Cheap Guitars
Good day everyone. Welcome back to the Beginner Guitar Lessons blog. Do you plan to purchase a guitar but you are on tight budget? If you want to give cheap guitars a try I have something to share.
Budget guitars don’t always mean low quality. I have 3 non-branded acoustic guitars and am quite happy with them; the first one has been 24 years in my possession. They don’t appear as good as the branded ones but they are easy to play. Find how I selected them below:
- The guitar necks should be straight. Best if they are equipped with trust rods.
- All tuning pegs should be in good working condition. You don’t want to re tune your guitar repeatedly.
- Cheap guitars may sacrifice precision. I always check every fret to make sure there is no out of tune tones.
- I can take guitars with hard playability due to high action setting. Some budget guitars have quite a big gap between the strings and the necks. This setting makes them hard to play; they sore my fingers especially when I play bar chords. To overcome this I just remove the plastic saddle on the guitar bridge and file it. The common setting is 3mm on the thickest string and 2mm on the first string. This measurement is taken from the top of 12th fret to the bottom of the strings.
- High action is a related to the nut’s groove as well. If the groove is too shallow it will increase the gap between the strings and the neck. Don’t file too much here. If you go down too deep you can create unnecessary buzzes.
- Since we are talking about cheap guitars here I don’t really take appearance into my consideration: I can take minor dents, scratches as long as they don’t affect the guitar structure.
- Try a set of electric guitar strings. I started the strings with 0.009”. Although the sound created is not as loud as the acoustic guitar strings sound but it improves the playability.
- My other guitar has E 0.009″ electric guitar string on string #1, followed by another E string of the acoustic guitar strings (0.010″) on the second string. Since this E is tuned to B the tension is easy to handle and I can bend the string easily here. The third string is B acoustic string tuned to G note. Again the tension is reduced greatly. The other strings are ordinary D, A & E acoustic guitar strings. Bottom line is you can make experiment with your guitars to improve the playability.
Have fun with your cheap guitars!
-TJ-
Beginner Guitar Lessons Admin
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