If you have decided to change your guitar or want to start playing it but don’t know how orientate yourself in buying, in this article I will help you make the right choice. Whatever is your budget or level, I have learned through experience that there are some things to always keep in mind when buying a guitar!
The classical guitar is a plucked string musical instrument that has had a long development in history and in the last century. Nowadays, there are many types of guitar (acoustic, electric, folk, etc.), but the classical guitar is distinguished by its nylon strings and the way it is played.
The classical guitar consists of the body that amplifies the sound, the neck and the headstock with the tuning machines.
The body is divided into three parts: the back, the ribs and
the top.
In the top there is the hole that is fundamental for the production of sound, from where air enters and exits and therefore the sound! Yes, because the sound reaches our ears thanks to the movement of the air caused, in this case, by the oscillation of the strings.
The decoration around the sound hole is called a rosette and is constructed by luthiers using the fascinating mosaic technique.
The strings are tied in the bridge which has small holes for them to pass through and, at the other end, are wound and pulled by the tuning peg.
The head of the guitar has tuning pegs, which are used to tune the guitar: screwing the pegs (turning them clockwise) will increase the tension of the strings and produce a higher sound, turning them in the opposite direction will decrease the tension and lower the pitch of the sound.
In the neck of the guitar there is the fingerboard consisting of 12 frets plus another 7 or 8 on the top.
The classical guitar has 6 strings: 3 metal basses and 3 higher called “trebles” made of nylon or carbon. It is these two materials that give a darker and sweeter sound. Until about 100 years ago, only gut was used, but later, due to its fragility, first nylon was introduced and recently carbon and titanium.
The first step in choosing the right guitar is to decide on the type of wood for the top.
The two most commonly used woods for building guitars are spruce and cedar, others less common are redwood and larch.
Cedar and spruce give a very different timbre to the sound and therefore the choice must be careful. Let’s go straight into their characteristics:
Spruce guitars are characterized by a brilliant sound and allow a great deal of variation in timbre depending on the attack of the finger on the string and the position of the hand (“sul tasto” or “sul ponte”.
This sensitivity has as a disadvantage the fact that a good spruce will not forgive you anything: nails that are too long, with a wrong shape or an incorrect hand position will cause you a lot of frustration.
If you buy a new spruce guitar, you will have to be patient, as spruce begins to give off its splendid sound between its first and second year of life.
But beware! This doesn’t mean that the guitar will be louder or that its tonal defects will magically resolve themselves (unfortunately I hear these things too often), so be careful: the sound will mature over time, but a bad sound will remain bad.
I love spruce guitars because they have the authentic sound of the Spanish guitar, and they allow me to search and “dig” the sound of every single note.
The cedar is immediately distinguishable from spruce by its dark colour. Its sound is very sweet and warm and it performs best in the medium-low register.
Unlike spruce, cedar renders at the maximum of its capabilities from its first notes.
The sustain (duration of sound) of cedar guitars is often greater, which is why they are very good for chamber music, fearing less comparison with other instruments and performing in slightly larger venues. For example, they offer dense support when accompanying another instrument and emerge without problems in solo moments or when needed.
I suggest you make your choice according to your priorities and, above all, according to your playing style because, if you are not very interested in looking for different timbres and colors, a cedar guitar might be the right one.
However, in addition to the top wood, there are woods used for the back and sides, although the influence of these woods on the sound is much debated. Today, it is very fashionable to have guitars with rosewood sides and back (dark wood), but at one time it was very common to use maple (light wood).
When trying out an instrument, it happens that you immediately feel a sense of frustration and technical inability. Mind you, it’s not always your fault! There are components of the guitar that can objectively make playing much more difficult, let’s see what they are in order not to fall into dissatisfaction.
The neck varies in width, thickness and shape and the perfect choice should be made bearing in mind, above all, the size of your hands.
If you have small hands you might be more comfortable with a thin and fairly flat handle, on the contrary a thicker and more rounded handle favors those with large hands.
I recommend paying particular attention to the shape of the neck because the position of the thumb and consequently of the entire left hand depends on it.
A neck that is too round (1) often requires more force in the thumb in an unnatural position. This complicates, or sometimes makes impossible, the performance of somewhat more complex pieces for the left hand.
A neck that is too flat (3) does not allow the thumb good support and consequently also gives discomfort and instability to the fingers of the hand.
The middle way (2) is the one needed to have an efficient thumb, capable of applying the right force while giving the right support to the hand and fingers.
The fingerboard is where the fingers of the left hand go to press and vibrate the strings. In order not to have great difficulty doing this, it is necessary that the attack, that is the distance between the string and the wood, is not too much, otherwise a lot of force will have to be applied, which over time means pain and tendonitis in the worst cases.
However, a too low attack makes it difficult to play louder because the strings slam against the frets causing a terrible noise (sdeng!).
You have to look for the right compromise between the two.
A guitar will never sound as much as a piano, but it can come close if it has a sound rich in body and harmonics. What now seems certain is that if you reduce the size of the instrument, even by just 1 cm, you lose volume because there is less mass vibrating.
History bears witness to this: we have gone from the small romantic guitar with its very short sound to the Torres guitar model on which so many bindings techniques were then developed.
The length of guitars is defined by the diapason, which is the distance between the nut and the bridge. After various experiments, the standard today is 65 cm, which suits everyone.
If you are short, however, you might consider a guitar with a 64 cm diapason so that you can reach all parts of the fingerboard more comfortably.
Regarding the sustain (duration of the sound), we cannot make great pretensions, but we must take care to find a guitar in which every note of every string has a life that is not too short.
There is a right hand technique that helps to obtain a much louder sound but if the sound dies immediately, it will be very difficult to play legato, not to mention that, in a slow piece, it will only be in our imagination :)
Here we come to the most important part of this article because here you will understand what the most common problems in guitars are and, when you encounter them, you can choose not to take home a “defective” instrument with big problems.
To try out an instrument, I recommend playing pieces of different characters in order to test their reaction. For example, a piece to play to test the bass is Prelude No 1 by Villa Lobos. If you play it with your thumb resting on it and the string bangs, producing that ugly metallic noise (bzzz), it may be that the action is too low or worse, that the fingerboard is bent.
If you only need a little extra force to make the string strike, you’re better off looking for another guitar, because you would risk playing with too much limitation and would always be dissatisfied with your performance.
Be careful because the other strings can bang too! If you play a two octave scale slowly with a apoyando technique, you will realise this immediately!
Depending on how the top and fingerboard have been tuned, problems can sometimes arise: the wolf note (traitor note) is one of them.
To understand whether or not your guitar has the wolf note, just listen carefully to the first notes struck on the low E (sixth string) and if one of them has a blocked and very percussive sound (it goes off immediately) then you’ve found it! Usually it is between F and G#, but just listen and this note will have the same problem, a bit more muffled, in the other octaves too.
All guitars have the wolf note, but if in a guitar the difference with the other notes is too great, I would advise against buying it.
To test your fingerboard intonation, first make sure you tune your instrument perfectly with an electronic tuner. Then try playing a note and the note an octave above at the same time starting with the bass notes and going up to the last fret.
Often guitars start out out of tune around the 10th fret, but if you hear that the two notes are already out of tune around the 5th fret, it means that the fingerboard is not precise and the guitar will be impossible to tune.
All instruments are not perfect in terms of intonation, but if, for example, you have to record something and the instrument is too out of tune, I can assure you that the result will be somewhat unpleasant.
Then, it may be trivial but it is not: you have to check that the registers (low, medium and high) are fairly balanced and that one does not predominate over the other.
A final characteristic to consider is the amount of resonance a string generates. When you play a single note, you will feel that other strings also vibrate in sympathy and create resonances. These resonances are deceptive, in fact they may make your sound seem very loud and rich, but anyone listening from the outside will find it hard to distinguish the voices making the polyphony a mess.
In general, what I always recommend is to listen carefully to all the notes on each string (especially the firsts strings) paying attention to the attack of each of them. I say this because some guitars have notes that “shoot” abnormally, sounding more than others with the same force applied.
It is very important to avoid these types of defects because, without us realizing it, they change the way we play and making music becomes difficult and frustrating.
At the end of this article I have to confess that I don’t think there is a perfect guitar or one suitable for all occasions. The best thing is to be able to have several instruments with different characteristics and change them according to need, but unfortunately this is not always possible 😟
In this article I refer to the classical guitar with the traditional guitar model as a reference. But there is still much to be said about the characteristics of guitars and the construction, and luthiers are constantly experimenting with innovative construction methods. I will tell you about this in another, more detailed article.
Now that you know what to consider when choosing a guitar, I leave you with a free downloadable checklist that you can use when you go to try out a new instrument.
Good Luck! 😊
Roberta
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