5 Things to Check BEFORE Buying a Guitar!

hey guys welcome back to the channel hope you're having a great day today it's Darrell here and today we're talking about five things you need to check out before you buy an electric guitar and they might not be what you think now the odds are pretty good if you're a first time guitar buyer and you walk into a music store the salesperson is gonna hand you something like this strat style guitar and say this is what you need and you end up going home with a strat now there's certainly nothing wrong with that but we want to dig a little bit deeper today so that you guys are equipped with some knowledge to help you pick the right guitar for you now over the years I've been lucky enough to try and own many different instruments so here is kind of like a boiled down or condensed list of some of the most important things and some of the things that you know people might think are important but aren't let's jump in here we go alright in no specific order let's start with tip number one now season players may notice I am holding a Gibson SG famous for one little flaw and that is yes you got it neck dive one of the most annoying things about a guitar and it can plagued acoustic guitars electric guitars various different body shapes but the SG is well known for that and if you're new player neck dive simply means it's really heavy on the headstock side really light on the body so when you let go of it the guitar always dives so that's called neck dive super annoying now I think checking for neck dive is really important and why it made my list is because especially if you're a new player and you're not aware of it again whether you're playing electric classical acoustic whatever it can really impede your learning if you're subconsciously supporting the weight of the headstock with your left hand it's gonna be a lot harder to play so if you're new player your hand should be free you know you shouldn't be supporting the weight of a headstock you should be you know playing chords notes riffs or whatever you're doing your hand should be just loose and able to cruise around the neck if you're supporting the weight of the neck it's gonna be a lot harder to play so that's why I think checking your guitar for you know headstock dive is really important don't lean it up against your body if you're wearing like a sticky shirt like I am here you know it might look like it's going to stay and then as soon as you put it on a strap and stand up with a different shirt or whatever it's going to be like this and you fighting it so check for that just do quick little test and then you'll know now the second thing you should consider when buying an electric guitar is the instruments tone no it's not tone is way way way down on the list I'm gonna show you guys why at the end of the video the second thing to consider much more important than an instruments tone is ergonomic s' so ergonomics is all about contouring the shape of the guitars body so that it's easy for the player to play now when I was designing this guitar I had the privilege of doing that with 10s lots of you guys have seen this guitar but it's all about contours right contours all along the top and the bottom almost almost all over the body a huge scoop here so I'm just gonna look at my monitor right in here you know most manufacturers will not give a scoop like that because it might not be as aesthetically pleasing but as soon as you start to play it you're like why doesn't everybody do that it's so comfortable and so that's an area where maybe economics wins over just straight aesthetics although I like the way it looks up here again get it in the light huge contour here for your hand contoured heel joint big belly cut that goes all the way along right from the the top horn all the way to the back so again it sits against your body and it just feels right it becomes a part of your body you don't want to be fighting that now new players may not consider economics at all I certainly didn't when I was young but the older I get new more instruments that I play I really appreciate what manufacturers do to make it easier for us to play now people might just be like well I've always liked the Les Paul I'm just going to order one online or I'm just gonna pick one up used and not really take the time to really consider it and after playing on some other models maybe that your friends have or something like that or just playing on it and you realize how big and heavy and clunky and you know almost everything about that well it's from the 50s right and it hasn't been changed and that's great if you want a historic instrument you know if you just like Les Paul's that's awesome that's great but if you go into it not considering some of these things you might regret what you buy now I'm not one to talk in this regard because I do love my Telecasters and they are almost worse than Les Paul's although they're quite a bit lighter yes just a plank of wood no contours here no contours on the belly no contours here so it's just like I said it's a plank so you can still play proficiently and enjoy an instrument but if you're new player try some different designs out you might be surprised as to what feels the best and that's really important all right number three and the third thing to consider when buying an electric guitar is yes we're still talking about playability it's that important we will get to the tones don't worry but playability super important here we're talking about neck profile let's be honest you spend a hundred percent of the time playing your guitar on your guitars neck it's gotta be a good fit for you now if you're a new player there's at least three things to consider when choosing a guitar neck number one is the profile and this simply refers to the carve on the back of the neck some guitar necks are very thin some are very thick and there's different shapes or profiles there's the C shape which is like famously on the strats D shape you shape V shape or soft v ya so some really interesting carves on the back of the neck so something to consider the radius is the second thing and that refers to the front face of the guitar how flat it is or how curved I'll give you an example in a second and of course the fret size now I know that's a lot to consider if you're new player but they are very important to how a guitar feels and how it plays so you know maybe more advanced players would be you know easier to go into a store and understand all these things and pick an instrument but I think it just speaks to the fact that you should try a bunch of different guitars out because they're all going to be slightly different and so even if you don't maybe understand all those terms you will understand what feels good to play so I just wanted to quickly show you guys the difference in radius now here we have a couple radius gauges this is seven and a quarter so this would represent a vintage kind of Fender radius you can see it's very arched and this would represent you know the front edge of your fingerboard so your frets would be arched your fingerboard would be are very nice for courting and you know just general playing and on a modern radius it is much much flatter so there's almost no arch in it at all very flat playing easy to bend you to play fast easy to play all sorts of multiple genres where is the seventh quarter can be a little bit more you know specific for courting and stuff it could be harder to band and play fast so that's just a quick way to kind of illustrate the difference between a vintage and a modern radius and again you just need to you know try the mode some people love the vintage radius some people love more modern try a bunch out see which one fits best for you alright the fourth thing to consider when buying an electric guitar is the type of pickups so we're getting closer to tone here but we haven't quite arrived so I'm going to go over three of the most popular configurations for pickups and we're gonna talk about which one might be right for you because when you're new player it can be daunting all these guitars on a wall and they all have different types of pickups and stuff but we're going to go through the most popular let's start with the single coils bright punchy glassy chime II cutting these are all words that describe single coils in sort of vague ways but single coils very popular now if you're new player I know it's daunting when you walk into a guitar store and there's walls of guitars and there's different pickups and they all look cool and different and you don't know what they do but as general rules you want a single coil equipped guitar if you want to play styles that don't require a lot of gain although there's ways to get around that with gates and stuff but as a general rule if you want you know clean tones bluesy tones light breakup up to a boat kind of classic rock the lower end of classic rock kind of gain a single coils are a great choice you know famously used by almost every blues player on the planet they just give you a very nice present every single kind of nuance is not lost on a lower output single coil as you you know up the the output of pickups you kind of lose some of the nuances but for the most part single coils are low output so you know everything you put in comes out and players you know like clapped in like Gilmour like Stevie Ray Vaughan on and on and on the list is huge so a very popular pickup but if you want to play high gain there's better choices number two is the humbucker much more high output than this single-coil these guitars can be used with a lot of distortion and they remain quiet if you do that with a single coil it generates a lot of noise and most people hate that that's why the humbucker was invented to buck the hum at a 60 cycle hum so anyway great for metal you know classic rock hard rock all those Styles handles gain wonderfully and they clean up nicely too so jazz players will use them and get a very very warm sound so very versatile in terms of the tones that you can get for it but as a general rule if you want to play with more gain humbuckers a great way to go and finally the king of versatility the humbucker single single or HSS as its referred to so if you see that written out HSS that just simply refers to humbucker single single so you get all the best of rock and metal tones with that humbucker and all the best of kind of like bluesy tones that famous position for on strats so this is a great way if you're not sure what you want and you're just figuring out what what kind of tones you want or you know you know I only have a certain number of dollars and I want to be able to play multiple styles humbucker single single absolutely great way to go alright finally number five and the thing we've all been waiting for is of course the guitars aesthetics yes we're talking about aesthetics no we're not we're going to talk about the guitar tone but I will say one thing about aesthetics it's really tied up with image unfortunately or fortunately I guess good and bad a guitar playing is caught up in that image right you see a Les Paul you think rock and roll you see and I've been as you think Steve Vai or Joe Satriani you see you know whatever whatever a big body guitar you think jazz it's really tied up in image so I will say aesthetics do matter I'm not you know gonna say they don't because we all want to play guitars that we think look good and are inspired to play so it is important but yes we're talking about tone and why it's on the bottom of my list let's talk about that now so here's the cold hard truth and the reason why tone is at the bottom of my list when she was in a guitar and you know well below things like like I mentioned like urgh UNAM explain all those things that are really going to inspire you to play and it's this a guitars tone comes from the amp so to illustrate this let's take this cheap $100 strat copy plug it in and see what kind of tones we can get out of it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so there you guys go that's why I put tone at the end of the list things like the guitars wait the guitars balance the neck profile frets eyes contours on it all those issues of playability like I said before are really gonna make you reach for that guitar because it just fits you so well whether it's a you know a thick baseball bat neck or a thin Ibanez neck everybody has their preferences so if you're a new player that's my advice to you hit up the music store don't just you know whatever try a certain guitar because your favorite artist uses it or whatever try a bunch of different guitars even ones that you're like I don't know I don't really think I would gel with that guitar try them out because like I said you spend a hundred percent of your time on that neck and a hundred percent of that time with like guitar body up against your body and as I've gotten older you know guitar wait really important ergonomics really important and anything you know that inspires me to pick up that guitar is important so hopefully that helped you guys if you're new player and yeah if there's other things that are important to you guys drop them in the comments below if you've discovered over the years that you know maybe a guitar that you thought you'd never liked you ended up playing or you know a specific feature that you absolutely love on your guitar I'd love to hear them so drop them in the video comments below thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so yet you can check out this t-shirt in the video description below as well have yourself a great week take care [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Darrell Braun Guitar

Views: 1,502,620

Rating: 4.946363 out of 5

Keywords: easy guitar licks, easy guitar riffs, guitar riffs for beginners, easy guitar songs, easy guitar tutorial, darrell braun, top 10 guitar riffs, best guitar riffs, easy guitar lesson, guitar lesson, guitar lesson for beginners, first guitar lesson, gibson les paul, gibson les paul traditional, guitar riffs and licks, guitar songs for beginners, les paul vs stratocaster, les paul standard, 10 easy guitar songs, 10 easy picking songs, 10 easy guitar riffs, Guitar licks

Id: bVbFc7I_ACc

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019