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Chapter 14
Shop Till You Drop: Buying the
Right Guitar for You
In This Chapter
Defining your guitar needs
Pricing guitars
Shopping strategies
Bringing along an expert
The good news about shopping for a guitar is that unlike high-performance
auto or horse racing, you don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of
dollars to get in the game. If you’re smart, and you shop carefully, you can
end up with the same model guitar that the most famous players in history
played — for just a few hundred dollars. The other bit of encouraging news is
that there are no wrong choices. You can create the blues on any electric or
acoustic guitar, and even the best players — Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton,
to name two — have famously switched guitars midway in their careers, and
it didn’t seem to hurt their playing one bit.
Shopping for a guitar gives you the excuse to go out and audition the instrument
of your dreams, but eventually your dreams have to reconcile with your
wallet. But for a blues guitar, reality isn’t that harsh. Even a cheaper guitar
was played by the Delta blues players from the ’20s and ’30s. If you look at
old photos, you can see that even these players all had cheap guitars, and
the music is immortal.
So don’t fear. In the sections of this chapter, I give you some guidance on
picking out the guitar that best suits you and your budget.
TEAM LinG