Picking A Wrong Acoustic Guitar – A Beginner’s Disaster
As a beginning guitarist, have you ever thought of quitting your guitar? Why your guitar sounds bad no matter how good you squeeze the fretboard? Why your fretting fingers can’t stay longer on the fretboard without having pain?
If you think that you can use any cheap guitars for practicing you could be wrong. Some parents bought cheap guitars because they thought the children would abandon their guitars once they experienced the difficulties, however giving them cheap guitars might also discourage them to continue practicing.
You can buy budget guitars as long as they meet some criteria below:
Check for warped guitar neck. Press one string at the first and 12th fret and look at the gap between the string and the frets on the fretboard. You should see a little tiny gap only between them.
The next important thing is to find a guitar within your budget that has a good playability. Good playability means it should feel comfortable in your hand. Getting a right guitar will help eliminating the unnecessary muscle tension because the strings tension is softer. You should be able to play any chords on the fretboard at any place without sore fingers.
You should pick a guitar with low action. Action is the clearance between the thickest string’s bottom to the top of 12th fret. A measurement of 3mm to 4 mm is desirable. With low action you need less pressure to form chords and this means you will have less pain in your fingers. This increase the guitar playability.
The last thing to check is intonation. Good intonation means each note pressed on any fret across the fretboard should stay in tune. A guitar may sound OK when you play open chords but once you are moving your chords along the fretboard you may experience out of tune chords. This is a due to bad intonation and nothing related to the guitar tuning at all. Use guitar tuner to take some measurement in case you are in doubt.
Should you are interested in budget guitar it’s a good idea to ask somebody experienced to accompany you to the guitar store and ask him/her to pick some for you to test. From those preselected guitars find one that is most comfortable with you. Don’t be fooled by the guitar coating or any aesthetic factors that can mislead you.
With a limited budget you are still able to get a relatively good guitar as long as you know how to make the selection. Just follow this guideline to prevent spending money on something you can’t play.
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