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Top 10 rating according to KP
1. SQUIER SA-150
Guitar for beginners from the subsidiary budget brand of the legendary Fender company. The tool is great for practice. The guitar looks neat and “expensive” while being full size and quite comfortable. You should not expect a thoroughbred sound – the guitar is made of laminate, but learning on it is the very thing.
Advantages and disadvantages
2. Yamaha F310
This guitar is the market leader among budget instruments, it is unrivaled in its price category, it is famous for its proven quality and reliability. Thanks to her, we learned that there is such a tree species as “meranti”. This tree is almost never found in guitar building, but is valued by masters for its stability and ease of processing. In the case of a musical instrument, this ensures quality and low cost in production. The top is made of spruce, which is good. The guitar sounds not perfect, but quite good. The sound is bright, with an advantage in favor of high frequencies.
Advantages and disadvantages
3. Greg Bennett D1
Greg Bennett is an American luthier (guitar maker) who designed a line of guitars with an unconventional design for the Korean firm Samick. For production, good components and fairly high-quality wood were used. The guitars turned out to be very curious, they sounded very good, but they did not gain popularity, because the musicians are a very conservative people, greedy for big names and careful with design experiments. All parts of the body are made of nato (a type of mahogany), and the fretboard is made of rosewood. As a result, the sound is rich and balanced.
Advantages and disadvantages
4. Fender CD60
Also a very popular guitar, time-tested. It is available in several versions: standard dreadnought, dreadnought with a cutout for easier access to the neck, and also in electro-acoustic format. Made from traditional “guitar” woods: top – spruce; shell (side of the body), lower soundboard and neck – mahogany, fretboard – walnut. Sounds good, comfortable enough, what else do you need for comfortable playing music?
Advantages and disadvantages
5. Yamaha FG800M
At one time, it was with the FG series that the Yamaha brand broke into the acoustic guitar market. It was in 1966, an inexpensive instrument of amazing quality quickly gained recognition among musicians, and so far the company has managed to keep up the bar and produce excellent inexpensive guitars. This model is no exception, it is an excellent comfortable guitar with a rich and thoroughbred sound. Available in two versions: FG800 and FG800M. They are the same price, the difference lies in the size of the body, the “M” version has a slightly smaller one, but the sound is not affected by this, it’s just that such a guitar may be more convenient in some cases.
Advantages and disadvantages
6. Crafter MD-60/AM
Crafter is one of those manufacturers whose products you can buy almost without hesitation, they are always well made, comfortable and sound. Guitars are made in Korea, so they don’t have super-budget models. What is the advantage of this particular guitar? Just look how beautiful she is! The top is made from brindle maple. A symmetrical pattern is obtained using a radial cut – this is when a piece of wood is sawn lengthwise and then unfolds like a book.
Advantages and disadvantages
7. Taylor BBT
The youngest model in the line of one of the coolest manufacturers of acoustic guitars. Owning a Taylor is like owning a Rolls-Royce. What’s the point in talking about it? If you have money, take it. Top – spruce, body – sapele (a kind of mahogany), neck – sapele, fretboard – ebony (it’s a thrill!), The sound is trembling in the knees. The guitar has a slightly reduced body (15/16), hence the name, which stands for “Big Baby Taylor” – “Big Little Taylor”.
Advantages and disadvantages
8. CREATE GLA T118D
LAG is a highly visible and technologically advanced French guitar manufacturer. It is interesting primarily because instead of the traditional rosewood and ebony, it uses artificial analogues in its production called brownwood and blackwood, respectively. This is explained by the fact that the rare hardwoods used in the manufacture of guitars need to be protected and preserved. For the production of an analogue, coniferous wood is used, which is chemically treated, all components are of natural origin, the sensations when playing are interesting, it is rather difficult to guess about the substitution. The unusual appearance of the guitars will also leave few people indifferent.
Advantages and disadvantages
9. Crafter D-6/N
Another versatile option. There is nothing bad to say about this guitar. Crafter are very careful about the quality of their tools. The top deck is solid spruce, the body and neck are mahogany, the fretboard is rosewood. Classic. Also available in electro-acoustic format called DE-6/N.
Advantages and disadvantages
10. Takamine GD93 NAT
An excellent model from a well-known Japanese manufacturer specializing only in acoustic guitars. This guitar looks very interesting – this is the case when traditional musical woods were applied in an unusual way. The top deck is made from spruce. But the sides and back are made of walnut and maple – the materials look great and contrast with each other. The neck is made of mahogany – also nothing surprising, but the fretboard and bridge (stand) are made of terminalia (aka korina, aka limba) – a tree, although rarely used, but very much appreciated in guitar building. Also available in electro-acoustic format under the name GD93CE.
Advantages and disadvantages
How to choose an acoustic guitar
Budget
The cost of a guitar will largely determine all consumer qualities of the instrument. The conditional price range for those that are suitable for both beginners and practicing guitarists is approximately from 10 to 40 thousand rubles. It’s hard to imagine what and how a guitar cheaper than $100 will be made of. At the same time, an instrument costing $500-600 is already suitable for concert and studio work and will be able to serve a musician with proper care for an unlimited amount of time.
Brand name
The number of guitar brands on the market is amazing, getting lost in them is easy. The most practical advice in this case is to rely on well-known popular firms that have been on the market for many years. And even listing them would take a lot of time, just do not be too lazy to make inquiries. Taylor, Martin, Ovation and Gibson make the best acoustic guitars of 2021, but they are also very expensive.
Country of Origin
About ten years ago, I would say that in no case should you take Chinese, Indonesian and other guitars made in Asian countries, except for Japanese and Korean ones, but over time the situation has changed a lot. Many American, European and Japanese brands have long moved their production there, and if earlier the quality situation there was very unstable, now it has improved for the better. It is practically no longer important WHERE the tool is made, it is important by WHO, that is, under whose leadership and according to what specifications. But the best at it, of course, are still the Americans and the Japanese. You can call it “guitar traditions” – whoever got down to business earlier and accumulated more experience makes the coolest acoustic guitars.
What are the best acoustic guitars made of?
There is no the most correct guitar wood species, just as there are no two identical trees. Therefore, two identical guitars made from the same material can end up sounding different. There are the most popular and proven species: mahogany (mahogany), spruce, maple, linden, ash, rosewood and walnut. In inexpensive Asian-made guitars, they like to use less valuable woods that are relatives of the above, and grow somewhere nearby. For example, sapele and nato are varieties of mahogany, while agatis belongs to pine. All breeds will sound different. They like to make the top body of spruce – it resonates beautifully, is very light and elastic, but at the same time quite fragile, so the rest of the body is often made of mahogany – a denser wood with a uniform structure, it gives an excellent rich sound, lends itself well to processing and is durable. The fingerboard most commonly used is rosewood, which is very pleasant to the touch, very hard and resistant to wear. Sometimes similar breeds are used for the lining: ebony (ebony), pao ferro, etc. I once had a guitar with a bubinga body – a stunningly beautiful breed!
Laminate is often used to produce the cheapest guitars. Do not be afraid, this is not what they lay on the floor when renovating an apartment! This is just a tree thermally treated with polymeric materials. It is worth mentioning right away that the application of any material to wood reduces its acoustic resonator properties. But on the other hand, it is much easier to process, more durable and more resistant to external influences.
Build quality
So, you have saved up enough money, read a lot of biographies of the best guitar companies, made inquiries about where, how and what your potential future guitar was made of, go to the store, and the most important and crucial moment comes – you need to check the instrument. Where to begin? From visual inspection. Turn the guitar in your hands and inspect it as a whole: is the varnish lying well everywhere, is the wood even, inspect the glue seams – they should all be even, without sticking out excess glue and scuffs, check how the tuning mechanisms work, look inside – there should not be mess. Take the guitar like a gun, put your head on the top, and aim the neck at the seller, looking along the frets, you can see how straight the neck is, it should not twist to the side or go hilly. If you don’t have any complaints, then try to play it (if you don’t know how to play, just strum), evaluate how comfortable it is for you, how your hands slide along the fretboard, the metal frets should not cling and scratch your fingers, feel with your stomach how the guitar vibrates.
What are the best acoustic guitars
There are many varieties of acoustic guitars. They differ in design, body shape, size and equipment. In fact, this is a colossal topic that you can dig endlessly, so let’s first define the terminology. In the modern conventional sense, an acoustic guitar is a western-style guitar with steel strings, a narrowed neck with a truss rod inside and a body shape that is familiar to us, which is called a “dreadnought”. We are considering them here.
There are other types of guitars, such as the classical one. It is distinguished by nylon strings, a wider neck, different peg mechanics, different playing principles and techniques. The result is a different sound. Likewise, besides the dreadnoughts, there are other hull shapes, such as the jumbo, which are bigger, more intricate, and sound louder. There are electro-acoustic guitars, semi-acoustic, “dobro” (with the accent on the first syllable), “resonators”, etc. But let’s talk about all this another time.