My new guitar arrived yesterday, and it's waaaay better than the crappy one I had been learning on!
Years ago we (my brother and I) got a guitar each for Christmas or something, but we never really did much with them. They're just $50 Clarks' guitars - nylon string classical.
Anyway my brother and I were enjoying learning guitar sufficiently that we decided we wanted decent guitars on which to learn, so we started looking. Turns out there's an excellent Australian company called Artist Guitars that make great cheap beginner guitars. I bought the LSPBK model, which is a beginner pack that includes a great steel-string acoustic guitar (with truss rod and built-in chromatic tuner), soft carry bag and a few other things.
When it arrived I unpacked it, tuned it (the built-in tuner is REALLY useful!) and played a chord... WOW. It's a thousand times better than the awful guitars we had before! The strings all resonate in harmony instead of chaos so it sounds GREAT!
The steel strings give a slightly twangier sound that I actually really like, and the body is full-size rather than 3/4 so it's a bigger sound too. It's also factory-preset at the lowest action you can safely have without buzzing so despite being stiffer, the strings are far easier to press down reliably.
The biggest thing I like about it is that when something isn't working, it's entirely my fault! With the cheap guitars, I could be doing everything perfectly and it still might not sound right (the A chord, for example, wavered horribly on those guitars).
We like my new guitar so much that Lachy (my brother) has bought one, and Dad (who used to own a good steel-string guitar but lost it years ago) has bought one as well to get back into playing. Dad has a big advantage over us, though, because both he and Mum play piano really well and took lots of music theory classes in school so they understand what Asus4 means without even trying
Our youngest sister (Tabitha) wants to learn violin (but gave up on recorder - no idea how she thinks she'll be any better on a more difficult instrument), our second-youngest sister (Jess, one the four
Flash Buddies) is learning flute (and doing pretty well) and our oldest sister (Alex, the second female member of Flash Buddies) is learning bass recorded and guitar.
So overall quite the musical family
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The latest
Flash Buddies video is out! (It was actually out this morning but I forgot to say)
