When first learning to play guitar, one of the biggest decisions that people face is whether they want to start learning with an electric guitar or an acoustic guitar. Both have distinct characteristics and sounds, and favor certain styles and genres of music over the other. So how should one go about making this choice between electric and acoustic? For some it might be obvious, but for others, there are some major factors that should be considered that we will explore. Let’s start with electric guitars.
Electric guitars are used largely for rock music, and unlike acoustic guitars are very forgiving. This can be both a good and a bad thing. What I mean by forgiving, is you can strum a chord slightly wrong, but with the distortion and other effects that can be achieved with electric guitars, it will be almost unnoticeable. This is good since your playing will sound that much better, but bad in that it will make it difficult for you to improve on your technical skills as a guitar player. What you can’t hear, you can’t fix. One of really great things about electric guitars that I just mentioned however is the ability to add distortion, or other effects to your playing. This allows for a large number of different sounds, which can be really fun to play with. If you want to rock out, you will probably want an electric guitar.
Acoustic guitars are used in a number of different types of music, and can be very versatile in their own right. Acoustic guitars are often used for blues, jazz, country, and even occasionally some rock. It’s just a matter of how you play it. Acoustic guitars have a much purer sound, forcing you to play notes and chords cleanly, thus improving on your technical playing ability. Once you begin to learn more chords and become more proficient at picking and strumming, you can begin to experiment with how they sound. Do you strum them hard, or softly, or strum a couple of times, pick some notes, then strum a couple more. The key aspect of acoustic guitars to remember is that the notes ring clear, making it not only great sounding, but great for learning on.
There is a third choice you could look into, and that is getting an electric/acoustic guitar. This is an acoustic guitar with a build in pick-up for plugging into a guitar amp. I have personally not used one, but they are worth looking into if you are not sure which guitar type you want. The benefit of getting an electric/acoustic guitar is that you can switch it up to play any genre of music. I believe that the quality of sound is not as good as a normal acoustic or normal electric guitar, so you may sacrifice sound quality for versatility. Most guitarists end up learning on an acoustic guitar, then moving on to an electric guitar if they want to play some rock. In my opinion, this is the smartest way to learn, but if you just wanna rock, then you know what to do.
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