Do tonewoods matter on an electric guitar at all?
You'll notice I purposely put electric guitar in the title of this blog and not just guitar on its own. The reason for that is because when it comes to acoustic guitars, the woods chosen in the build absolutely matter.
The scale length of a guitar refers to the measurement from the bridge saddle to the nut. No guitar company I know of makes all their guitars exclusively using one specific length, because there are times when the design of a guitar neck needs to be a certain length for either appearance, function or both.
You have probably heard many guitar players say that a certain brand and model of guitar is their "go-to instrument" for every type of music they do.
There are some guitars that exist where the day after you buy them, you know you've made a mistake. I'm going to list 5 of them below.
If you ever wondered why you just can't get your guitar to sound like it's supposed to when recording a YouTube video, the answer is simple. It's an answer that many guitar players absolutely refuse to accept as true, but it is true.
If you buy enough electric guitars, at some point you run into that "played and sounded great in the store, but then played and sounded like crap when I got it home" scenario. This happens to a lot of guitar buyers, and yes I've had it happen to me a few times. And remember, this can happen with any guitar regardless of how cheap or expensive it is.
Fortunately there are a few really easy things you can do while in the guitar store to determine whether a guitar is junk or not.
When I was a kid just starting out on guitar in the very-early 1990s, the Strat was the guitar. None of the guitar stores ever featured the Les Paul at the time. You never saw them in the glass case that some guitar stores had. Most of the time, all you ever saw there were premium American Stratocaster guitars.
Moon Over Parador (1988) is one of those movies where I seriously cannot remember whether I saw it in the theater, rented it or saw it on TV. Part of my brain thinks I actually saw this in the theater; another says no, I must have rented this (I did sometimes rent movies I ordinarily never would just because I was in the video store and had to rent something so I wouldn't leave empty-handed); and yet another part says I must have seen this on TV as one of those filler movies during the summer. I just don't remember.
There are things you should buy in bulk and other things you shouldn't. What I'm going to concentrate on here is stuff you should buy in bulk as a guitar player.
Fender electric guitars do typically work best with .009 to .042 gauge string. Both Squier and Fender do ship electric guitars from the factory with that size string installed on the Stratocaster and Telecaster. In addition, the string is always nickel-plated, commonly abbreviated as NPS (nickel-plated steel).
