If you already own a guitar and are about to buy a better one, you’ve probably already figured out how the instrument’s configuration is connected with your playing style and ability. But for anyone new to the instrument, what is essentially a collection of wood and string that’s as old as Otzi the iceman, fretted instruments in the form they are now come in a enormous – and sometimes bewildering – variety of shapes, materials and tones.
So, if you are just starting out, the questions you need to ask are a lot less complicated than you might imagine. And most have to do only with the physical size of the instrument and the way your fingers work on its fretboard.
When you buy clothes, you make sure that they fit and a guitar is no different. If you’re playing something that has the same effect on you as walking around in a tight shirt and pants that split when you sit down, you’re not going to be making great music. So, when you meet with a guitar you’re interested in, sit down on a chair, put it in your lap and play it. If the bass end of the sound box is too big and your strumming arm is being pushed up into your shoulder socket when you try and hit the strings, you know you’re going to need something smaller.
The same thoughts work for the length of a guitar’s neck.
If you feel as though you are reaching beyond a comfortable distance to get your hand around the chords and make precise push points when you’re fretting strings, maybe a shorter neck is for you. Guitars come in a number of neck lengths, nowadays. This is also true for the width of the fretboard.
The part of the guitar where all the action happens, fingerwise, come in a variety of widths, from just over five centimeters on some classical nylon string guitars to around four centimeters on steel string electric and acoustic guitars. The width of the fretboard and the size of your fingers will need to match so that you can get your fingers around the back of the neck as well as properly placing it on strings to fret notes.
A good way to test this is to play a C chord. The three fretted notes of the chord spread out across the strings, and, if you find that your fingers are not muting any of the strings on either side of the notes you are fretting, that’s probably the right sized guitar for your fingers.
The next thing to look at when you’re buying a new guitar is the action. This is the distance the strings are from the fretboard. Obviously, this will differ all the way along the fretboard, but it’s important that its not too high, which would make fretting notes a chore because you have to push them so far down to reach the fret. Or too low where they might hit against the frets when you are playing making a rattling sound that is often referred to as ‘fret buzz’.
In most cases the action on a guitar puts the strings at around two to three millimeters (sometimes four) at the twelfth fret, depending on the gauge of the strings. It is important to realize that, on some guitars, the action can be lowered by turning a socket that controls a metal bar that reaches up to the end of the neck from the inside. You can tell if your guitar has this facility or not by looking in the sound hole where the neck connects to the guitar.
Another important thing to do when you get a new guitar is to hold its base at your feet and stare down along the fret board from the tuning end so that the fret wires line up like sleepers on a railway track. This is the best way to make sure that your guitar’s neck is not twisted. If all the fret wires line up properly, the guitar is okay. But, if you can see that they drift to one side or the other, it’s likely that guitar was left in a car on a hot day and has twisted and will never tune correctly.
If all of these issues are sorted, you are almost there. Be sure to check the body for any gaps in the wood or holes or cracks. Sometimes these issues are not terminal, and, if it’s a guitar you’re particularly fond of, you can take it to a luthier to have the body repaired.
Take a look also at the machine head and the arrangement of tuners at the guitars end. Check to see if they are rusty or not moving smoothly when they are tuning strings. It’s probably also a good idea to check the nut just near the machine heads to be sure that it’s not loose. On older guitars the glue holding it in place can wear away and the nut can often be only held in place by the strings.
The same can be said for the bridge, where you should also check that the sound board down from the bridge is not bubbled or raised slightly from its usually smooth plane. If it is, this is a good indication that a strut on the frame inside the sound box has broken and the strings and bridge are pulling on the guitar body incorrectly.
If you’ve got all these things in order, the only thing left to do is to check out the guitars tone. All guitars have a different sound, just like human beings, and it’s often a good idea to play and listen to the guitar to make sure it’s the right sound for you.
The final consideration, of course, is how much do you want to spend. There are a lot of guitar brands out there and they all claim different value based on their reputation. Guitars purchased new are not always more expensive than a used guitar, depending on its age and reputation. Some guitars from the 1950s sell for thousands of dollars more than the same design manufactured last year and never played.
For the everyday musician looking to start playing guitar there are a number of brands that sell new around the five-hundred-dollar range that sound fine and play well. You can often get used versions of these for even less, but you should be careful to check all the points listed above.
It’s also worth looking around for used examples of more expensive brands at around the one-thousand-dollar mark, if you have more money to spend and you’ve been playing guitar for a while and know that it’s something you will always want to do. Brands like Gibson and Fender are the most well-known, but there are great – and often, better – guitars made by companies like Epiphone, Gretsch, Martin, Maton, Guild, Ovation, Taylor and Washburn to name only a few.
And there are new companies appearing all the time, making perfectly wonderful guitars. The thing to do is to read a lot about the guitar you finally decide will be right for you so that you have a reasonably healthy idea about what you should pay, and then, sit down and make sure everything is in order before you hand over the money.
By James Gallaway