Guitar - Quality and Sound - Tips on Choosing Your Instrument

Learning to play an instrument is not easy and requires a lot of time and discipline. You want to optimize your practice conditions to learn as fast and easy as possible. A decent standard guitar with a good sound is the first thing you need. Anything less will make learning more difficult, slow down your progress and will make you believe you just don't have the talent or the discipline or the patience to learn it.

My first guitar was a borrowed guitar from the music school. At the time I could not hear when a guitar was out of tune but even my totally untrained beginners ears could hear that it was an awful guitar. It sounded dark, flat and ugly and I was embarrassed to bring that to my teacher. Needless to say how frustrated it was to learn to play on it. Despite the guitar I practised every day, my parents saw that I was serious and three months later I had my own guitar, a brand new nylon string classical Yamaha guitar.

Choose your instrument with care.

So how do you go out and buy a good standard guitar without having to spent a ton of money not knowing where the threshold is between a good guitar and one of poor quality? Don't just go out with a couple hundred dollars choosing a guitar within that budget.

The price of a guitar goes from a hundred dollars to thousands of dollars. Obviously the more expensive the better the guitar but for six to seven hundred dollars you can buy a decent one that goes a long way. It's is not cheap but far from expensive and it's worth saving until you have the money because over time a good guitar will become a better guitar while a bad guitar will never be a good one.

What makes a great instrument - Things to look out for.

If you have untrained ears ask someone with experience to go with you. You want to make sure that the guitar doesn't have invisible damage or issues.

Check the tuning : Tune the guitar or ask someone to tune it for you. If a guitar has tuning issues it will definitely go out of tune within fifteen minutes of playing on it.

Check that all pickups work : Plug in the guitar and try every pickup setting using the switch. You should hear a clear difference in tone. There is a tone knob. Make sure it's all the way open(turn clockwise)while you check the pickups. Turning it counter clockwise will filter out the high frequencies.

Check the neck : If you can't play yet you don't know what feels comfortable and what doesn't but you should be able to easily slide up and down the neck. Doing so let your fingers and thump hang over the edges onto the fret board to check that frets don't have any sharp edges sticking out. It shouldn't hurt.

The neck should also fit properly onto the body. When you hold the guitar the way you would play it look at the neck where it is attached to the body. The body has a cutout and the neck should fit exactly into the space. On some guitars the cutout is wider than the neck. You should not be able to fit your bank card into the space between the neck and the body.

Check the pretuning : Guitars are pretuned in the factory. What does that mean? The pitch of the harmonic on fret twelve should be identical to the open string. If that is not the case the guitar cannot be tuned properly.

Check the frets : Turn the guitar horizontal holding the lower end of the body near you face so you can look down the fretboard. All the frets should be parallel. This is most often the case but double check.

Try several guitars : If you have set your mind for instance to buy a Fender Stratocaster tryout a few guitars. Every single guitar sounds different. You might prefer a black guitar but find that you really like the sound of the blue one.

Just remember that what you pay less on buying the instrument you'll pay later in sweat, more practice time and costs to repair and adjust your cheap guitar. For acoustic guitars I can recommend Martin and Taylor and for electric guitars I recommend American made Fender and Gibson.

June Moris has been playing the guitar since she was thirteen. She has been doing research on the use of effects full time for six months. When you hear her live it's like there are two guitar players on stage. Some people mistake her guitar for a couple synthesizers. June lives in NYC where she plays her music and teaches guitar. Some of her lessons can be found on her website @ http://www.music.junemoris.com

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