If you are on a budget and want to teach yourself guitar, you will be equipped to make a good purchase after reading this article.
There are some differences in acoustic guitars that you will want to take into consideration. There are nylon string and steel stringed guitars. There are also 12 string guitars (the standard guitar has 6 strings). You will probably want to rule out the 12 string when looking for a cheap acoustic guitar. They are a breed unto themselves, not typically inexpensive, and not the best to learn on.
Your basic choice is between nylon and steel stringed guitars. The nylon string has a softer sound and is used predominately in Latin, Flamenco, and some jazz music, though it does show up in other varieties of music as well.
The steel stringed guitar is the most commonly used acoustic guitar. The sound you are probably used to hearing from a guitar is produced by this guitar. A steel string guitar will be more painful to learn to play at first. The steel strings are just harder on your fingers than the nylon strings. (It will hurt at first learning on either kind of guitar, but it doesn’t hurt once you have developed calluses on the tips of your fingers.)
Once you have decided between nylon or steel strings, there are some common things to look at on every guitar. Make sure the neck is straight. Get your eye up close where the neck meets the body and look down the neck to see if it is straight or not. Do this from a few different angles. If the neck is crooked, don’t buy the guitar, it will be nothing but trouble.
Next, sit with the guitar on your lap like you are going to play it. If you can’t sit down for some reason, hold the guitar like you would play it, the point is to look down and see how close the strings are to the neck, so you’re looking at the side of the neck.
Starting at the head, where the tuning pegs are, the strings should be very close to the neck, and the gap will widen a little as you follow the neck to where it connects with the body. This gap should not widen too much and it should not continue to grow. The gap should be about 3-4mm, 5mm at the most, where the neck meets the body.
Push down on the strings. You are testing the “action” of the guitar. A guitar with higher action will be harder to play, harder to push down the strings and get a good sound. A guitar with lower action will be easier to play. Action is something that can be adjusted, but not if the guitar itself is too poor of quality.
The last, but most important thing to check on the guitar is the tuning. Everything mentioned so far has an impact on the tuning, but there are other not so obvious things that can create tuning problems, and a guitar that won’t tune or can’t stay in tune is not the guitar for you.
A guitar can be tuned with a tuner, but when you play a chord sound out of tune. If this happens, it indicates a problem with the guitar and you should not consider buying it. You will want to know how to tune a guitar by ear and play at least one chord, or know someone who can, to be able to accurately check the tuning of the guitar you are considering for purchase. Most times the person selling the guitar should be able to tune it and know some chords. You might have them play it so you can hear it. But sometimes the seller does not play guitar.
One time I was helping a friend get a guitar for her child. She had found an ad on Craigslist for a guitar and asked me to go with her to look at it. The guy selling the guitar was selling several other guitars as well, and he didn’t know how to play. He was importing cheap, poorly made guitars and selling them cheap on Craigslist.
He would use a tuner to make sure he could tune the guitars, but as soon as I picked up one of them I knew immediately it would never be a good guitar for my friends kid. The first chord I played sounded awful, so I started to tune the guitar. It proved to be a challenge, so the guy gave me the tuner he was using. I “tuned” the guitar with the tuner, but as soon as I played a chord it still sounded awful. This indicated the guitar was fatally flawed.
The moral is, the better educated you are before you make your purchase, the more enabled you are to make the best purchase you can on an inexpensive guitar.
If you can’t learn to tune and play a chord before you buy a guitar, have someone you know can play go with you. If you can’t do either of these, then when you’re looking at the guitar ask the seller to tune it and play it for you. If the seller cannot do this, and you cannot do it or have a friend do it, then don’t buy that guitar. Move on to the next seller. Trust me, you would rather not buy in that case, and wait if you have to, so that you can be sure you’re getting the best cheap acoustic guitar you can.