MD200S $299

Taylor Baby ¾ size $299

Choosing as a Pro:

After playing a number of years on a decent or crummy guitar, you get to a point where its time to buy your “grown-up” guitar. It’s graduation day and you want to buy “the one.” You come to the day where this isn’t just a hobby but something you will be doing, probably even publicly, for the rest of your life. It’s time to buy the guitar that will last the next sixty-plus years, that can handle a lot of playing time, that you can pass on to your kids, and that will have the sound and feel you’ve always dreamed of. The problem is that when most people reach that point they go to the local store and what they see are brands like Gibson, Martin, Taylor, Breedlove, Larrivee, Etc. They figure it will cost them about $2,000 to get into the kind of guitar they want. But sadly, these brands aren’t making the kind of guitars they used to even though the costs are pretty high. The factories are a place where numbers matter most and a guy who got trained last week has a stack of backs and a stack of tops, glues it all up, puts it in the case, and sends it to the store. These companies have found a way to make a pretty good guitar all the time but nothing really special. Out of ten to twenty Martin guitars that come off the line, one or two might be something really good.

I want to challenge you to think about your acoustic the way classical musicians think of their instruments. They think of their viola, violin, cello, or whatever, as a serious investment. They need something they can trust to go anywhere in the world with them and perform beautifully. It should be hand crafted in a way that every joint and carving on the instrument is cared for and given the proper amount of attention. These guys expect their instrument to cost between $3,000 and $5,500 to start with and go up from there. I think $3,000 is a good baseline to set when thinking about buying your lifelong guitar. At that price you can start to explore the hand-crafted, quality instruments that exist out there. They guys who make these listen to every piece of wood to make sure the whole instrument resonates with the tone it is capable of. There are several brands out there like Fortenbery, Collings, McPherson, Bourgeois, Goodall, Kevin Ryan, Oslon, Froggy-Bottom, Lowden, just to name a few! If you live anywhere near Cincinnati you should talk to Jeff Fortenbery before you consider another guitar. He is local and his work is comparable with any top-end guitar on the market although his he doesn’t charge nearly what most of those guys do for a custom build.

If you buy a guitar in this category you will pay twice the amount for 10x the guitar. So do your homework, take your time, and save your cash, cause it will be worth it.