Ok I’m not new to playing the guitar as you probably know and I started on a Spanish guitar 50 years ago. My love of guitar knows no limits but it’s always been electric solid bodied guitars. Probably coz they are easier to play- and we always aspired to the electric as they were way more cool when I was a kid. The problem is I’ve always thought this and in my dotage I’ve gone back to exploring acoustic guitars. This is what I have found so far; if you go too low on the string gauge the sound/tone disappears but they start to be able to be played. Dusty end- forget it!
My questions are these:
How come so many people play acoustic guitars given that they (for me) are f@ckin impossible to play? More like a torture device than an instrument of pleasure!
The bridge height is miles from the top of the guitar and the strings are so far away from the fretboard why? Is it the sound that decides this? Then the strings are the thickness of drain pipes. Impossible for me to play!
Am I missing something?
why don’t the factories angle the necks so you have a chance to play up the dusty end?
Are even the hand made custom jobbers the same? I know tone is important but Christ on a bike to what cost? I hear people saying that a setup makes all the difference but really are you acoustic players just super human? When I play acoustic guitar it sounds like I’ve just learning to play!
Please enlighten me!
( I do have 3 acoustics of different value and age)
Comments
yes you are going to lose some tone and volume but you only have to play it everyday for a month with it sounding weedier and you will be back heavier strings. You may fin with a decent setup the sound is a little better even with the lighter strings. The other thing with playing lighter strings is they can sound good enough but you have to adjust your playing to get the sweet spot.
Custom handmade guitars can be built for lighter strings if the luthier knows what they re doing and makes adjustments to the build. That said if you opted for a much lighter build to compensate then it would be more worrisome in my mind to decide I want to now get back 12’s as heavier string do make more demands.
At this point a good setup will pay dividends
also, don’t play electric music on an acoustic - try to experiment on what makes an acoustic sound like it does.
Also have a read the front pages of Acoustic Guitar playing books, (you know the ones we skip over to get to the interesting bits) the pages about how to hold your wrist , because it is very different to rock/blues.
and learn to add pressure to your left hand fingers not by increasing left hand wrist pressure but by hugging the body of the guitar into your belly, and then it makes it much easier to finger on those nasty wider higher actioned neck
good luck, hope yo7 make some progress and get the benefit
oh yeah, stretch and exercise your left wrist in particular before you start playing
* Why do people play acoustic? For lots and lots of different reasons. One is that they have a richness and depth of tone that electric guitars can only dream about. Electric guitars (well OK let's be honest here: electric pedals and pickups and amps) have a far greater range of different tones, but each different tone is relatively shallow.
* They are not impossible to play! Those damn electric things are impossible to play! (In my experience.) This is not because I "can't play electric", it is because I have decades worth of habits and techniques built up in my muscle memory which work on acoustic and don't work on electric and that is a hell of a lot of unlearning to have to do before I can start learning. I could play electric, but I'd have to unlearn first, then learn. It would almost be easier to take up the banjo from scratch, or the piano. The same applies in reverse. Anyone who says electric guitar and acoustic guitar "are the same instrument" has no clue. Can you play the same things on both in the same way? Sure you can, but only if you avoid doing any of the things acoustics are really good at and electrics are really bad at, and also avoid the many things electrics do much, much better and acoustics badly, or sometimes not at all.
* The ideal acoustic string set is 12-53 (give or take). Some players use lighter than this, some players heavier, but it is the usual standard which almost all new guitars come with for a reason. 12s are the lightest string with really, really good tone and volume (some would say 11s, opinions differ). 10s are very weedy and thin, as a rule.
* Are acoustic strings hard to play? No. If you find them hard to play, one or more of the following applies: (a) your guitar is badly set up, or just a bad guitar. (b) You haven't put in the work - it only takes a few weeks to build up a bit of strength and learn the knack of getting good left hand grip without too much effort. We are not talking Charles Atlas stuff here. (c) You are trying to do the wrong things! This is the big one. If you are trying to do the things electric guitars do best (like big bends and crazy-man vibrato) on acoustic, you will find it very difficult, and it won't sound great either. On acoustic, you are not trying to be the wailing man lead-playing hero. You are trying to be the band. You are the bass player and the drummer and the guitar player as well. Possibly you also sing or blow on the harmonica. Acoustic playing is all about building up layers of sound and rhythm. Concentrate on that. Many great acoustic players don't even bend notes at all, or at least not so as anyone would notice. Different instrument.
* Bridge height. An acoustic guitar works by rocking the saddle back and forward. This imparts a twisting motion to the bridge, which in turn flexes the soundboard. As you reduce the height of the saddle, you reduce the leverage and thus the ability of the strings to make the top move. However the height of the bridge from the top of an acoustic guitar is typically not all that much. Less than 20mm on the two examples I just measured. That is way less than (for example) a Les Paul where (because of the strong curve of the top) if you drop a digit down to finger-rest it feels like a mighty chasm has opened under you! (What is the bridge-fingerboard height on a Tele or a Strat? Can somebody measure that and post it please?)
* Acoustic action is typically somewhere around 2-2.5mm on the bass side, 1.5-2mm on the treble side. That's measured at the 12th fret. It varies from player to player and (a bit) with different sorts of guitar (e.g., baritones tend to be a bit higher, 12-strings are often a bit lower) but that's around about right for most circumstances. Any higher becomes unnecessarily hard to play; any lower leads to loss of volume, buzzing, sitar sounds, and poor tone. As you can see from this, properly set steel string acoustic action is only slightly higher than most people would set an electric - about 0.5mm, give or take. Note that height of the bridge and saddle above the soundboard has no necessary connection with action height. To see this illustrated, look at a cello.
* Yes.
* Why don't factories angle the necks so you get a chance to play up at the dusty end? They do. Any properly set up guitar is perfectly playable at the dusty end. An acoustic will never be the dusty end monster a good electric is - the laws of physics see to that - but a good one is more than playable up there. But why buggerise about with twiddly-widdly stuff on the dusty end of an acoustic? They don't sound good up at that end (more laws-of-physics stuff: short strings don't sound like longer ones, even at the same nominal pitch - not that electric guitars don't care about that as most of your tone is coming out of the electronics) and they are harder to play because the action is slightly higher and the larger body gets in the way. Would you buy a 4WD to take to the racetrack? If you want to play twiddly-widdly stuff, use an electric. That's what electric guitars are for! If you want to play acoustic, use the magic of open strings and interesting combinations of notes sounding together - acoustics are much better at making nice tones by combining notes in all sorts of different ways than an electric can ever be.
* What condition are your acoustics in? Measure the action and post it here (as always, measure with the guitar in playing position, not on a bench). What about the nut slots? Are they correct? (Hint: put a capo on the 1st fret. Paly. Does it feel wildly different? Or about the same. A small difference is normal. If there is a big difference, something is wrong.
* What sort of acoustic are you playing? If you are expecting or wanting a lightly built, highly responsive acoustic but playing a heavier, more stage-and-strum oriented guitar, you'll work very hard trying to make it do stuff it wasn't designed or built to do. And if you are playing a highly responsive (and usually very expensive) fingerstyle guitar in a robust sort of style (i.e., normally), you'll work very hard trying to control the damn thing and stop it doing things you don't want. (It's a bit like playing an electric with the volume set much too high, you end up being afraid to touch it in case you set off an earthquake.)
* What strings are you using? Different makes of string with the same nominal gauge can be wildly different! Some (Dunlop, Elixir) are very stiff and hard on your fingers, others (Martin, Ball) are medium, others again (Galli, Adamas, La Bella) are very soft to play. And round cores offer the weight (=sound quality) of a big string with the softness of a little one. Try DR Sunbeam, Newtone, Pyramid Western Folk.
* Really are you acoustic players just super human? Yes.
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I struggled a bit when I got my first electric in the beginning, two completely different guitars but I probably prefer Acoustic a little more generally.
I think most electric players have at least one Acoustic in their family of guitars.
just because you do, doesn't mean you should.
I love acoustics and must have had great luck finding them because they are not hard to play at all. My strings are definitely not far from the fretboard.
One thing @Tannin touched on that I’ll reiterate is getting yourself an acoustic that suits your style. If you just want to strum, and especially if you’re a heavy strummer, a bigger bodied guitar that can take a medium-heavy string (dread or jumbo most likely) is your ticket. I used to swear by the dreadnought, but once I got more serious about things and started working on picking technique and finger picking, bright has the allure grown of smaller bodies, lighter strings and sweeter, less bassy sounds. I still play my dreads a lot, but the OM stays out in the rotation and I’m constantly on the lookout for a well made concert/concertina.