Hey guitar enthusiasts, welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about acoustic
Now everything in life has trade-offs and that is no exception with guitar. There are definitely
pluses and minuses to an acoustic guitar. There are definitely pluses and minuses to the electric
guitars you see behind me. So why don't we start off with the acoustic guitar since that's the one
that's in my hand. So my acoustic guitar here, the pro is that it's pretty loud without an
amp. Now electric guitars, you usually have to go and buy an amp to hear it where an acoustic
you can get away without an amp. So it's one less piece of equipment that you need. Another
pro about an acoustic guitar is that the strings are thicker which means you're going to build
your calluses on your fingertips much faster on an acoustic guitar versus an electric guitar.
One additional pro about an acoustic guitar is that the strings are more forgiving than the
string noise with electric guitars. usually you're plugging them into amps and these amplifiers these
pickups so you can see on my electric guitars here i have these little pickups all right that send
a signal into the amplifier well when you make a mistake the amplifier amplifies that mistake
the other thing is that mistake keeps ringing and depending on how good your pickups are
it can ring for a very long time and cause kind of muddy sounds and distortions on your guitar
and make your chords not sound as good now with the acoustic guitar that can still happen but
it's a little bit more forgiving and can make you sound a little bit better at the beginner stages
now let's talk about the cons of the acoustic guitar so a con of the acoustic guitar is because
the strings are thicker yes you can build more calluses faster but the trade-off is it requires
more hand strength to play the strings now you could always go and put lighter gauge strings
on your acoustic guitar to make it easier to play but if you're an older player or someone who has
weaker hands i often recommend that you go to an electric style guitar just because the strings
are much thinner and it's usually much easier to play in the beginning than the acoustic guitar
now a pro is that because the acoustic guitar is harder to play if you practice something on an
acoustic guitar first and then you take it over to one of your electric guitars it's going to
be a lot easier on the electric so that's kind of a practice tip i use with beginners practice
something on the acoustic guitar so if you're working on your chord changes say you're working
on this c this g to c chord change okay and you're going back and forth and it's really hard on the
acoustic do that for a couple minutes then bring it over to one of your electric guitars here and
try it for a couple minutes on the electric guitar and you might notice that it's a lot faster i used
to do this a lot with students when we would learn guitar solos because it's again harder to play a
solo or play a riff on an acoustic guitar so if you really push yourself to go as fast as you
can on the acoustic when you take yourself over to the electric it's going to be a lot easier to play
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just like this now with the electric guitars like i said the pros are that
it's a lot easier to play the strings are much thinner and you can do other things much easier
on an electric guitar for example like bending strings if you're going to get into playing solos
it's much easier to bend a string on an electric guitar versus an acoustic guitar and if you've
been doing string bends you know it can be very hard sometimes to get those bends into tune
it's much harder to get them in tune on the acoustic than it is with an electric now the
other cool thing about the electric is that you can plug it into an amplifier and you can add
some really cool effects you can do that with an acoustic but i think the electric guitar is served
much better with effects pedals wawas um all kinds of distortion effects things that you can add
to change the sound of your guitar now the downside of a lot of electric guitars is the setup
electric guitars can tend to be a little bit more maintenance why if you see down here on my gretch
i have this bridge and on my ibanez here i have this bridge here now over time things expand and
contract and this happens with acoustic guitars too usually acoustic guitars you can adjust the
truss rod and you're going to be pretty good but sometimes with electric guitars they require
a complete setup which means we have to do some intonation work so a luther or someone who does a
guitar setup would adjust these bridge pegs these settings down here for your strings to make sure
that the guitar stays in tune not only from fret 1 all the way down to fret 12 and beyond now in
terms of maintaining your strings and keeping your guitar clean there's really no difference there
just understand that you know there might be a little bit more maintenance requirements
on electric guitars because of the electronics and the way the bridges are set up now i want to
talk about a con for electric guitars i know is a con for me um you can see here i have an electric
guitar this is my um duo jet my gretch my george harrison it is it's hollow inside it's a hollard
chamber guitar what we would call a hollow body guitar and this makes the guitar much
lighter i have a very hard time playing something like a les paul because electric guitars this one
it's solid wood so it's it's much heavier it's a solid piece of wood this ibanez is actually very
very thin this is the ibanez sa series i can't play really thick electric guitars because the
weight of the guitar puts a lot of stress on my shoulder and it wasn't very comfortable for me
but the great thing about electric guitars versus the acoustic is that there are so
many options i mean there's options on acoustic but in terms of like colors and
styles electric guitars are where it's at so if you're someone who likes the style of an acoustic
but you like the playability of an electric you might want to go with something like a
semi hollow you know acoustic electric or what we call a hollow body electric guitar
the fretboard is set up with the playability of an electric guitar but it is hollow so it's a little
bit louder you may not need an amp i would still recommend getting an amp but it kind of is a happy
medium between a solid body electric guitar and a full-blown acoustic guitar hey guitar enthusiasts
just wanted to let you know if you're new to guitar i do have an absolutely free guitar crash
course just go to laurenbateman.com backslash crash course and you can sign up there it's
absolutely free and we'll get you started so which one should you start with as a beginner guitar
player honestly that's up to you if you're someone who's more into singer songwriter style of music
then i would definitely go with an acoustic guitar especially if you're going to do a lot
of finger picking if you're someone who's into classic rock rock and roll the blues
i would probably pick up a hollow body electric or a solid body electric with a really nice amp
but ultimately i always tell students you should have at least one acoustic guitar
and one electric guitar just for the practice reasons i talked about alone earlier in this video
so those are the pros and cons of electric guitars versus acoustic guitars don't forget to like this
video guys i hope you appreciate the content that i put out here youtube's gonna throw a couple more
videos up there go check those out and i hope to see you guys in another lesson video real soon