Some Thoughts About Buying Your Child's First Guitar

What are you going to do when your child asks you for their first guitar? What is going through your head? What are you visualising? Are you riddled with panic or are you seeing your little one up on stage at Carnegie Hall or Wembley Stadium? Whatever you are thinking one thing is for sure they are going to be persistent and you are going to have to go through a pretty fast learning curve.

Clearly there are some serious considerations, but the main two are budget and their ability to retain the current level of enthusiasm!

One of the big questions is acoustic guitar or electric guitar?

As you scour the millions of online reviews you will see many conflicting views about the best type of guitar to learn on, which is basically what you are buying.

Acoustic guitars have no pick-ups so therefore no amplification. An advantage is that the guitar is all that you need, apart from the training obviously!! The disadvantages are that they require more finger strength and stronger finger-tip calluses, things beginners' lack. Too many people get discouraged because of the resulting finger pain.

Electric guitars are easier to play than acoustics, especially for a beginner. Once you get the basics down you can graduate onto playing an acoustic to sharpen technique - most players will end up playing both anyway. A disadvantage with an electric guitar is that any mistake will be amplified, but the old saying that 'if you can't play, then play it loud' springs to mind!

There is a reason you start reading with SpongeBob rather than War and Peace. Starting with acoustic, particularly a cheaper, but the best acoustic guitar you can afford, could be asking to give up in frustration at not being able to hear a chord ring out properly if there is no consideration to the consequence, and let's face it we do not want to be discouraging any future guitar legend do we?

The really important thing for a beginner is to be comfortable and proud of the instrument they have, so find a guitar that has a good "action", meaning the strings are as close to the frets as possible without "buzzing" (when you push down on a string to sound a non-open note, it will ring out clear).

Generally, if you "fret" the string at the first fret AND the last fret at the same time (this takes both hands) the string should be just barely above the rest of the frets.

Oh, and finally try to get one that stays in tune, as well. Nothing is more frustrating than re-tuning every few bars to retune. The way to check is to do some hard strumming for a few seconds and then recheck the tuning. New strings stretch a bit, so try to wear-in the strings for a few minutes if they are new.