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Summary: Guitar teacher explains elements you should consider before buying your first guitar. Including comparison between steel and nylon strings.
As a guitar teacher, people ask me all the time, when they are about to start having guitar lessons, what kind of guitar they should buy?
You have a few choices, but let’s divide it into 2 basic categories:
Electric Guitar or Acoustic Guitar. In the “electric” category we can find different choices to consider. The first one is the style of music you want to play on your guitar.Electric guitar is best for pop, rock, blues, alternative,country, metal but you should also consider that the learning materials that you are going to find, related to electric guitars is more oriented to scales, exercises, tricks and guitar solos. In other words, electric guitar learning material is going to take more effort on your side.
There are also, different types of electric guitars. Basic, with tremolo, even 7 string guitars, smaller size for young children, etc. I personally do not recommend guitars with a Floyd Rose tremolo bridge (usually called: Floyd Rose) as your first guitar because they are too difficult to tune, especially for a beginner. Every time you adjust the tuning of one string, the others are affected. This not the case when you have a regular electric guitar.
How can you tell the difference between an electric guitar with a tremolo bridge and a regular guitar ? … Just look at the body of the guitar where the knob for volume is located. If you see that the bridge holding the strings is ¨floating¨ in the air, that is the Floyd Rose type. What I mean by ¨floating¨ is the fact that the bridge stretches up or down, moving freely when you push or release the tremolo arm.
A regular tremolo is ATACHED to the body of the guitar and can only move in one direction (I’d say up, but depends on your point of view) but this one also has a problem for beginners: It affects the tuning of the strings everytime you use it. In acoustic guitar, we have 2 basic choices:The “classical guitar” which comes with nylon strings and is your best choice if you like to sing and just play chords or seriously study classical music. The styles that better match the classical guitar are: pop, soft rock, ballads, rhythm guitar styles, bossa nova and classical of course. The second basic choice is “folk guitar” or “Steel-String Guitar” which is acoustic but comes with steel strings
The sound is much brighter and louder than the classical guitar (nylon strings). The down side is that steel strings get corroded pretty fast if your fingers tend to sweat. Nylon strings tend to be more gentle on your fingers, easier to tune and also tend to maintain tuning. That's why a classical or acoustic guitar is a good choice for beginners. Steel strings get corroded frequently depending on the level of moisture in the air and sweating of your fingers, easily lose tuning and can be more difficult to manage, depending on how thick they are. They come in different gauges.
As a result, you will need to change strings more often (every 2 months or so, if you are not a performing artist) but the benefit of a nice bright sound is worth it. Pop, rock, blues, alternative and country are the best match for the steel-string guitar. You can also find electro-acoustic guitars. They are the same as acoustic guitars with the extra feature of an output connection to plug into an amplifier (amp) so you can have a louder sound to perform in public. They come with nylon strings or steel strings. Modern electro-acoustic guitars even include a tuner built into the body of the guitar. This is a great feature to consider.
Alvaro Avila (Guitar Teacher)
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Last edited by Alvaro Avila on Oct 16, 2010 3:56 pm -0500.
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