by Christopher Knight

Created on: October 26, 2009

I have been playing guitar for about fifteen years now. I have taught guitar classes and played in several bands. The question acoustic vs. electric guitar comes up almost every time I talk to someone with more than passing knowledge or interest in guitar. My personal preference and experience is that for a beginner guitarist an acoustic guitar is the instrument to start with. I hold this theory for several reasons.

There are several things that need to develop at the same time in order to learn to play guitar properly. Your finger strength needs to develop, You need to develop proper rhythm and your "ear" needs to develop. By ear, I am referring to you being able to hear notes and chords and tell if they are in tune or not. This is much easier to hear with an acoustic guitar at first. Both kinds of guitars will allow you to work on these elements, however, a guitar is a complicated instrument to begin with. I am a believer in learning the basics, but once the basics are mastered you can move in many different directions with the guitar. My first lesson to my students is that everything you need to learn guitar you can learn by practicing on the first six frets of the guitar. Chord shapes, scales, songs and exercises can all be learned on these frets and then higher up the neck when necessary. In order to master the basics it makes sense to focus on those things and discard everything else.

An electric guitar is a great instrument, don't get me wrong, but the temptation is going to be strong to play with an electric guitar and just make noise. Besides that, an electric guitar uses the pickups on the guitar and the ampifier to produce the music. The sound can change based on the volume the amp is set at, the direction you are facing, any number of factors that you won't even be aware of when you sit down to play.

An acoustic guitar takes all of that away. The sound of the music comes directly from the instrument and you are as close as you can get to the pure sound produced by the instrument. That's not to say that learning the acoustic guitar is easy... it's not. The strings are a little thicker and the action (the space between the strings and fretboard) will be a little higher than an electric guitar. But if you have a decent guitar to start on, those things with cease to be problems and just be part of the guitar. I encourage anyone who wants to play guitar to pick one up, but I believe that you will learn more faster and be happier with the results if you start with an acoustic guitar.

Learn more about this author, Christopher Knight.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.