-John Allan

There is a wide range of guitars to choose from when buying your first guitar. There are certain considerations that you should take into account before you purchase an instrument.

What is your ultimate aim? Do you only want to play acoustic guitar? Or do you eventually see yourself playing in a Rock Band maybe? Whatever it may be, the majority of people start playing an acoustic guitar first. The reason for this is: they are relatively cheap to start with; they can be bought in ¾ size versions, for the student with smaller hands (although you can get electric guitars in ¾ sizes also). You don’t need an amplifier for an acoustic guitar, which means, less noise to annoy people with.

Acoustic guitars, as I said earlier are relatively cheap, compared with buying an electric guitar and amplifier, but don’t buy a guitar on cost alone, some of the cheaper ones are really not worth bothering with. Try to take someone that knows about guitars with you for advice, try the guitar, and make sure that you feel comfortable with the feel and weight of the guitar.

Buy a guitar with a good action; most good guitar shops will set up a guitar to suit every individual. The action of the guitar is the distance that the strings are from the fret board. The greater the distance, means that the worse the action. A guitar with good action will enable you to press the strings down more easily, (because they are closer to the fret board) making it a lot easier to play guitar chords, especially barre chords.

For the students that prefer to start learning using an electric guitar, well there is nothing wrong with that! In fact! The strings on an electric guitar are generally lighter in gauge which makes them slightly easier to press down or bend, (bending means to increase the pitch of the note by stretching the guitar string).

Whichever guitarthat you decide to buy, the most important thing is, that you make sure that you have researched that particular make and model on the internet and know what you want to purchase before walking into a music store.

You may even consider buying a used guitar, from eBay for example. In this case, you really need to take advice from someone with knowledge of guitars.

Once you have found the guitar you are looking for, the most important thing to remember is to seek out some good quality guitar instruction. There is a couple of ways you can go with this:

1. Find a guitar instructor that will be patient with you, especially in the beginning when every thing is completely new to you. Make sure that they are qualified to be able to teach you. Please bear in mind that one to one mentoring as with a guitar instructor can work out very expensive.

2. If you know someone that is willing to show you a few guitar chords, scales and guitar licks, then you are onto a winner, this way is the cheapest way to learn, but you are limited by the other persons ability.

3. There are a lot of guitar course’s on the internet, some of them are very good and some promise that every thing is included in there course or ebook. Some are delivered via CD/DVD these tend to be more expensive. There are online course’s where you need to log into a web site to view lessons, with this type of course you will need to have an internet connection available every time you wish to take a guitar lesson. In my opinion the best course to go for are the guitar course which can be downloaded onto your own PC and then every thing run from there. With the better course’s you will be offered a trial period for free to help you decide. Which ever course you go for, it is important to get good quality content with plenty of video and colour diagrams, with a systematic approach to the guitar lessons.

Find out if the course you are interested in will give you a good foundation in music theory to get you started, are there guitar tabs supplied? guitar chord charts, chord progressions, guitar scales? All these questions should be answered before you commit yourself.

Good luck in your search for the right guitar and teaching method.

 

John Allan