Important Features

Some Terminology Worth Knowing

Action: How close or far the guitar strings are from neck or fingerboard. The lower the action, the closer the strings are to the fingerboard and the easier it is to push down the strings. A guitar with high action can be very hard to play. A guitar with action that is too low can cause the strings to buzz when you pluck them. You want the lowest action possible with little or no string buzzing.

Intonation: Intonation has to deal with how close the notes on the guitar are to being in tune. On the guitar, every string and every fret on the neck is supposed to be a specific note. You want those notes to be as accurate as possible. Generally, the better quality the guitar, the better the intonation will be. While perfect intonation would be ideal, even on higher-end guitars this is close to impossible. You should expect on a beginner guitar for the intonation to be a little bit off, especially as you get to the notes higher up the fingerboard. This is okay, but what you do not want is a guitar with really bad intonation. If your guitar has poor intonation, it doesn’t matter how good a player you are; it will be hard to play anything and make it sound good. As a beginner, since you don’t play guitar yet, this is something that will be harder for you to know or check for yourself. You can, however, ask the salesman how the intonation is on a particular guitar. Any reputable guitar shop should have no problem showing you how accurate the intonation is on a particular guitar.

Machine Heads (also called Tuners or Tuning Gears): This is the hardware that is on the headstock of the guitar, at the top of the neck. These are important because they are what keep your guitar in tune. They have little to do with intonation, but they are used to tune each string individually. Low quality machine heads can cause your guitar to go out of tune right in the middle of playing, or could even make it difficult to accurately tune your guitar at all. This is an example of some of the hardware that is greatly improved when you go from, say, a $100 guitar to a $200 guitar.

*A “note” on tuning your guitar: When it comes to tuning, a common misconception many people have is that guitars are similar to pianos in that once you tune one up, it will stay in tune for a long period of time. Actually, guitars need to be tuned regularly, even high-end guitars. It isn’t hard to do but this is why, as a beginner, you definitely want to invest in a digital tuner! They run about $20 and are worth every penny.

Pickups: These are the parts on an electric guitar that “pick up” the sound of the strings and send it to the amplifier. You may have seen specific electric guitars advertised that feature the pickups as “humbucker” pickups or “single coil” pickups or maybe described the pickups as having a “warm” or “bright” sound. There are many different types of pickups that can vary greatly in sound, quality, and price. It is good to know some of the basic differences, and when you go into a guitar shop, you should have the salesman explain and demonstrate some of the different pickups available. If this is your first guitar, however, you don’t need to be overly concerned with the type of pickups. As a beginner, you may actually find it hard to truly hear a big difference between the pickups on an expensive guitar versus those on an entry-level guitar.