Before getting an electric guitar...

my advice would be to go with your parents' advice and get the acoustic first. It's the best schooling you can get and you won't annoy anybody too much in the first months when your technique will... ummmm... suck royally.

An electric won't hurt your fingers but it isn't the best place to start. it's  more expensive to equip yourself (axe, amp etc) and it will sound awful at first.

Learning to play acoustic, with a wider neck, heavier strings and more difficult fretting technique than an electric will stretch your fingers, give you good strength and flexibility.

I first learned on a £50 acoustic that had a neck that seemed to be as wide as a telegraph pole but I mastered that and when I moved to electric with a flat neck and 9 gauge strings everything just seemed so simple and easy.

Also the best advice I can give is walk before you run. Some of the music you like is extremely complicated and imagining that you're going to crank out Magnum Opus in a couple of months is over-ambitious.

Your best bet is to buy your acoustic and at the same time nab yourself a songbook (with chord windows) of some simple enough songs but ones you like. Try some Beatles, Bowie, whatever. If nothing else these will teach you the fundamental of song construction, after all these guys were masters of the art of songwriting.

Also ther's millions of great solely acosutic songs out there, from Zep to Yes to Rush to Genesis to whoever... ti's not a limiting instrument. And open tunings will expand your horizons even further.

At the end of the day it's practice that will get you there. Don't get donwhearted when you find yourself with blistered fingers and no discernible improvement after a month. It takes time and effort.

But it is the most rewarding and enjoyable thing you will ever teach yourself. And you can only get better at it.

I've been playing for nearly 20 years and I still learn new things every day and it still thrills me and soothes me in equal measure as much as it did the very first day I ever picked the thing up.

It's an astonishing, always fascinating instrument and it will enrich your life.

Plus, if you're good, it'll get you girls.

isn't that the reason we all started to play?

 

I have never owned a good acoustic guitar, but I've had a lot of cheap ones

My first was a student-size Fender (about $150, but that was almost 20 years ago!) that played great from day one but sounded pretty thin because of the smaller body. I then got a Yamaha Dreadnought ($199) that sounded good but was really hard on my fingers for some reason. Then came the inevitable Ovation (used, $225), which I curse to this day...not only did it play really stiff, it kept slipping off my lap because of that damn round back! After that, the Takamine...it was the most expensive acoustic I ever bought (at $300, used, that's not saying too much!), and honestly didn't sound much better than the Yamaha or play much better than the Fender. My main acoustic now is another cheapie; an Ibanez that I got on sale for about $150 at a Sam Ash in Florida about three years ago.

Oh, and I had a Martin backpacker that I specifically bought for my cross-country trips. If you like to travel light, it's a nice thing to have. I destroyed mine in a fit of rage one day, but it wasn't really the guitar's fault...

Acoustics are trickier to buy used- there's plenty of potential problems that you just can't fix- so definitely go new unless you really trust the seller. There's a lot of crappy guitars but a couple surprisingly good ones in the under-$200 bracket; it would be great if you knew an experienced guitar player who could try them out with you...my first guitars were pretty much decided solely on brand name, looks and price becuase I had no idea what a good guitar actually felt or sounded like.

And BTW, built-in pickups and preamps and such seem like a nice feature but most of them sound really horrible and drive the price up. There's nothing worse than getting stuck with an acoustic-electric that doesn't quite satisfy on either end.

Good hunting Shatter . Remember, Even Gilmour was crap once.

I bought my first acoustic for 3 reasons;

1) I wanted a guitar, and my parents wouldn't let me have an electric (seriously...)

2) The one I eventually bought looked really cool - it was BLACK!!!

3) When I tried it out, it sounded good to me, and felt like I might get to enjoy playing it.

oh, and there's 4) It was just in my price range; ie very cheap.

I found out later that I'd been lucky - it was/is an Eko.

It went everywhere with me - summer camp, holidays, Stonehenge and other free festivals - notably one year, when approx 1,000 of us got rushed by 10,000 baton-wielding police, who picked me up by the hair and dragged me the best part of a mile from my gear. Fortunately I'd made a few friends up on the slope, and one guy had made it his business to collect everyone's guitars (Me and two others had concentrated on bags), and we were all re-united with our babies. Sadly, the guy who had collected the guitars found that his was the only damaged one - completely irrepairable - but refused the offer from all of the rest of us of a replacement.

...erm, enough of the tangential boring stories...

The only reason I parted with it eventually was because I inherited my mother's Ovation and my brother wanted a guitar.

God, I miss that axe...

Bottom line: if you're only spending a very little money, then I think that 2) and 3) are as good criteria as any. Although, depending on your budget, James' criteria are definitely the safer! A guitar is for life...

How about persuading your parents that an electric guitar and a headphone amp will be much quieter than an acoustic? 

There are some excellent headphone amps out there (I'm seriously thinking about the new Vox AC30 Amplug which costs £30 and sounds great) and multi-effects devices like the Zoom G2 can be used with headphones. Multi-effects sometimes have a built-in electronic tuner which can be a great help!

As for which guitar to choose, it sounds lame but what does your favourite guitarist play? If they play a Gibson, try the Epiphone equivalent, similarly with Fender and Squier. They're pretty good value for money and, if you decide later on that the guitar isn't really for you, the resale value will be higher than a similarly priced "unknown" guitar.

Well an acoustic guitar... I think you could just as well buy a soprano sax to practise a baritone one. I'm not saying one is easier than the other, but the aid you'll get in my opinion is inexistant. Seeing as how when you realise the genre/style you want to be practising/performing, you'll be grown to your instrument, be it acoustic or electric, but there's a significant difference there. My teacher told me to practise the songs we played on an electric guitar, and then play the ones that were for acoustic on an acoustic. i thought this was the best way to learn.

Though I started with a fairly cheap classical guitar, I don't think it helped my el guitar playing at that much. Basically I've never broken my fingers while playing any of them, and I think after periods of 6 hours a day I can say you're doing something wrong if you bleed your guitar neck red. Also, these two instruments serve a very different purpose for me, I play different music when I have different guitars. My classical one is usually for jazz, bossa, spanish picking etc. However the pick feels completely different on the el guitar, and I do not play the same stuff with it, I usually go for blues, jazz too, funk, rock even.

Honestly I wouldn't advice to get an acoustic if you want to play the electric guitar. Only if you just think about buying a guitar and don't know what to try/play yet. The theory is the same, so that leaves an option, but don't start playing dream theater on an acoustic, you'll learn much easier and faster with an electric guitar. You don't study motorbikes with a bicycle, do you? I do not agree with your parents. You can tell them that, after all, I am a random guy from the internet ;)

your fingers will hate you regardless, the only reason that an acoustic might hurt less is if it were nylon stringed, steel string acoustic and electric feel the same to me. The real reason for your parents wanting you to start acoustic is likely because they dont wat their ears screaming in pane.

I'm going to advise you to get an electric guitar before you get an acoustic. Why?

darqdean wrote: Shatterwolf wrote: Thanks for the advice guys, hell, it won't be until a few years that I'll get pretty decent, but I'd better start now then never. Acoustic it is then!   It would be cool to find out whether Shatterwolf ever did buy that acoustic guitar and to learn basic chord sequences, pentatonic solos and the like, to see whether he has toughened his finger-tips, kept his finger-nails short, developed supple digits, mastered his instrument, graduated onto an eclectic, with a mesa-boogie amp and a floor full of effects pedals (and a line6 podx3 live ), discovered his unique axe-man pose and formed his own Prog-rock band...           /edit: .... in the past 3 years!

oh darn I didn't realize this thread is so old!!  darn, I guess my advice here is unneeded .

I too would like to know basic classical pieces on guitar, since I want to hopefully pick up the guitar sometime.