Things to check when buying a new guitar
Whether you are buying your first guitar or your twentieth, there are a few things you should always check before you buy a guitar. We will almost always see a guitar before we hear it, which means the aesthetic impact of the instrument can often dominate our decisions without us even realising it. Here are a few other things to check on a guitar before you buy it:
Play without the amp
When you first play the guitar, play it unplugged.. or if the shop assistant plugs you into an amp straight away, just turn the volume knob all the way down, so that all you can hear is the acoustic sound of the guitar. Play some chords, some rhythms, and some lead work. Listen to hear what the unamplified tone of the guitar is.. is it resonant and balanced, or muddy, or harsh? Does it put a smile on your face? It’s important to listen to the guitar’s natural tone first, because the electric elements that contribute to a guitar sound can be easily altered, but the basic sound of the strings on the wood will be as they are.
Check the frets
Play the guitar in all the different positions on the neck, across all the strings.. play some bends, play hard and play soft. You want to check for “fretting out”, where the string hits the next upper fret and sounds the wrong note, and “dead spots” where the note has a very quick decay with very little sustain. You also want to check that the frets are just nice to play all the way up and down the neck.
Check for comfort
A great sounding, great playing guitar can still be hard to enjoy if you find it awkward to play for any length of time. If you’re going to be playing the guitar in any sort of band situation, remember to try using it standing up.. as standing up is how you will be playing it much of the time, particularly if it’s an electric guitar.
Intonation
Guitar intonation is a difficult topic to explain quickly. But it’s very easy to check it.. just tune each string to pitch, and then play each string at the twelfth fret to check that it’s in tune. On an electric guitar, the intonation can usually be easily fixed by adjusting the saddles, though it might cost money to get it done if you don’t know how to do it yourself. Apart from avoiding hassle or expense, it’s good to check intonation because it can be a good indication of the level of care that the seller has for the instrument you are thinking of buying.
The x factor
These are a few things you can look at, but ultimately a musical instrument is not a piece of scientific apparatus but a device for communicating music. Different people will all use a guitar slightly differently, and will respond to them differently because they want to use them to communicate different things. This makes it impossible to provide a comprehensive checklist for what to look for in a guitar. This is where the x factor of an instrument comes in.. how it makes you feel to play it. This is ultimately going to be the most important consideration, and rightly so – it’s hard to think of anything more important in a guitar than how much you are going to enjoy playing it.
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