There’s a seemingly infinite variety of guitars on the market.  When it comes time for you to upgrade, how do you know where to begin?

Choosing the right guitar is a pretty important part of a guitarist’s career.  While some people have extra money to burn to collect instruments, most people need to think carefully about a guitar purchase.  The next guitar you buy may be your main guitar for many years to come.  

Where do you begin?

Here are what I consider the 5 most important aspects to think about when choosing your next guitar.  

Reason

One critical and sometimes overlooked aspect of a guitar purchase is the reason to purchase a new guitar.  Taking the reason to make the purchase into account, you can hone in pretty quickly on a more narrow selection of instruments.  If you’re relatively new to guitar and have been playing on a beginner instrument, your next guitar probably shouldn’t be an incredibly expensive model.  You’ll want to wait to make an investment like that until you’re more knowledgeable about the direction your going in and other factors that will become apparent over time.  On the other hand, if you’ve moved into the pro arena, you may want to consider making a real investment in a professional level guitar. 

If you don’t have the money, instead of opting for something that’s just a little better than what you’re currently playing, it might be better to save up and wait until you can afford something that better suits what you will be using it for.  Lastly, there is a possibility that a new guitar isn’t what you need.  We’ll get a little more into that below. 

Cost

The cost of your guitar purchase is usually one of the first things you consider.  There are many classic, famous and timeless instruments on the market that I’m sure we’d all love to get our hands on.  The only trouble is, the majority of these guitars come with very large price tags.  There are also an absurd amount of knock-off brands and low price options that can be difficult to tell if they are as good as they claim to be. 

The truth is, if you’re willing to go with a lesser known brand, there are a number of low cost options for high quality instruments.  However, there are a lot more junk guitars in those price ranges and it can be pretty difficult to tell which is which without playing them for yourself.  Paradoxically, low cost “brand name” instruments can be of far lower quality than a similarly priced obscure brand guitar.  Instead of determining your budget based literally on what you have to spend, I highly recommend taking some time to research lower cost options and watch videos of those guitars being reviewed online.  Make sure to watch at least a few unaffiliated reviews from trusted sources.  Then, if possible, try to find a music store that carries instruments from that brand that you can try out in person before making a purchase.  Keep in mind that it’s possible to get a higher quality guitar for less money when you go with a more obscure brand.  The money you save can be put towards a new amp or FX pedals.  

My good friend Max Carlisle has been doing guitar reviews on YouTube for the last couple years and his channel Guitar MAXis a great resource.  He also spends a lot of his time focusing on surprisingly low cost instruments.  

Playability

Now this is a pretty critical aspect of choosing your next guitar.  Let’s say that you have a guitar that is somewhat difficult to play compared to other guitars.  Before making a decision to buy a new guitar purely based on playability, it’s important to get to the bottom of what is causing the issues on your current guitar.  There are a couple reasons to do this.  The first is that it’s possible the problems with your guitar are easily fixed.  It could simply be a matter of lowering the action and getting a truss rod adjustment to get your current guitar playing the way you want it to.  The other reason is that you want to make sure you are getting a guitar that will play the way you want it to long-term.  If your current guitar’s issues stem from it being cheaply made, you don’t want to end up with another cheaply made guitar.  The same problems could arise in a short period of time.  The more you know about why a guitar plays well or not, the better informed your next purchase can be. 

It’s important to understand that just because a guitar doesn’t play exactly how you want it to at the store doesn’t mean that you can’t adjust it to where you want it to be.  When you know how these adjustments work, you will be able to tell what you can do with a prospective new guitar. 

Tone

There are endless discussions and debates about guitar tone.  Clearly there are subjective and relatively objective aspects to what makes a good guitar tone in a specific genre of music.  There are definitely some objective aspects of what makes a bad guitar tone!   But that’s something for me to write about on another day.  For now, let’s assume that you generally know the guitar tone you’re after and talk instead about what you need to consider about tone when buying your next guitar. 

First and foremost, while your amp and FX chain significantly shape your tone, they can’t create guitar tone that isn’t there.  It’s true that the most apparent “tonal colors” will be from your amp and FX, but it’s important to remember that the foundation for the overall tone comes from your guitar.  Your amp and FX have to work with the signal you put through them.  You can have the best amp and “perfect” FX setup and still get a terrible tone with the wrong guitar and/or guitar setup.

The type of wood a guitar is made from, the construction type of the guitar (neck-thru, set-neck, bolt-on, chambered body, etc.), the amount of wood used, the neck scale and even the string height are all major factors in your guitar’s tone.  There’s no perfect road map to go by with these, but they can give you a good place to start.  As an extreme example, a guitar made with little or no wood (or analogous resonant material), will typically sound thin or dull.  A wooden electric guitar with hollow chambers can have a more resonant sound while also increasing feedback.  Again, this is something that I could spend a lot of time writing about on its own.  For now, this is something to pay attention to when demoing different guitars. 

The pick-ups of the guitar are a major factor in the tone you get.  If you’re not an expert on pick-ups, I would highly recommend doing some research on the pick-ups used be your favorite guitarists.  If you want to get a similar tone to a certain player, pick-ups will take you a long way.  Another thing to consider is that it’s possible you’ve been trying to get active pick-up tone with passive pick-ups, or vice versa.  

If tone is your problem, you may want to consider simply upgrading the pick-ups on your current guitar. Of course, your rig could also be the problem.  If you want to know for sure where the tone problems are coming from, bring your guitar down to your local music store and demo some of their top amps with it.  If it sounds incredible through a good amp, then your guitar is probably not the main culprit.   

Style

Last but not least, we have guitar style.  This one is fairly self-explanatory, but it’s still worth thinking about.  There are a lot of eye-catching guitar styles out there and some of them are pretty well pigeon-holed into a specific genre of music.  I have to say, I’ve known more than a few guitarists who bought themselves a truly wild looking pro-level guitar and found themselves wishing for something a little more subtle down the road. 

If you’re going to be making a real investment in a guitar that you’ll be using for a long time, I recommend considering what you’ll be using that guitar for in the future.  If you’re going strictly Metal, then that B.C. Rich Beast might be just what you’re looking for.  But if you’re also going to be taking it to the local Blues Jam every weekend, you might want to find something that fits in both places.  

But that’s all personal preference. 

Dan Mumm

Need some new sweep picking materials?  Check out my massive catalog of guitar related products, covering everything from Metal versions of Classical pieces, Neo-Classical Shred technique, Sweep Picking, and more!  See what’s on sale today at the link below:

www.Sellfy.com/DanMumm

Sweep picking is one of the most coveted techniques on the guitar and has become surrounded with myth and legend.  While it’s true that it takes real dedication and a good deal of practice to completely master sweep picking, it’s nowhere near as difficult to learn when you know the secrets behind it.

A lot of guitarists get very skeptical when they hear claims like that, and it’s no wonder.  Among the uninitiated, sweep picking seems to be reserved for denizens of Valhalla – people somehow chosen by fate to dominate the world with the guitar. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

The first and most important secret to know about sweep picking is that it is nothing but a shortcut, a trick to play certain types of passages faster and more easily than you could otherwise.  That’s what it is.  The reason why it seems prohibitively difficult is simply that in order for someone to play those types of passages at that speed without the crutch of sweep picking, it would require some kind of superhuman ability.  

It’s an illusion. 

That’s one secret… let’s look at another:

When most people first try to learn sweep picking, it can seem impossibly challenging.  This fact alone makes the majority of people who try it give up before they ever make any real progress.  

So, if sweep picking is so much easier than it seems, what’s really happening here?

Imagine that someone challenges you to free climb a mountain to the top.  When you look at the mountain, all you see is a sheer cliff going up thousands of feet.  While looking at that mountain, do you believe you can climb it without the assistance of climbing equipment? 

The reasonable answer would be: almost certainly not.

So the next question would be, how much effort would you be willing to expend to climb a mountain that you know you have absolutely zero chance of successfully climbing?   

But let’s say that you’ve seen other people at the top of the mountain.  You didn’t see them climb it, but you’ve seen that sheer cliff and it’s easy to assume that they would need superhuman abilities to accomplish such a feat.  It’s perfectly natural to come to that conclusion under those circumstances.  If you have no chance of climbing it and those people can, those people must have some special ability that you don’t have, right?

In this hypothetical scenario, you’d be wrong. 

The reality is, there is a nice steady incline on the other side of the mountain that allows people to simply hike their way to the top.  No climbing necessary.  The problem here is that you were so impressed by these people’s apparent feat of climbing a sheer cliff that you never stopped to imagine that you could be missing some key information about how they got up there. 

So then, what is the steady incline of sweep picking technique?  

First of all, throw away any notions you might have about sweep picking being an amazing technique.  Sweep picking is meant to look amazing to the audience, but every master of sweep picking knows the truth – and when they act otherwise, they are playing the part of a showman in the same way a stage magician would. 

If you want to be a magician yourself, you have to learn the secrets of how the tricks work.  It might spoil some of the fun, but that’s part of the process.  

Once you’ve sufficiently disillusioned yourself about the “magic” of sweep picking, it’s time to change your approach to practicing the technique.  You have to remember that any time you’re learning something new on the guitar, you have to spend some time training your fingers.  This is the same concept as when you were first learning the guitar.  There is nothing happening here that you haven’t already faced and conquered before.  

Think about when you learned your first chord.  Remember how daunting the concept of chords seemed?  You would see other players running through a seemingly endless variety of chords and you couldn’t imagine how it was possible.  If it took this long to learn one chord, it must have taken them decades to learn so many chords.  But obviously, you eventually realized that wasn’t true.  Once you got the concept of chords down, you could learn new chords in a heartbeat.  It became easy. 

This is also true for learning different types of sweep arpeggios and patterns.  It is exactly the same principle.  Just like with chords, sometimes you have to learn new types that require training your fingers again – think of barre chords.  Sweep picking patterns are no different.  

Just like with when you were first learning chords, when getting into sweep picking, start with something simple to get the basic concept down and branch out from there.  

Okay, here’s the last secret and it’s one you can apply right now: how to practice sweep picking. 

Do you know why so many people try and give up on sweep picking?  The main reason is that, because they don’t know the secrets I already mentioned, they approach practicing it in a ridiculous way.  They try to free climb the sheer cliff.  They simply memorize where the notes go and try to will themselves to play it at full speed, over and over again. 

They might as well be hitting their head against a brick wall, expecting to break through it.  

If you want a good exercise in futility and frustration, try practicing sweep picking this way.  You can spend years on it and, while you might make some progress towards a sloppy mess of a technique, you will never achieve control, fluidity or articulation.  This is because this method isn’t even trying to practice those things.  

However you practice something is how you will learn it.  If you practice it sloppy and out of time, your playing will be sloppy and out of time.  While that may seem obvious while reading that, this is something that must be learned and doesn’t come stock.  

First things first: practice the picking technique of sweep picking.  Get out a metronome (no excuses here – if you have a device that let’s you read this article, you can download a free metronome), mute the strings with your fretting hand and practice sweeping up and down at a slow enough tempo that you can get it perfectly.  Slowly increase the speed in such a way that you are never pushing yourself beyond the ability to play it right.  Do this long enough to at least be comfortable sweeping at a slow tempo.  If this sounds hard, remember that you’re just practicing strumming slowly and focusing on control.  If you can strum, you can sweep pick.

If you approach it correctly, that part will not take long.

Next step: Now, memorize a simple sweep pattern.  Don’t practice it, memorize it.  I mean literally memorize where the notes and fingers go with your fretting hand so you don’t have to look at the tab while practicing it with the metronome.

I recommend starting with a 3-string pattern that doesn’t use rolling barre or extra hammer-ons or pull-offs.  A basic Major arpeggio on the top three strings with a single hammer-pull on the first string is a great way to start.  Pick one that is played somewhere around the 12th fret because the fret distance makes it less of a challenge there. 

Remember that we are simply putting down a foundation for the technique.  If you follow my advice here, we’re talking about memorizing just 4 notes.  

If you believe you have some innate special ability that should allow you to jump forward with something more complicated, then you didn’t understand what I said earlier.  The illusion of “innate ability” is not for us to believe in – it’s strictly for the audience’s enjoyment.  Remember this: a stage magician who believes in their own “supernatural powers” would fail at almost every trick they attempted.

Now comes the fun part: practice sweeping the pattern using the metronome in the same manner as you did when you isolated the sweeping technique.  Start with a tempo that is absurdly easy, play it through until you get 5 perfect iterations in a row and then increase the metronome by just 2 beats per minute.  Repeat this process until you truly can’t get 5 perfect iterations in a row (meaning, try as you might, it’s just not going to happen at that tempo yet) and stop for the day.  On the next day, start a little faster than you started the day before and repeat.

Put a solid 15 minutes a day into this for one full week in addition to whatever else you’re practicing.  

Let’s jump forward that week… woah, looks like sweep picking isn’t so difficult after all…

Have fun!

Dan Mumm

Need some new sweep picking materials?  Check out my massive catalog of guitar related products, covering everything from Metal versions of Classical pieces, Neo-Classical Shred technique, Sweep Picking, and more!  See what’s on sale today at the link below:

www.Sellfy.com/DanMumm