Is a $200 guitar any good?
In this video, I put a cheap $200 acoustic guitar head-to-head with my personal acoustic guitar, which I paid $1,600 for over 10-years ago.
There are legitimate reasons why you might choose to spend more when you’re shopping for a new guitar. A more expensive guitar will likely have better finishing. It should sound better, have good volume, and be more responsive dynamically. But most importantly, it will have received far greater attention to detail while it was being made. This will allow it to be set up more effectively, which will ultimately result in it feeling nicer to play.
In the video, we discover that, although the $200 guitar is still great value for money, it can’t be set up to play anywhere near as nicely as the $1,600 guitar without the help of a professional luthier.
At that point, you have to start asking yourself if it would be more cost-effective to just buy a more expensive guitar.
A guitarist who has learned all the notes on the fretboard: Can more effectively learn scales and chords; Has a better understanding of keys, intervals, and scale degrees; Is able to more easily memorise songs; Has a greater capacity to understand music theory; Is more effectively able to develop their aural skills; Gets ‘lost’ far less frequently when they are improvising on the guitar.