Honest Reviews & Expert Advice for UK Musicians
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
A dreadnought acoustic guitar is the big, square-shouldered acoustic body shape that C. F. Martin developed in the early twentieth century to produce more volume and bass than the parlour guitars that came before it — it’s the shape most people picture when they hear the word “guitar” at all, and it remains the default … Read more
Somewhere between “I fancy trying an 8 string guitar” and actually owning one sits a swamp of marketing fluff, contradictory forum threads, and spec sheets that read like they were translated twice. An 8 string guitar is a solid-body electric with two extra bass strings below standard low E, typically tuned down to F# and … Read more
A 7 string guitar for metal isn’t a gimmick bolted onto a normal six-string — it’s a different relationship with the low end entirely. Add one extra string, tuned to a low B (or lower), and suddenly your rhythm playing has a foundation that a standard guitar physically cannot reach. That’s the whole point. Bands … Read more