Wall of Mouths

It generally comes down to personal preference and the most frequent advice I hear is “go down to the shop and play the guitar you are considering purchasing yourself”. It can be intimidating - but if it is, it could be argued that you are in the wrong shop. You don’t have to play mental solos (even with acoustics) to test a guitar. You can just as easily strum a few open chords and then play each string and each fret to ensure it is set up OK and there are no dead spots or buzzing. Even if there are, a decent store will have a tech who can look at it for you. Think about the action (distance between strings and fretboard), the width of the neck and the accessibility of higher frets. If a guitar doesn’t suit -you- then don’t buy it. There’s another waiting for you somewhere.

And that applies to 80 GBP guitars as much as it does to 800 GBP guitars.

Aye, there is no way round testing them suckers. I just wondered if there are any makes that are usually crap and the other way round.

By western I do mean steel strings, and yeah I’ve been playing for the best part of 25 years. No guitar so far mind, more of bass man.

Yamaha do some great inexpensive acoustic guitars.

Mine is something like an F310 or something like that.

You can’t go wrong with an ol’ Gibson Epiphone