Okay, so you’ve made the big commitment to learn to play the guitar! Now what?
Obviously, your first priority is to take a series of classy portraits of yourself for use on the cover of your inevitable debut album. In addition, you might want to pen the introduction of your autobiography, which you will inevitably have to write, as it’ll be super-cool if it came from the time before your meteoric rise to stardom.
Once you get those important tasks taken care of, it’s time to move on to the next step: Getting yourself a guitar to play. Unfortunately, this can be a particularly confusing and stressful endeavor, due to the sheer number of options out there, and so I’ve taken the liberty of coming up with a potential hack. Listen close, as this may save you a LOT of time: What I want you to do is search your entire house, including all of those dark little closets that play host to massive spider parties, and see if you can find … a guitar. If so, congratulations, you already have one!!! Hooray!! What a lucky break! Now you can just skip the rest of this essay and take some well-earned time off.
Still here? Bummer! That means you don’t own a guitar and you now have to go out and find one.
The obvious play here is to go down to your local music shop, since there should be people there to help you narrow your options and assist you in making a wise choice that not only suits your needs but also fits your budget. However, I wouldn’t recommend this, since music shops all have an air of … how do I put it? … competence to them. The few times I’ve entered one, I’ve always felt like an absolute poser with no right to be there, like every single person inside has Jimmy Hendrix-like abilities and is already judging me. In fact, in my mind, this is how I fully expect things to play out each time I decide to frequent such an establishment:
Proprietor: {Mildly suspicious} “Oh, hello. Why are you here?”
Me: “I play the guitar. I’m here to examine your wares.”
Proprietor: {After doubling over in a fit of hysterics that lasts for far too long} “Oh, that’s a good one! You play the guitar!! Can you imagine? Still, you almost had me going there for a second!” {Wipes a few tears away} “Okay, now really, why are you here? Are you lost or something?”
However, if you don’t have crippling music-shop-anxiety, feel free to give it a shot and let me know how it goes!
Another option would be to go to a few local yard sales and see if you can pick one up cheap there. People are giving up learning to play left and right, and if they haven’t already destroyed their instrument in a fit of rage, there’s always a chance they might be selling it. The advantage of going this route, as opposed to looking at various online marketplaces, is that you get to see the instrument in-person and squint at it knowledgeably before deciding if you should buy it. Of course, you’ll have no idea what you’re doing, much like when you open the hood of your car to try and diagnose that funny wheezing noise, but you can still do a few basic checks, such as making sure it’s still in one piece, it doesn’t have any fire damage, and there are no rats’ nests inside of the sound hole. Beyond that, though, I recommend you don’t even touch it, much less try to play it. The last thing you want is to be chastised by some smug know-it-all who has the nerve to tell you that you’re not supposed to be holding it like an upright bass.
This leads me to my preferred method of obtaining a guitar: Intending to do intensive research online but then getting frustrated and picking one on a whim off of Amazon. Yes, I always go into purchasing a guitar with good intentions of doing my research, including a critical analysis of different brands and styles. However, I’ll then remember that about 7 million companies make guitars of various shapes and sizes, including some that you’d never expect, such as Yamaha. This sobering fact always makes my motivation crumble, leaving me looking for an easy way out. I’ll then go to Amazon, search for guitars, and sort the results by price. Next, I’ll scroll to those within my specific price range, look at a few, and finally pick one pretty much at random, just as long as there are no user reviews stating that these particular models have been known to spontaneously combust.
All right! Assuming you follow these steps, you’ll soon have gotten yourself a guitar! Congratulations! At that point it’ll almost be time to start completely humiliating yourself! However, you won’t be there yet. So, join me next time as we’ll discuss tuning your new guitar, which is a necessary step to make your initial attempts to play sound slightly less terrible.
Until next time,
Keep Strummin’!
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