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Sunday, July 26, 2009

Choosing A Right Acoustic Guitar For Beginners

By FX. Steinmueller

Beginning guitarists sometimes experienced a lot of problems in their guitar journey and decided to quit. Some gave up because they never produced good musical tones with their guitar while others complained they could not take the 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.

Cheap guitars are OK as long as they meet the condition below:

Warped neck is not acceptable. Press the thickest string on the 1st and 12th frets and look at the gap between the string and frets. A good neck will leave a small 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.

It is quite difficult to find cheap guitars that can meet those criteria, especially for beginners. Get an experienced friend to guide you in the guitar store and let him/her recommend some guitars for you to try. Choose one that feels right in your hand and don't pay attention too much on the guitar appearance. You don't need a fancy good looking guitar. It may fool you easily.

A budget guitar that meets the basic criteria above is worth buying. With very limited budget you can't expect much but you won't get a crap guitar either if you follow this guideline correctly. - 18780

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