Buying An Electric Guitar
Buying an electric guitar, especially your first electric guitar, may be a triumph of emotion over logic. Many guitars are designed to catch your eye, make you feel like a real guitar hero when you sling them around your neck, make your heart skip a beat when you first see the shape and colour. Fine, but none of that makes a guitar a better musical instrument. You might be convinced that price and brand determines quality and to a degree you may be right. However, twice the price probably doesn’t mean twice the quality. Gig hardened guitarists probably don’t need to be told how to buy a guitar but newcomers to the wonderful art of the electric axe might value a few pointers so that they don’t wasted their money.
Firstly, don’t go straight to a beautiful Gibson, Fender Stratocaster or whatever famous brand appeals to you. You will pay a high price but you aren’t yet ready to get the best from it. By the time that you can play well enough to get the best from the top brand guitar you may have decided that the style isn’t for you.
My first electric guitar was bought for less than £100 from a market stall. It was a Stratocaster copy made in China and a beginner’s level guitar now easily available on-line. Consider that, in a few months’ time, you will be ready to play something better. In other words, don’t spend much but use your first purchase to learn what suits you. Then you’ll make a wise purchase when you are ready to trade up. Buying from a reputable on-line merchant is an ideal way to get the right balance between quality and price and without the pressure from a salesman to buy an expensive guitar that is of no extra benefit to you yet.
When you buy an electric guitar, make sure that the tuners are sturdy. If it has a floating bridge (tremolo arrangement), make sure that the bridge springs are strong. For a first guitar you might avoid a tremolo model because they are a little more difficult to tune – that rules out Stratocasters and a few others, I’m afraid. Rest your guitar on a soft surface, raise the headstock to your eye and look down the fretboard. There should be just the very slightest concave bow along the fretboard and no twist. A new guitar from a good dealer should be fine in all respects but if you see something wrong, return it to the merchant. You might also want to spend a few coppers having your guitar set up at a guitar shop. Some small adjustments can make playing easier and tuning more accurate. Beginners should avoid setting the action and intonation themselves. It’s easy to make matters worse and messing about with the action when you aren’t sure what you are doing can cause damage.
Enjoy learning to play and learning about your instrument!
A heavily customised Fender Stratocaster
