You want to play electric guitar but you have a limited budget. Your first electric guitar needs to be cheap so you need to get some idea which is the best brand to buy. If you do not buy a good quality electric guitar your guitar playing learning curve is going to be that much more steep, and you are going to feel like a prize dumbbell telling people that your playing would be much better if your guitar was not such a pile of junk.
Let us set some ground rules. Do not buy a cheap guitar online unless the vendor is in your local area. Also, when we talk about cheap guitars we should be talking cheap brands, not old guitars of dubious quality and unknown condition. If there is a music shop or two somewhere close to where you live, they should be able to cater to your needs. There are a lot of deep mysteries connected with guitar playing but finding a cheap guitar is not one of them.
To start with, there are big brand name guitars that you may not be able to afford, and indeed it would be silly to pay a fortune for your first electric guitar, but there are copies of these famous guitars which you CAN afford. Amongst these copies of the big name guitars made by various guitar makers, are good and bad quality guitars, and you need to be familiar with the better quality makers of cheap guitars. Any guitar factory in Outer Mongolia can churn out realistic looking electric guitars but they may not be able to hold together for longer than five minutes.
So, let us first look at a few big name guitars. Fender, Gibson, Washburn. You recognize those names, right? Squier, Ibanez, Yamaha, Crafter. Do you recognize those names? They make cheap electric guitars some of which are copies of more expensive models. The basic difference between cheap guitars and expensive guitars is quality of materials. The reason you need to be aware of which cheaper brands to buy is that you do not want to go too far into the realms of cheap and nasty. Without wanting to influence you unduly, I think you could do a lot worse than buying a Squier Stratocaster for a first electric guitar. It is made by Fender, the makers of the original Strat.
Another thing you need to consider is the type of music you want to play. Once you start looking around at guitars you need to be aware of the sound. Right from the first day as a guitar player you should be listening to yourself making a sound that you are happy with.
One really cool thing you should be taking with you when you go looking to buy a cheap electric guitar is a guitar player. Even if it is one of the neighbors who bought a guitar years ago and never did anything with it, it is better than nothing. And then there's the color. Your neighbor may be able to give you some advice on the construction of electric guitars or the benefits of this or that pickup, but only YOU can decide what color you want. When Mark Knopfler decided to buy his first guitar he knew he wanted a red one. It is an important consideration. You will not feel comfortable posing in front of the mirror with the wrong color guitar!
You will not be posing in front of the mirror? Oh . . . okay.
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