5 Tips form Anıl Uzun
All of the people looking to ear playing the guitar do ask me to help them buying a new guitar.
How to choose a quality guitar?
That one is a difficult question because the price won’t tell you what to do. Many cheap guitars can be excellent and many expensive ones that can be crap. So when buying online, you cannot understand if the guitar is of low quality or not.
The quality of an acoustic guitar can make or break your playing experience.
Tip 1- Try the guitar
I do recommend my students to touch the guitar they will be buying. When you feel the guitar, you can determine the quality of it. Hold the guitar and see if the body style of the guitar will fit you or not. Do you feel comfortable playing it? Does it fit your hand? The jumbo guitars would look good, but you need to measure yourself; if it is too big, you can’t control it between your chest and arm. These are the first features that you shall look as you try a guitar. The neck of the guitar should be suitable enough for you to move your hand comfortably.
Tip 2- The sound of the guitar
You need to look at the resonator and projector to understand if the guitar sounds good or not. Resonation is the vibration of the guitar as you strum. The second is the projection, and you need a friend to play the guitar and listen to its sound. Play it loud and soft to test the sound correctly.
Tip 3 – The action and intonation
The guitar stores adjust the action and intonation correctly to sell the guitar. You can check them, though. Find the 12th fret of the guitar and see if the strings are too close to or too far away from the fretboard. To check the intonation you can press D chord and play the same chord on any fret. If they sound the same, the intonation is good. There is another way, it is called the harmonics method, you can play an open strict and compare it with other harmonic. If they are exactly the same it means the guitar is a quality one.
The final check is to see if the guitar has any damage on it. The guitars in stores may have some splits or cracks that may have happened as the customers tried them. Check if there is any fracture, then you need to check if the top face od the guitar is proper, and see if the neck is attached to the body in the right way. There shall not be any gap between the two parts, the joint connection need to be done in the proper way.
Now you are ready to buy a guitar. Follow the above-mentioned steps you can be confident that you will find the perfect guitar. Finally, you can check the prices on the guitars because good quality ones will make you stretch your budget!