Guitar Lessons Tips – Is It Best To Buy A Top Range Guitar?
After listening to a superb blues guitar performance, one of the most common questions that comes by the audience is ‘what make of guitar is that’ ? This reflects a common myth about a guitarist’s performance, basically that it’s the instrument and not the guitarist that makes the music! People don’t consider all the guitar lessons and thousands of hours of practice! All guitarists dream of having the very best and most expensive instrument, and somehow imagine that this will improve their skill level.
Of course it helps to play a really good guitar, but a great musician will get an impressive sound out of most any instrument, more or less. It’s pretty safe to say that you can buy a good quality guitar for several hundred dollars nowadays, and for most purposes, it’s good enough. The difference between an instrument costing 500 dollars and another priced at 2000 is very little. Of course, it depends on the guitar, and there are normally exceptions either way.
For instance, Vintage market a parlor guitar which costs well under $200 which was given the ‘Best Parlor Guitar Under $1000′ award by Acoustic Guitar Magazine a few years ago. On the other hand, I went to visit a friend who owns no less than five top end Martins of various ages, and none of them were that ‘special’. It additionally depends on what you use the guitar for. If you play acoustically to a very attentive audience, then the full acoustic range and harmonics are vital for the overall sound. However, if you play the instrument amplified by a pickup inside the guitar or located under the bridge, then the finer features of the construction designed to improve the acoustic guitar sound are just wasted.
My advice is to spend over $200 and less than $800. You will surely get something between those limits that will suit your style. Look around prudently, and think about a good used guitar, if you are sure it has been cared for. I recently saw an advert on Ebay for an ancient Stella guitar which went for a few hundred dollars. Naturally, it wouldn’t sound like a top range guitar, but it’s a slice of history and I bet it made really mellow blues music. It certainly looked wonderful.
