Instrument Tips - Page 3

quote FortePenance

Here's a dandy little acronym I got off my friend, to help you memorize the tuning for the guitar.

Every
Awesome
Dude
Goes
Back
Early

1. How resonant is the wood? The easiest way to test this is use one hand to strum hard on the strings and then use your other hand to hold onto the headstock. If you're recieving a lot of vibrations from the headstock then your wood is very resonant and thus it makes a better guitar (tonality wise). Naturally resonance is more important in acoustic guitars but however it can also make a huge difference to the sound of an electric. Neck thru guitars usually have the most resonance since the gap between body and neck is jointless.
   
   
2. The weight of the wood. This is simple. Is the wood too heavy?
   
   
3. The feel of the wood. Naturally you don't want a guitar with splinters all over the place so a good way to check the whole guitar's feel is to simply molest it up. Touch every crevice to ensure that there isn't a single spot on the guitar which feels bad.
   
   
4. The hardness of the wood. If your wood is really hard then well, that's good I suppose. But if your wood is soft and porous then it picks up dents more easily. Mostly the hardness of the wood comes into the equation when you're testing the fingerboard. Some people prefer a softer fingerboard (rosewood) or a harder fingerboard (maple or ebony).
   
   
5. Appearance. If your wood looks like shit then why buy it? Of course if it's finished it's a bit harder to tell. =P
   
   
6. Sound and tone. Does your wood give off a nice bassy tone? Or does it screech altos? Is the tone warm and fat or attacky and violent? Sound is very important in wood and naturally you should care a lot for it. Of course if you're playing an electric it's a bit harder to tell with the pickups and all.
   
   
7. And finally the sustain. Of course there are many factors that apply for sustain but wood is one of the big ones along with neck construction and the pickups. As a genral rule of speaking, the harder, brighter and heavier your wood is, the longer sustain it generally tends to have. Some people prefer a bass sound however so they opt to have a bassy wood (i.e mahogany) underneath with a bright and hard wood on top (i.e maple). Gibson Les Pauls are an example of this.

quote Abused Child

4) I'm in the store...what now? - Tell the person in their your max price[i] and tell them to work with ya with it. If its under 100...go and cry because you wont get anything good under that.
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I'll have the next four for you tomorrow.

That's something you DON'T do. The people who work there are sharks, if you tell them your max price they'll never go below that. they don't care if you spend 500 million as long as they're making money. Never tell them how much money you have, most of the time they have the guitars over priced, act like you don't have much and ask for a deal too, like lets say you bought a case and an amp. You should at least get 100-200 dollars off because you just bought the guy his own guitar.

But the best thing to do is search the internet for the lowest price

quote Sphinx

I got almost £100 (200$) off the list price of my guitar without even trying to haggle that much. The main thing that helped was that I had been in the store a few weeks back, tried out the Hamer and loved it, told the guy I would come back with my brother. When I went back with my brother a few weeks later I went to the same sales guy and he remembered me so gave me a discount.

Having my older brother there helped as well as he's played guitar for 15 years so knows what he's talking about and was pretty level with the guy and asked blankly what extras he could chuck in free. Got free strings, as well as getting money off of not only the guitar, but also the gigbag and the amp.

Easy peasy. I would definately recommend if you're younger and starting out going guitar shopping with someone who knows their stuff. It just gives you that extra bit of confidence that what you are buying is good, and any 'sharks' are less likely to rip you off if there's someone else with you.

quote sten mk II

That's something you DON'T do. The people who work there are sharks, if you tell them your max price they'll never go below that. they don't care if you spend 500 million as long as they're making money. Never tell them how much money you have, most of the time they have the guitars over priced, act like you don't have much and ask for a deal too, like lets say you bought a case and an amp. You should at least get 100-200 dollars off because you just bought the guy his own guitar.

But the best thing to do is search the internet for the lowest price

quote Absolution91

They usually contain the best sorta' advice you can get .