So you have finally decided to take the plunge and start learning guitar, or maybe you are buying for someone who wants to. Whatever it is, to prepare for a lifelong journey of creative fulfillment, you will need one of the best acoustic guitars for beginners. The perfect starting point for those first chords and riffs, an acoustic guitar will set you up for success, providing the springboard to launch your guitar-playing career.
The traditional starting point for learning the instrument, countless players have honed their chops playing an acoustic. An acoustic guitar is actually a little harder to get started with than an electric, but this tougher foundation builds hand and finger strength, resulting in an excellent base to develop further. Once over the initial hurdle of learning those first few chords, the growth of ability will be exponential.
When we started learning, our only choice was a full-sized dreadnought, but nowadays, there’s a huge amount of choice in the beginning market. If you are buying for the first time and have some questions, make sure to check out our buying advice section which features a comprehensive breakdown of beginner acoustics.
How to test your Guitar:
Acoustic guitars are some of the most subjective instruments out there. Every player has their own set of preferences that they look for in an acoustic guitar – but there are a few key criteria every beginner acoustic player should meet before we recommend it to our readers.
It is crucially important that a beginner acoustic guitar is built well, so the first thing we look at is the overall build quality of the instrument. We need to make sure any acoustic guitar we recommend is sturdy and reliable, and won’t let you down. We make sure it is all put together properly, and that the moving parts move, and the parts that aren’t meant to move, don’t.
We then check the setup, and level of finish of the guitar. We look at the action (the vertical distance between the strings and the fingerboard), and also the fretwork – making sure there are no dead spots or sharp fret ends. Beginner acoustic guitars, being on the cheaper end of the scale, can sometimes suffer from less thorough quality control checks from the manufacturer, so we like to make sure that everything is as it should be.
We then test the playability and sound. We check how comfortable the neck and body are, how the neck profile feels in our hand and how the fingerboard radius feels when playing. We will play a variation of different styles including chord strumming and fingerpicking to come to our conclusions.