Acoustic Guitar: Looking, Buying, and Keeping

Preface

Sometime in 1995, a keyboard-playing friend of mine E-mailed me asking me for some help and advice in purchasing an acoustic guitar. Since we were separated by roughly 1400 miles, I couldn't just hop in the car and go with him to the stores, pawn shops, etc. He was asking questions about price range, styles, name brands.... "No problem," I thought to myself. "I'll just look up the information on the WWW and give him an URL or two to check out."

To my surprise, I found no such easy resource online (at that time). In an apologetic E-mail, I gave him a few pointers and ideas, but then said to myself, "You know, I detect a need here...." And that's how I started work on this project.

Now, approaching ten years later, I average over to 65 visitors/day, and still get emails from folks wanting similar information. Believe me, nobody is more surprised about this than I am!! But I'm delighted to be a resource for folks looking for information about a first instrument. It's an honor and a privilege to contribute my knowledge, and make it available online.


I will offer a caveat, though: I don't claim this as the be-all, end-all of acoustic guitar documents. Far from it. But I DO believe that it is a decent collection of ideas and information that I think a first-time guitar shopper would find useful. If you can tolerate my fairly conversational style of writing, then you should find this page of use.


Need Assessment

Acoustic Guitar Basics:

While you shop: trust your ears

Where do you buy?

Maintenance/Repair

Signal Processing/Recording


A Glossary of terms used on this site

Wisdom pertaining to guitar playing.


You are encouraged to send me some feedback on the construction and content this page. I fully intend to credit contributors to this page, and wouldn't mind meeting a few new people in the process of it all!


About the Primary Author

Mark A. Vassberg is a musical hobbyist who lives in Austin, TX (Buda, TX, actually, but nobody knows where Buda is). During the day he works for a modest computer company, and on weekends and special occasions, he gigs in and around Austin.

A number of readers and web surfers have generously
offered their input to improve the quality of this page,
and I would like to credit them here.
 
  
This page was originally designed using HTML Assistant, and seems
to display pretty well when viewed with either Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer.
It was designed by Mark A. Vassberg, who will be happy to hear any comments or
mechanical/content critiques you have of this page.