Teresa Mae

As a guitarist (and especially as a student), it is vital that you choose the appropriate guitar for YOUR needs. With this, I’m not trying to say that you may have only one guitar, let alone have it for life… All I’m saying is, your needs RIGHT NOW are the ones that need to be catered to… If in the future you needs change and you need a new guitar for that, at least you’ll know what to consider and what to look for when choosing a new instrument.

 

As a teacher, you can often notice that the guitar your beginner student carries so proudly may not be the right one for him due to any number of reasons… With this article, I hope to enable students of any level to make a more informed decision when picking a guitar.

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The most common factor to choose a guitar among beginners is the looks. Shape and color are what make it cool for the student, maybe even the amount of control knobs and switches… Looks are indeed an important factor, but other factors should be taken into consideration besides shape and color.

Here’s a brief description of what to pay attention to when choosing your guitar:

1. Body Shape – You can get a really cool-shaped guitar, but don’t take form over function. You need to understand that although it may look cool, you should also have the following:

   1. Neck joint – this is really important, because depending on the size of your hands, the access to upper frets may be extremely limited if the heel is not carved appropriately.

   2. Body cut – this can also limit your access to the upper frets on the 3 higher strings. As you bring you thumb lower on the neck and your wrist forward, you hand may hit the “horn” of the guitar, not giving you all the freedom you need to play the higher notes on your guitar.

2. Neck Shape – This is definitely something I advise you to test on multiple guitars in a shop before making you decision. The height and width of the neck can make or break a player. Again, try to see which neck shape and size adapts the best to the size of your hands and, if you’re a beginner, ask somebody to help you to have your fretting hand in the right position when doing this assessment.

3. Weight – Comfort is key. As much as you may love the shape and sound of a Les Paul, it can be detrimental to your comfort and overall performance to have a heavy guitar on your shoulder all the time… and I’m not talking about people who have back issues or similar conditions.

4. Type of Bridge – Admit it… Having a tremolo in your guitar looks really cool and badass… But you need to have in mind that guitars with floating bridges (with tremolo) can be much more unstable in terms of keeping in tune or breaking strings. Trust me, if you don’t need it, don’t buy it!

5. Type of pickups – It all depends on what style and what type of sound you want to achieve. In my opinion you will never be 100% sure on either… simply because your musical taste will keep evolving and expanding as you learn more and more about the guitar. My advice is to have a guitar that is as versatile as possible. For this, I recommend you to use Humbucker pickups, as they have enough output to play every style of music and are much better at cancelling noise than Single Coil pickups. But if you really want to have a versatile instrument, try getting a guitar with Humbuckers that include “Coil Split”. With this feature, you can use single coils just by flipping a switch.

 

There are many other aspects to take into consideration when choosing your next (or first) guitar, but all the items explained above are guaranteed to provide you with the best experience possible and to fall in love with your new instrument.

 

About the author

Based in Zurich Switzerland, Gonçalo Crespo is the founder of Music&Co. guitar music school. He is a professional musician and guitar teacher mainly focused on getting his students to guitar proficiency in the most efficient way possible. Gonçalo also offers tuition for acoustic and electric guitar, covering a lot of different styles of music. Check out his website at Gitarrenunterricht Zurich.