Acoustic Guitars

If you’ve decided to invest in an acoustic guitar, you’ll have to narrow your search further. Every acoustic guitar is designed to handle either steel or nylon strings (not both). The design, feel, and sound of each are spectacularly different.

Steel String Acoustic Guitars

Almost every acoustic guitar you hear in popular music is a steel string guitar. Steel string acoustic guitars are the instruments most people think of when they hear the term ”acoustic guitar.“ They are louder and brighter than nylon stringed guitars and are, to most ears, the best suited to strumming and campfire playing. They are also a little harder on the fingertips of new players than both electric and nylon string acoustic guitars. Don’t fear them for this reason, though. The tenderness of the fingertips subsides after a short adjustment period, and steel string acoustic guitars become very easy to play.

Nylon String Acoustic Guitars

These guitars are commonly named ”classical“ or ”flamenco“ guitars for the genres of music most commonly associated with nylon string guitars. If you’re most interested in one of these genres you should, almost unquestionably, start with a nylon string guitar made for that genre (and be aware that there are differences between guitars designed for flamenco and classical music, too). Otherwise, you may decide to start with a nylon string guitar because they are a little easier on the fingers—at first. If this is the case, make sure you also consider the nylon string guitar’s wider string spacing (distance between the strings) and shorter fingerboards, which can be liabilities when playing music meant for a steel string guitar.

Finding the Best Guitar for Your Budget

Acoustic guitars can be constructed of either solid wood or laminate wood. Laminate wood is remarkably sturdy, which makes for cheaper and easier to care for guitars that don’t resonate as well or evolve with time. The sound quality sacrifice of laminate wood is often acceptable to new players, since it makes for an instrument that is far less of an initial investment and is far more resistant to stresses (being knocked over, tied to the roof of a station wagon, etc.).

All solid wood guitars, conversely, are much more sensitive to changes in temperature, humidity, air pressure, Nielsen Ratings (well, not that last one, but you get the idea). They also tend to be 300% or more the price of a basic laminate wood acoustic guitar. Their advantage is in the enormously better sound quality. Not only will a new solid wood guitar have a sound far superior to that of a laminate wood counterpart, its sound quality will improve over time. The longer you own and play a solid wood guitar, the better it will sound. Laminate wood, being much more stable, will not allow for improvement in tone over time.

A good compromise can be to find a guitar with a so called ”solid top.“ These guitars are made with one solid plank of wood (with the big round hole in it) fastened to laminate wood back and sides. These guitars enjoy some of the tonal advantages of a solid wood guitar while still being almost as inexpensive and easy to care for as a laminate wood guitar.

Most acoustic guitars with a solid top are easy to recognize. There will usually be a tag or a sticker saying so (since it is a selling point) somewhere on a new guitar. If you aren’t sure (or are looking at used guitars, long absent of their tags), there is another easy way to tell if at least the top of an acoustic guitar is solid. Look into the hole under the strings so that you can see the inside edge of the hole. A laminate wood guitar will have a ring around the inside of this hole. That ring is just one of the thin layers of different types of wood that were glued together to make the laminate. If there is no such ring and the wood grain follows through around the edge of the hole, the guitar has at least a solid top.

Electronics

Some acoustic guitars come with built in electronics (so they can be plugged in). These are the aforementioned acoustic-electric guitars, which are not like electric guitars at all. Acoustic-electric guitars employ electronics that are meant only to increase the volume of the instrument and not to color and shape it, as do the electronics in an electric guitar. Acoustic-electric guitars are meant to be plugged directly into a P.A. system instead of into an electric guitar amp. While you can plug an acoustic-electric guitar into an electric guitar amp, the resulting sound will be slightly less pleasant than that of an angry hissing cat dragging its claws down a chalkboard.

Electronics are a feature commonly used by salesmen as leverage for an up-sell. Although it may be true that you can buy the same guitar with electronics for only $70 more than the one you were looking at, this does NOT mean that you’ll get more value from the instrument. Unless you plan to be playing coffee houses, a church, or Madison Square Garden, you probably won’t need it to have electronics almost immediately after you buy it. Unplugged instruments resonating naturally in a room always sound better than plugged in acoustic-electrics (making the plug-in guitars impractical for home use). The sacrifice in tone is only necessary to make when you really need more volume in a performance situation. So, if you’re not planning on being in front of an audience soon, your $70 is better spent on a different model of guitar with more high-quality wood. Choose a guitar whose sound you like (it won’t be hard to talk a sales guy into a demo) and you can always add electronics to it later for a reasonably low amount of money.

It should also be mentioned that there is such a thing as an acoustic amplifier. However, since acoustic-electric guitars in live performance are usually plugged directly in by the sound man, acoustic amps have really no place on the stage. So . . . we’re not really sure what they’re for. Some of them have microphone inputs that could be used by guitar playing singers, but they would just be needlessly amplifying the volume of their performance in the rare circumstance that they play somewhere that does not have a P.A. to do it for them. Long story short: If you don’t have a REALLY specific purpose in mind for an acoustic amplifier, don’t waste your money. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them end up collecting dust in a closet.

Another selling point for acoustic guitars is the cutaway. Some guitars are made with an altered body shape that allows for easier access to the higher frets. This alteration is a cutaway. While useful, the alteration does sacrifice a bit in sound quality. So, when considering a guitar with a cutaway, make sure that is a worthwhile sacrifice to you. Very little acoustic guitar playing happens in highest notes (because it isn’t the most attractive part of the instrument’s range). So, you’ll likely not need access to those notes unless you plan to play a very ”lead guitar“ oriented style of playing on the instrument. If you want the cutaway so you can get those high notes in ”Purple Haze“ or the solo of ”Stairway to Heaven,“ well, then it’s time that you admit it to yourself: You want an electric guitar.