Buying your first guitar

Guitar Hero, Rock Band and all of the other musical games seem to be having a major impact on the sales of real musical instruments, with more money spent on guitars last year than ever before. If you’re one of the people who like the feeling of being in a virtual band so much that you want to have a go at the real thing, or even if you’re interested in playing despite having never had a go on a games console, the Jitty would like to help you to take that first step towards musicianship with our guide to buying your first guitar.

What type of guitar do I need?

Walking into a guitar shop can be overwhelming if you’re not sure what you want, and it’s often hard to know where to start looking for something suitable. Your first major decision will be if you want an electric or an acoustic, and this will probably be determined by the sort of music you’d like to play. Take a look at the guitars your favourite bands use to play the music that got you into the idea of learning for yourself, and use that as a guide. We’ll take you through a bit of information about both types of guitar.

Acoustic guitars

Your basic acoustic tends to come in two flavours – steel strung and nylon strung – although there are lots of other options you can consider. Nylon strung guitars, often referred to generically as classical guitars, tend to be smaller and lighter than their steel counterparts and generally have wider necks and flatter fretboards. The main difference between the two is in the type of sounds you can get out of the respective strings, and as you can’t swap strings between the two types or guitar it’s important to choose wisely to begin with. It’s possible to buy smaller versions of each guitar, usually in three quarter and half sizes, but the quality of these varies by manufacturer. The cheaper ones tend to be aimed at children and so may not be built as well as you might hope. There are also a few ‘travel’ acoustics (notably Martin’s Backpacker) which have tiny bodies, but this understandably affects the sound.

A nylon strung guitar will produce a very soft and rich sound that tends to be quieter than a steel strung one, and is far more suited to playing with your fingertips rather than a pick (also known as a plectrum, but that’s a truly horrible word). This means it tends to be great for classical playing and quiet folky music, but you can only get so much volume out of one when you’re strumming it. Changing the strings is a bit more complex than on a steel strung guitar because they need to be tied on, but that’s quite easy to learn.

Steel strung guitars are bigger and heavier because of the extra reinforcement that’s needed to support the tougher strings. They tend to sound bigger and brighter than nylon strung guitars and are ideal for strumming and creating a lot of volume. The necks tend to be thinner than the ones on nylon strung guitars, and they’ll often have a ‘cut away’ section up where the neck meets the body so you can get to the higher frets. The thing you’ll notice immediately is that steel strings are much stiffer than nylon, and this can be a challenge for a new player because you’ll need greater finger strength to hold them down. This can also mean that the ends of your fingers can get sore easily when you’re learning but that’s true of all guitars to a degree.

There are various extra options you can go for when buying an acoustic. Your main choice is whether you want to be able to plug it in to an amplifier or PA system directly, which will require you to choose a guitar with a few extra bits of electronics built in. This is commonplace on steel strung guitars, but can increase the price of nylon strung ones quite significantly. You could also pick a twelve string steel guitar, which will have a very jangly, shimmery sound but requires a lot of strength to play, or even a bowlback which is a guitar where the rear is made of shaped plastic rather than wood. In order to appreciate the difference between the various construction techniques, types of material etc, you’ll have to trust your ears as everyone has their own idea of what makes a good guitar.

Electric guitars

You’ve got a shocking amount of options if you want to go along the electric route, so the best thing to do is to look at the major bits that make up an electric guitar so you can see at a glance if a particular one is likely to be right for you.

The shape of the body on an electric guitar is generally down to preference, although there are a couple of body types that might not be suitable for all music. If you're looking at the more dramatic shaped designs like Gibson's Flying V and Explorer, or the Razorback series by Dean, it's worth remembering that they can be big, heavy, tricky to balance and may not be easy to play when sitting down. If you see a large electric guitar with two ‘f’ shaped holes on the top, this will be a hollow body, or semi solid. These tend to have quite a smooth, mellow tone and are often favoured by blues players (BB King’s original Lucille was a Gibson ES-335 semi solid) but they can cause feedback if you’re playing in a loud venue.

All electric guitars have steel strings, which tend to be lighter and thinner than the ones you get on acoustics and far easier to hold down. The reason they have these is because the vibrations of the steel are captured by those bar shaped things you see on the front of the guitar, known as pickups, and are passed on to your amplifier. Pickups tend to come in two types – single coil and humbucker, each of which can be open or covered - although as we’ll shortly see there can be a lot more to it.

 A single coil pickup can generally be recognised by its long thin shape, and if it’s an open one you’ll usually be able to see a row of silver dots, one under each string. These dots are the Pole Pieces, or the bits that detect the vibration of the strings. Single coil pickups tend to have a bright, sharp sound with lots of high frequencies but the downside is that they can generate a bit of a buzz if you’re standing next to lots of electrical equipment. Don’t assume this is a deal breaker though – almost every Fender Strat throughout history, including those played by Hendrix, Clapton, etc had single coils.

In order to deal with the buzz, the humbucker pickup was invented. This is made from two single coil pickups wired together in such a way that they cancel out most background hum, but the downside is that their sound tends to lose a bit of the spikiness and top end. Humbuckers are often favoured by heavy rhythm players, and are the standard type of pickup on Gibson Les Paul guitars. You can recognise an open humbucker because it’ll just look like two single coils together, and a covered one because it’s rectangular rather than long and thin. Whether the pickup is covered or open tends to be just cosmetic, although there are lots of people who swear that metal covers make a difference to the sound. I’d say it’s not enough of an issue to stress over.

Where the pickups are placed on the guitar is probably more of an issue than what type they are. As you move a pickup closer to the neck the sound becomes richer at the expense of some top end, and moving it the other way makes the sound more piercing but gives it less ‘oomph’. Most guitars will have a variety of pickups in different places, a switch that lets you choose between them or blend them together, and volume and tone controls for each. It’s impossible to guarantee which is best for you, so you’ll have to trust your ears, although a rule of thumb is that a single coil near the neck and a humbucker at the other end tends to be a versatile combination.

You may come across something called a ‘coil tap’ which is a little switch that lets you turn off one of the pickups in a humbucker to get a single coil sound. From reading the previous bit you can probably see why that might be handy, but it’s not a common option. You’ll also sometimes come across ‘stacked humbuckers’ which are humbuckers where the two single coil pickups are on top of each other so it looks like there’s only one. These tend to be fitted to modern guitars that are intended to look like vintage ones, so the appearance is as authentic as possible. A final and not particularly common option is a piezo pickup, which is a hidden one that sits under the strings where they meet the body and is intended to give an acoustic like sound.. often with limited success. Parker guitars are well known for using this technology.

There’s one major decision left to make before you choose your weapon, and that’s the type of vibrato, or tremolo unit. The bit where the strings of a guitar are attached to the body is called the bridge, and this used to be a series of little sliding pieces called saddles for the strings to sit on, and a plate to anchor them to. This type of bridge is known as a fixed bridge, and lives on today, probably best known in the form of Gibson’s ‘stop tailpiece’. If you’ve ever seen rock guitarists flying through pyrotechnic solos you’ll notice that they often grab a metal bar hanging in front of the guitar and shake it around, causing the pitch of the notes to rise and fall. This is known as the tremolo, vibrato, or more commonly whammy bar – something Guitar Hero players will recognise! You can’t do this with a fixed bridge, although it may be easier to keep in tune as a result, so making the right choice will depend on what you want to play.

Tremolos (We’ll stick with that term) tend to come in two normal types and lots of unusual older ones. The type you see fitted to a Strat is often referred to as vintage, and is simple to maintain but can only be used to lower the pitch of the notes unless you mess around with the springs. There are also vintage looking ones that can be pulled back slightly into a recess in the body so you can raise the notes too. The other main type of tremolo is known as the floating type, commonly called a Floyd Rose after the most well known maker. These are huge chunky things that can raise or lower the sound of the strings by a large degree and so are ideal for lunatic divebombing solos, but the downside is that they’re an absolute pig to set up and keep balanced. They’re usually combined with a device that locks the strings in place up at the top of the guitar’s neck (because they tend to go out of tune when you hammer them) and so a floating unit will provide small fine tuners that can be used to make adjustments to the tuning while the strings are locked.

The unusual tremolo types we mentioned earlier tend to be fitted to older guitars, or modern reissues of the same. You’ll sometimes see names like Bigsby, Vibrola, Vibramute etc but it’s extremely rare to find one as standard on a new guitar. Many of these rarer types tend to have poor tuning stability and can be fiddly to set up, which is probably why they became rare in the first place!

How do I know if this guitar is a good one?

It’s safe to say that it’s far harder to buy a bad guitar now than it was 20 years ago. You can go out with a hundred quid and come back with a perfectly playable guitar, electric or acoustic, that’ll last you for as long as you care to look after it. The more the price drops, the more careful you need to be, but it’s still possible to get bargains. If you look for the budget brands associated with larger companies (Epiphone by Gibson, Squire by Fender, etc) you’ll probably be on to a safe bet, but companies such as Vintage, Electrasonik, Cort, Guvnor and Stagg make some cracking instruments that are worth a look. I tend to go for Yamahas, with the entry models in the Pacifica range being extremely hard to beat.

Whether it’s an electric or an acoustic there are a few simple visual checks you can do to see if a guitar is well made and set up. The neck is the area where cheap manufacturing tends to show up. The most important thing is that it’s not warped or twisted, and the way to check this is to stand the guitar on the floor and look down the neck. The frets, which are the metal bars that mark out the notes on the neck, should all be level – if they seem to twist off to one side, walk away. They should also be about the same height, as any fret that stands noticeably higher or lower that the ones around it will cause a buzz. Run your fingers carefully along the side of the neck to see if the frets have sharp ends – this is a sign of cheap construction and can hurt your fingers. Some necks have binding along the edges, which is a plastic strip that covers the ends of the frets and so avoids this issue. Make sure that the frets don’t have little dents in them under the strings, as these are a sign that the guitar has not only been badly packed in transit, but that the fret material is very soft and probably won’t last.

The next thing to do is to see how high the strings sit above the neck. Acoustic guitars tend to have their strings set higher than electrics but there should still only be a few millimetres between the strings and the frets. It can be quite hard to change this height by a large degree on acoustics so you need to get this right, and even though electrics are more adjustable there’s no excuse for strings so high that you can put your fingers under them. A guitar like that would probably be more use for grating cheese than rocking Wembley.

Next have a look over the body and the back of the neck for scratches and dents. Minor ones on the body probably aren’t an issue and shouldn’t get between you and your dream guitar (although you should argue for some money off if you find any) but dents in the neck can be offputting. You also need to consider how they got there and what that says about the way the guitar has been handled. The one exception to this is if you see any cracks in the paint on an electric guitar where the neck meets the body. These tend to mean the guitar has been dropped or put under pressure, and I’ve seen a BC Rich guitar crack in half before because of similar damage under the surface, so leave these on the shelf.

One small but often overlooked thing to check involves the tuners. If you can feel some play when you twist the tuning pegs backwards and forwards, even though the pitch of the string isn’t changing, this is known as whiplash. A guitar suffering from this will be very hard to keep in tune, and finding such cheap and nasty parts here suggest that all the hardware fitted might be equally bargain basement and prone to issues.

The time has now come to play it, which can be daunting if you’re just starting to learn. The simplest way around this is to take someone who can already play, or ask a nice shop assistant to play it for you to you can listen out for buzzes, rattles and iffy notes. It’d be better still if the person playing it can play the sort of things you’d like to learn for yourself so you can get a good idea of how well that guitar would handle them. If it’s an electric or electro-acoustic, make sure it’s tested on all of the pickup settings and run through each of the volume and tone controls to make sure they all make a noticeable difference to the sound. What you don’t want to hear are any crackles and pops, as this might mean that the controls, the wiring or the socket for the lead are a bit dodgy.

Cutting the deal

Always see what you can get thrown in, or reduced as part of the deal – a lot of music shops are prepared to do this in order to remain competitive. Key items to aim for that you’ll probably end up buying anyway are a gig bag (although don’t skimp on this if you’re given a thin vinyl job that offers no protection), a fresh set of strings and a string winder to make it easier to change them, a cheap tuner, a few picks and a lead if you’re buying an electro or electro-acoustic. If you get all of that you’ll be doing well, but don’t be tempted into buying a cheap unbranded boxed guitar instead because it comes with the above as part of a pack – the guitar is the most important thing and the other bits can be added later. It might also be worth asking if the shop are prepared to do a setup for you with fresh strings before you take it home. This will hopefully make sure it’s nice to play from the start, and stays in tune properly.

If you’re buying an electric then you’ll probably be looking at amplifiers too, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. The only simple advice we can give here is that for rehearsing in your bedroom 10-20 watts is more than enough, and don’t be taken in by those pre-boxed amp + guitar bundles for the same reason we mentioned earlier – you can add an amp at any time, and it’s probably worth saving up until you know what you want.

That’s that! Hopefully this should help you to avoid the main pitfalls when buying your first decent guitar.