Guitar, bass and ukulele

Two decisions come before choosing a model: what size the player needs, and whether the strings should be steel, nylon or electric. Get those right and almost any decent guitar works.

More first guitars are bought badly than any other instrument, and it is almost never because the buyer picked a bad brand. It is because they picked the wrong size, or the wrong string type, or a package that left out the one thing that makes a guitar playable. Those three mistakes account for most of the guitars that end up under a bed by March.

Size comes first, and age charts are a rough guide at best

Guitars come in 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and full sizes, and the numbers describe scale length rather than any consistent physical fraction. A child can reach the first-position chords on a guitar whose scale length suits their arm and hand, and cannot reach them on one that does not. No amount of practice fixes a reach problem. Our guitar sizing page gives the measurement rather than a birthday chart, because two nine-year-olds can need different sizes and frequently do.

Adults essentially always want a full-size instrument, with one exception worth knowing: a smaller-framed adult often finds a concert-body or parlour-shaped acoustic far more comfortable than a dreadnought, without giving up any scale length. That is a body-shape decision, not a size decision, and the two get confused constantly.

Steel, nylon or electric

This decision matters more for a beginner’s first month than the brand on the headstock does.

What a starter pack does and does not solve

A guitar on its own is not playable. It needs, at minimum, a tuner, and in practice it also wants a strap, a bag, a stand and a set of picks. Buying a pack usually costs less than assembling the same items and it arrives in one delivery, which matters more than it sounds when a child’s enthusiasm has a shelf life. What a pack does not include is a setup, and a setup is the thing most likely to make a cheap guitar feel like a good one.

A setup means adjusting the string height and the neck relief so the strings sit close to the fretboard without buzzing. It typically costs a modest amount at a local shop and it transforms a budget instrument. On very cheap guitars it can cost a meaningful fraction of the instrument’s price, and this is the honest reason we recommend spending a little more on the guitar itself: better factory setups are what you are actually paying for.

The bass is not a guitar with two strings missing

Bass deserves its own consideration. The scale length is much longer, the strings are much heavier, and the physical demand on a young player’s hands is genuinely higher. A student under about twelve is usually better served by a short-scale bass, and a student who wants to play bass because bass players are always needed is making a perfectly sound decision. They are.

And the ukulele, which is not a toy

The ukulele has the lowest barrier to a first song of any instrument on this site, and a good one is far cheaper than a good guitar. It is a legitimate destination as well as a stepping stone. The ukulele section covers sizing, strings and how the chord shapes transfer to a guitar later.

Where to start reading

If nothing has been decided yet, start with the main guitar roundup, which puts sizing before models. From there the decision usually splits by player: a teenager choosing on style and a player whose hands are the constraint need different answers, and the second is about scale length rather than body size.

Three short pages do most of the work in the first month. How to tune a guitar removes the most common reason a new guitar sounds bad. The starter kit page lists what a bundle includes and what it leaves out. And strings plus when to change them is the cheapest real improvement available to any guitar on this site.