Honest Reviews & Expert Advice for UK Musicians
Plug in, count yourself in, and suddenly a bedroom acoustic can fill a working men’s club, a wedding marquee, or a festival side-stage without a microphone stand in sight. That’s the entire promise of an electro acoustic guitar: the warmth of a wooden box married to a pickup and preamp that let you go straight … Read more
Walk into most high-street music shops and you’ll find rows of guitars all facing the same way — and none of them facing yours. If you’re left-handed, the search for a proper left handed acoustic guitar can feel less like shopping and more like a scavenger hunt through a world that simply forgot you exist. … Read more
There’s a very specific kind of confusion that hits the moment you stand in a guitar shop staring at two nearly identical dreadnoughts, one of which has twice as many tuning pegs as the other. That’s the 12 string vs 6 string guitar dilemma in a nutshell, and it trips up more players than you’d … Read more
There’s a moment every guitarist remembers: the first time they strummed a 12 string acoustic guitar and heard that shimmering, chorus-like wash of sound come rolling out of the soundhole. It’s not a six-string with extra decoration bolted on. It’s a genuinely different instrument to live with, tune, and love. A 12 string acoustic guitar … Read more
There’s a particular kind of guitar shame that comes from owning a dreadnought you never play because it lives in a case behind the sofa, too big to grab for a quick ten minutes before dinner. A mini acoustic guitar solves that problem by being genuinely small enough to keep within arm’s reach — on … Read more
Somewhere between the departure lounge and the campsite, most guitarists quietly give up. The full-size dreadnought stays home in its case while its owner spends a fortnight tapping half-remembered chord shapes on an armrest, fingers itching for six real strings. It doesn’t have to be this way. The right travel guitar solves the problem outright: … Read more
Walk into any Spanish guitar shop and ask for a “classical guitar for flamenco,” and you’ll probably get a raised eyebrow and a gentle correction. The two instruments look like twins from across the room — same six nylon strings, same fan-braced top, same warm wooden curves — but up close they’re closer to cousins … Read more
Somewhere between “I’d love to learn guitar” and actually owning one sits a genuinely confusing shop window full of nylon strings, wonky pricing, and marketing copy that promises the earth. If you’re searching for a classical guitar for beginners, you’ve probably already noticed that half the listings look identical and the other half are wildly … Read more
If you’ve ever strummed an open G chord on a small-bodied guitar and felt like something was missing, you already understand why a dreadnought for strumming keeps coming up in every “what guitar should I buy” conversation. A dreadnought is the big-shouldered, wide-waisted acoustic body shape that Martin popularised over a century ago, and in … Read more
Here’s an odd little contradiction that nobody warns you about when you start shopping for a dreadnought for fingerpicking: the guitar shape built to be loud was never really built with your quiet, intricate right-hand patterns in mind. Dreadnoughts were designed in 1916 by C.F. Martin to cut through a room full of banjos and … Read more