New Cheap Guitars Versus Used Cheap Guitars

One question everyone looking for a cheap guitar asks themselves at some point is whether they should buy new or used. By and large I think it comes to a personal choice. There are pluses and minuses both ways I suppose. I’ve got to tell you though that I strongly prefer buying used and here are some of the reasons why:

A used guitar should prove more stable over time. By stable I mean the neck not changing, staying in tune, etc. The wood has a chance to age and becomes set wanting to stay in a certain position. (NOTE: For this reason if you buy a used guitar with a badly out of adjustment neck, you should make corrections slowly over time rather than making a huge change at once.)

A used guitar simply sounds better. Even a cheap used guitar. Something about the wood aging changes the tone. You can kind of predict what a new guitar will end up sounding like as a result of the woods used in it, but you’ll still have to wait a period of years for it to sound like its going to sound.

A used guitar will only increase in value. In general a well cared for instrument is a sought after commodity. Case in point: Old 60s Harmony and Silvertone guitars were regarded as crap instruments at the time. My original Silvertone probably got sold in a garage sale or maybe even ended up in the trash as much as it hurts me to say it. Yet  now if you look at eBay or craigslist, you’ll see these old cheap guitars can now often go for premium prices and not just as collector items either! I would love an old Harmony f hole acoustic now and cherish my Harmony Rocket electric as a player, not a museum quality piece. Now a new guitar will of course likely increase as well. But not immediately. You’ll have to weather a dip in its value initially before it begins to increase. (By the way, buying a used guitar during this initial dip period can be a shrewd financial move for obvious reasons.)

I like to think that used instruments in general have a soul. This certainly holds true for used cheap guitars. Every dent, scratch and cigarette burn tells a story. I like a guitar that’s “been there and done that.” Of course a new guitar will eventually have its own story. A new guitar’s story will be personalized to you and you alone. I guess I like the mystery of the used guitar as well.

Now to be sure there are down sides to used cheap guitars. One particularly annoying one is that the electronics tend to be funky, buzzing and crackling and so on. Another is that tuners on old cheap guitars tended to be crap while even today’s cheap guitars have decent tuners. Replacing tuners isn’t that big of a deal but you probably want to leave a used guitar intact in original condition if its that way when you get it.

So there you have my take on used guitars versus new guitars. Like I started out saying, it all comes down to personal preference. The differences aren’t that huge. But for me, give me the used cheap guitar every time.

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Tags: Arts, EBay, flaws, Guitar, Instruments, Music, Shopping, Silvertone, Stringed

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 8:28 am and is filed under purchasing cheap guitars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.