How do you identify a good guitar?

Question

What do you look for when going for a guitar? I own an acoustic and am looking for a better one.

What should I be looking for? Wood quality, brand, strings, etc.?

Answer 1

What should I be looking for?

Don't look, listen and touch. Too many poor guitar purchases are made when you shop with your eyes and not ears and your hands. Here is my general advice for buying a guitar, stands for acoustic or electric:

• Set your budget before you leave the house. This is going to help you filter out stuff at the store. Play stuff that uses your budget, but doesn't break it. This will help you filter out the plethora of choice by taking the high and the low end stuff out of your line of sight. I firmly believe we live in a Golden Age where at just about any budget can find more than a few guitars to choose between.
• Play everything you can in your budget. Even you don't think you'll like it, pick it up and spend a few minutes with it. You can't possibly know the vast amount you don't know, so experience everything you can while you have the time.
• Bring a friend and have them tell you how you sound on different models. They'll hear the sound from the audience's perspective and you may find the point of view valuable.
• Buy the bones, don't buy accessories. You don't need pickups in an acoustic. That kind of stuff can be retrofitted later for not too much money. Especially with acoustics, you want to buy the best sounding and playing guitar you can find and dropping the need for electronics can help you afford a higher end model sometimes.
• Don't forget a case. Guitars belong in cases. That's where they're safest. So include it in your budget.

Do you guys have any suggestions?

Yup: play everything you can! Be "that guy" at the music store who's asking every guitar to be taken down for a quick spin. Especially if you're new to guitar, you don't really know what you like the sound of or what feels good in your hands. The only way you can remedy that shortcoming is to get experienced and the only way to get experienced is...well, you know the answer to that now. :)

Answer 2

By taking somebody that plays for a few years with you to a music shop.

To know, which guitar is good, and which is bad, you need to have an experience playing both of those types: only this way you can differ one from another. There are too many factors that are too hard to notice, if you don't know what exactly to look for. Many of them are feeling-based and hardly measurable.

Answer 3

When buying an acoustic, strings do not really matter, you can change them. What DOES matter is the setup it comes with. The guitar should play well, have good intonation and have no fret buzzing. Tonewood wise, spruce is very nice and produces a great sound and is common in most middle end acoustics. Of course there are more expensive woods that can go up to maple and rosewood, causing differences in tone.

One of the most common types of acoustic bodies are called 'Dreadnoughts' and produce a very full, loud sound. I can recommend the Yamaha F-310. Gives a great sound, is affordable, and as it gets older it becomes better. With bronzed steel strings, it sounds amazing.

In answer to your first question, I would recommend getting to grips with the guitar by playing an acoustic first, then moving on to the electric.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

The thing to keep in mind is that a guitar is, first and foremost, a machine -- specifically a machine that transmits string vibration into air vibration. Like any machine, you want it to do its job and be easy to use, and everything else -- including its tone -- is secondary. With that in mind, these should be your priorities, especially among inexpensive guitars:

1. Does the guitar stay in tune? If not, put it back. Do not proceed to Priority #2. A guitar that doesn't stay in tune is failing its most basic job, and you won't enjoy playing it. I find that until you get to really expensive instruments, guitars with enclosed tuning machines are more likely to stay in tune than guitars with open tuners.
2. When the open strings are in tune, are the fretted notes also in tune? I've played guitars where the frets were misplaced, or perhaps the neck was poorly set, and so it was actually physically impossible to play in tune. No good.
3. Is the guitar easy to play? Obviously this is extremely important, but it's Priority #3 because a guitar can often be made easier to play once it's professionally set-up. If you're serious about a specific guitar, feel free to ask the store to set-up the guitar before committing to purchasing it, but don't do this unless a successful set-up means you'll probably buy it.
4. Tone. You have to like the sound, sure, but it's Priority #4 because even the best tone the world won't make up for a hard-to-play, out-of-tune instrument.
5. Looks.
6. Anything else.

I'd recommend going acoustic before electric, for several reasons:

1. You can take an acoustic anywhere. Camping, house party, to the park, etc. You don't have to haul an amp around. Believe me, that's a big plus.
2. If you have X dollars to spend, you can spend all X on an acoustic, but you have to split X into two parts to buy both an electric and an amp, so you get less instrument for your money.
3. My teacher made me practice on an acoustic to build up my hand strength. It worked. Electrics feel unbelievably easy to my hands now.
4. It's easy to hide bad habits behind distortion and effects. An acoustic encourages the development of good mechanics.

Answer 5

Solid-body electric guitars are by far easier to play than acoustic guitars. While they do require more equipment (amp, cables, etc), solid-body electric guitars have thinner bodies (so you don't have to look over the top of the guitar) and usually the action (space between fretboard and string) is lower, making it easier to play.

I don't know how much you want to spend, but if you're a beginner, a 'good' guitar is the one you see hanging on the wall at the store that you must have; it looks great, and feels even better in your hands. If those things aren't the case, there's no way you're going to want to play it 4+ hours a day...

Answer 6

A good guitar is one that sounds and feels great to you. Don't get too hung up on brands that you've read about or seen your favorite guitarists play. Pick up and play as many as you can before choosing one -- You'll eventually find that "right" one that you can't live without.

Answer 7

I'm new to StackExchange so I'm not sure whether this should be a comment or an answer...

Watching "It Might Get Loud" really changed how I view instruments - there's a segment where Jack White builds a guitar from garbage, basically, and it sounds great.

I think what's important here is WHY do you want to upgrade? Have you learned how to do everything you can with your current guitar? What will upgrading get you? I know I've gotten sucked into "ohhh pretty guitar" moments, urges to try something new, but will that really be beneficial, musically? Do you really need that "better" tone, especially if it costs $500, $1000, more?

Even a $100 acoustic can make music that sounds good (subjectively), so before you go for an upgrade I'd take a good hard look at your reasons - maybe you just need to explore a new style of playing.

Answer 8

What you want depends on what you want.

Which is, of course, duh.

A good sign of high quality is solid wood. Or, rather, a useful if not complete sign of low quality is the use of laminates, which are like plywood. If you see a complete dog of an acoustic guitar, chances are it is laminate. But that's not the end of the story. Solid wood guitars are more sensitive to humidity than laminate, which means that you have to worry more about your instrument if you go solid. A common half-measure is to go with solid top and laminate back and sides. You can tell if the top is solid by looking at the inside of the soundhole. If the grain continues through the hole, it's solid. If it looks like a stack of pancakes, it's laminate.

Another indicator of lesser quality is a bolt-on neck. Bolt-on necks are easier to do, so it is a general low-quality indicator. But, over time, the tension of the strings pulls the neck up, against the glue, and you have to reset the neck to get proper action, and that can get expensive for dove-tail neck joints. Taylor uses a bolt-on technology (it's also glued - the bolt is mostly there to keep the pressure and position as the glue cures.

My first acoustic was a bad dog of a guitar, and it had a zero fret. Zero frets are frets where the nut should be, and the strings always lie on it, which makes the process of cutting a nut less precise than it is on normal guitars. But Maccaferri guitars, which are de regeuer for gypsy jazz, come with zero frets.

Another indicator of lower quality is mass. A guitar is a speaker system driven by the movement of the strings, and the more mass, the less the vibration of the strings is turned into sound. In general, you want the braces, the top, the sides, the bridge, everything to be as light as possible but no lighter. Folks who want their dreadnoughts brought up to bluegrass fighting shape have their braces shaved and remove the "popsicle brace" (a brace across the top of the guitar body between the soundhole and the neck), to cut down on the tone-damping mass. But guitar makers started putting them in for a reason, and that reason is that the lighter and more delicate an instrument is, the more that casual and non-careful playing might damage it, or even the humidity mentioned earlier. The assumption of higher-end luthiers is that if you're paying $5000 or more for a flatpicking hot-rod, you know what you want and know what you're doing, and the assumption of guitar companies (and the great Martin is the originator of the popsicle brace) is that they need to keep repairs and returns down, so overbuild 'em some.

So, that's four indicators of low quality I've hit that are used by fine guitar makers and show up in great or at least perfectly good guitars. So, what are some actual indicators?

It stays in tune. The harmonics at the 5th, 7th and 12th fret are strong and loud. If the action is adjustable to be right and there are no dead spots on the neck. And if it sounds good. I replaced my Ibanez acoustic (with a Wizard neck and 6-on-top headstock) with a heavier and more traditionally-headstocked Fender A/E, and when playing something more lead, the Ibanez always cut through.