In a guitar shop, you will find a good number of guitars available in different styles and sizes. This may easily overwhelm you if you want to buy a new guitar. When you are spoilt for choice, knowing how to evaluate the quality of a guitar helps you to get the right one. The knowledge for evaluating a guitar is practical when comparing two guitars in relation to workmanship, material and so forth. You do not require expertise to be a great judge of guitar quality.
With some experience, you can get just about everything you need to know about a particular guitar by merely playing it for some time. You can tell a quality guitar by its look, tune, frets and resistance to abuse. The following ideas will help you get the right guitar when shopping for one.
Construction of the guitar
It is essential to consider the construction of a guitar as it will help you to determine whether it is an acoustic or electric type. To construct a particular guitar, various construction methods are employed with different approaches. Therefore, if you want to evaluate a guitar by its construction, you need to consider three essential categories. For the first category, you will realize that solid or laminate wood are particularly meant for acoustic guitars. On the second category, you will find electric guitars characterized with tops and body caps. The third category is basically involves neck construction.
Guitar material
The material for musical instruments goes a long way to determine their price. In that regard, you can tell why a guitar is expensive just by evaluating its material. For a fact, a better material usually winds up on a better guitar. You can make a good bet on this fact. When you look at a guitar with quality material, you will notice that its construction and workmanship are perfectly matching. Therefore, everything boils down to the type of wood used to make a guitar, pickups, hardware and electronics. If the wood used is rare, it is likely to be more expensive. If the hardware is topnotch, it is likely to last long and perform efficiently.
Guitar workmanship
Apparently, when shopping for guitars you will realize that quite a number of them are exhibiting excellence in workmanship. This is because production companies are stuck on a policy that keeps bad guitars from coming off the factory floor. Nonetheless, mistakes can still slip through. In that case, it is vital to carefully inspect a new guitar for defects such as cracks, glue spots, bad joints, scratches and unfinished areas. In an acoustic guitar, you need to look out for a nice setup, perfect finishing, gapless joints and clean gluing in the guitar’s bracing. In an electric guitar, look out for tight metal parts (rattle-free), metal quality (smoothness), tuning mechanisms, fret texture and surface painting.
These three basic ideas will make your guitar shopping experience great. Apart from your guitar playing experience, you can always use these tips to get a quality guitar or help a friend make the right choice.