How To Buy Your First Guitar
By Fred Peters

Do you want to buy your first guitar? Buying your first guitar is an awesome experience. No instrument is cooler to play than the guitar. The guitarist is always the star of the bank. And let's face it, chicks dig them.

It is important to know how much money you can afford to spend before you start looking for a guitar. If you go to a local guitar store without a clear budget in mind, you will continue to pull the more expensive ones off the shelf. But, for a beginning guitar player, you don't need a really expensive one. You can probably get a good first guitar for around $300 to $500. Online you can also find some great deals on used beginner guitars.

Guitars have a beautiful sound and are a lot easier to learn how to play than most think possible. However, before you go out to buy one you need to know these tricks and tips to make sure you are getting the best guitar for your money. Online guitar stores are a great place to find the best guitars at the lowest prices. However, before buying a guitar online, I think that you should visit your local guitar shop so that you can look at the guitars in person and up close. You will want to see how the guitar feels in you hands, how it looks, and how it sounds. Take the guitar off the wall, plug it into an amp, grab a pick and start strumming. You should also look at buying an acoustic guitar. This is the best way to find out what guitar is the right one for you.

If you are having trouble narrowing down the guitar you want to buy, here are some good recommendations. For acoustic guitars, I love Takamine guitars, Martin guitars, Ovation guitars and epiphone guitars. For electric guitars, I would check out Ibanez guitars, Fender guitars and Gibson guitars.

Once you have found the guitar that you want to buy, check out the online stores to see if you can find one at the best price. I cannot stress enough the power of online stores. The prices are almost always lower.

Remember to look at some online guitar stores to find great prices on beginner guitars. Check out Music-Sale Online. They have great prices and a great selection of cheap acoustic guitars. You will not go wrong with Music-Sale Online. It is an online superstore for guitars.
Here is a great site for Takamine acoustic electric guitars and Ibanez acoustic electric guitars. You will love the selection of beginner guitars, both new and used.
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Guitars - One For Each Style
By Michael Russell

Guitar players cover a number of styles of music, from blues to jazz to rock to pop to speed metal and on and on. And since every style of music is different and every guitar is different, it would then seem a natural conclusion that each style of music is going to have a guitar that is more suited for that style. So, the question, for those who are considering taking up the guitar and getting their first one is, what guitar do you get? If you're interested in jazz do you get the same kind of guitar as somebody who wants to play speed metal? Well, it might be an interesting experiment, but most likely the answer would be, no. So, what guitar should each person get, depending on what kind of music they want to play? Hopefully this article will try to answer that question.

Music is very diverse to say the least. Even within each style there are variations. For example, in rock there is hard rock, soft rock, metal, acid and a host of other sub categories. The sounds and more specifically, the dynamics of each are quite different. While The Eagles and the Allman Brothers might both be considered country or southern rock, depending on which side of the fence you're on, their sounds are quite different. So without nitpicking we're going to take the broad approach over the specific.

If you're going to play music that is relatively soft such as folk music, you probably don't want to get yourself a Rickenbacker electric guitar. Most likely you'll want an acoustic guitar with a nice mellow and round tone. Why acoustic? Well, by the nature of the guitar itself it's a lot softer. Sure, you can turn down an electric guitar's volume but it's more than just that. Acoustic guitars are much easier to control dynamics on. The reason is because the sound is not artificially amplified. If you pluck the string softly you're going to get a soft tone. If you pluck it harder, you'll get a louder tone. Of course an acoustic guitar is never going to get up to the volume of an electric unless you mic it.

On the other side of the spectrum, if you're going to be playing in a heavy metal band, your acoustic guitar, with all the other instruments playing, such as keyboards, bass and drums, won't even be heard. Plus the tone quality of the guitar itself just won't fit into that kind of music. By their nature, electric guitars have a sharper and harder sound. Add distortion effects to them, which are hard to do with acoustics and you've got a sound that is quite unique. That's why there are so many different electric guitar sounds.

Obviously, this is a very general overview of style to guitar choice. You can get a lot more specific, such as what type of acoustic do you get if you're a country guitar player as opposed to somebody who plays jazz? John Denver based on lot of his patented sound on 12 string guitars while Harry Chapin stayed more with the traditional 6 strong acoustic.

Maybe for a future article we'll dive more deeply into the finer points of picking a guitar based on the style of music you play.

Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Guitars
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Electric Guitar Amplification - What it Really Is
By Victor Epand

An acoustic guitar is so named because the hollow design of its body provides a natural means by which the acoustics can be optimized, so that the sound of the guitar is naturally amplified, and therefore needs no exterior or additional means of amplifying the sound. Electric guitars are quite different, and without an external, electrical amplifier, strumming or picking the strings will make almost no sound at all, and certainly nothing much more impressive than pinging a rubber band! It is for this reason that electric guitars do use external amplification, but there is a common misconception or misunderstanding as to what exactly the external amplification does.

Many people believe, quite wrongly in fact, that the external electric amplification of an electric guitar simply makes the sound of the string much louder. If you switch off the amplifier, you'll notice that simply making the resulting sound louder would be a pitiful quality of note, and despite its name, the amplifier does not simply make the sound produced by the string louder.

It is actually not the sound that the string makes which is detected, but its movement. An electric guitar is so named because effectively, each of its strings is a wire in an electric circuit, and it is by strumming or picking these wires or strings that movement is created. The harder the string is plucked, the greater its movement, and it is this movement or resonating that is detected.

The part of an electric guitar which detects this movement is called the pickup, which are basically magnets wrapped tightly round with very fine wire. As any electrician will tell you, a magnet wrapped round with coils of wire is an electric generator waiting to happen, and the vibrating movement of the string next to this mini generator is enough to create an electric current. This electric current is sent as a signal to the amplifier, and it is at this point that the tone, voice, sound, colour, and any distortion effects, are generated, and of course, the volume boosted.

Of course, many factors affect the eventual sound of the note, in addition to simply how hard the string is plucked. The thickness and manufacture of the string, how close it is to the body, the body's shape and design, the type of pickup, the number of pickups, to name just a few. Once the signal reaches the amplifier, all manner of different effects and distortions are possible to create an individual voice for the instrument.

Because the strings of a guitar are close together, and the pickups use magnetic vibrations, there is a natural tendency for these magnetic pickups to detect and pickup electromagnetic signals from other nearby sources - anything from nearby microphones, to other electric equipment in the area - even lighting. This extra noise is generally not overly distracting, but does tend to create a kind of background hum. Single coil pickups tend to create the most amount of background hum, and the fact that most electric guitars tend to be incorrectly shielded against any interference of this kind, this can be quite unwanted.

A solution to this hum was the development of a pickup which was created slightly differently to the normal ones. Instead of a single coil of wire wrapped round the magnets, two coils were used, but each wired to the opposite polarity, both electrically and magnetically. This meant that any electromagnetic noise that was detected by both if these coils was effectively cancelled out - like adding minus five and positive five, the answer is zero. This also had the added effect of creating a much fatter sound to the guitar too. Because these pickups were designed to cancel out the hum, they were named humbuckers, and are still extremely popular today.

Victor Epand is an expert consultant for guitars, drums, keyboards, sheet music, guitar tab, and home theater audio. You can find the best marketplace at these sites for single coil electric guitars, double coil electric guitars and Humbuckers, sheet music, guitar tab.
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