Here are what I believe to be the six most important things to consider when buying your first guitar.
Most beginning guitar students start with a steel-string acoustic guitar since it's so versatile. You can use it to play rock, blues, folk, country, jazz, and everything in between. Plus, you don't have to buy an amplifier and cables as you would if you purchased an electric guitar.
So the advice below is geared mostly to people who are considering purchasing this type of guitar. And I am assuming you are buying a new guitar. If you want to buy a used guitar, there are additional considerations you will want to be aware of to ensure the guitar is in good condition (see bottom of this article).
1. Brands
I find that most guitars these days are quite well made, even at the $300-$400 range. The two brands I recommend most often are Seagull, and Simon & Patrick, partly because they make quality guitars at decent prices, but also because they are Canadian companies, which is nice.
But there are many other brands that make quality guitars at reasonable prices. I have seen some very nice Yamaha guitars in that price range.
Music is so much more than just sound waves hitting our ear drums. We can literally feel music as sound waves pulse through the air and affect our bodies and influence our emotions.
What if you were deaf? Do you think that music would have no meaning to you any longer?
I have been a big fan of percussionist Evelyn Gennie ever since the day I saw the documentary about her titled "Touch the Sound." Her experience has inspired me to re-imagine what it means to listen to music and how we experience sound.
There is now a free online video of a talk Glennie gave at one of the TED events and it's well worth watching. In the video, Glennie teaches us how to listen again.
"What I have to do, as a musician," she says, "is do everything that is not [written down] in the music." The difference is between simply playing the music as it's written on the page, and "interpreting" the music, adding to the performance "the things that you notice when you are not actually at your instrument." I think the "things that you notice" could be anything about the world, yourself, your feelings, your identity, etc, etc.
The moments of our lives are increasingly PhotoShop-ped, auto-tuned, plasticized, genetically modified, and quality-controlled to the point they are not real any more. And it's especially sad to me that it has become so difficult for others to experience real music today.
I want to applaud Vancouver Symphony Orchestra conductor Bramwell Tovey for refusing to record music for the Olympics' opening ceremonies -- not that he's against the Olympics -- it's because Vanoc plans to use that recording in the opening ceremonies and have a smaller orchestra pretend to play the music that the VSO records.
Not only that, but they were going to get some other person to pretend to conduct the musicians that Tovey would have conducted for the recording. How insulting!
"My participation at the opening ceremonies was dependent upon my agreeing that music I recorded would be mimed by another individual and I regarded that as fraudulent and withdrew," Tovey told The Vancouver Sun.
I found a very interesting video on YouTube that serves as a very quick analysis of Philip Glass' music. The guy in the video is cheeky and a bit of a clown, but it's very interesting to learn about these core ideas that appear in so much of Glass' music.
Now I want to try playing some of this on the guitar.
Some of the comments on the YouTube page are a bit nasty. Some hardcore Glass fans are offended by the video's flippant attitude about the supposed "simplicity" of Glass' music. But simplicity is not a failing. Just listen to the music. There is great beauty there.
