Members VengefulTikiGod Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 So, I play ukulele and I know that there is a HUGE difference in tonal quality between the cheapo strings that come on them and the expensive strings like Worths or Aquilas that serious players use. Is this so with classical guitars too? Every time I walk into a guitar store, the strings on low to mid priced classicals are all very floppy and thin-sounding. The guitar could sound brilliant with good strings on for all I know, but, well, I can't know. Any insight? Are the standard strings, say, a different tension or something, or just generally crap? Or are they really just crappy guitars I've been playing and I should shop around more? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members BROLEX Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 classical guitars are expensive, put it that way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Osmosis Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 So, I play ukulele and I know that there is a HUGE difference in tonal quality between the cheapo strings that come on them and the expensive strings like Worths or Aquilas that serious players use. Is this so with classical guitars too? Every time I walk into a guitar store, the strings on low to mid priced classicals are all very floppy and thin-sounding. The guitar could sound brilliant with good strings on for all I know, but, well, I can't know. Any insight? Are the standard strings, say, a different tension or something, or just generally crap? Or are they really just crappy guitars I've been playing and I should shop around more? You won't find a worthwhile classical guitar at your local guitar center. A high-quality classical guitar has one of the most beautiful, warm timbres you'll ever hear. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 Why do all the classical guitars sound... bad? Tone is in the fingers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members KATMAN Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 I played $400 Cordoba and I thought it sounded ok. You can always buy different strings.That's the first thing I do anyway,unless the guitar has a tag saying what strings they have on. Classical guitar strings come in different tensions. They come in normal,medium,medium hard,and hard tension.I perfer normal tension myself,because I don't play a classical guitar like I do my other acoustics.If I did,I'd sound like Wille! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Guitar_stringer Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 Classical guitars, can be the most beautiful guitars to listen to. A good one that is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members sunshowers Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 Tone is in the fingers. I miss my classical guitar so much... I sold it 8 years ago to a family friend and I think about trying to buy it back every now and then. It wasn't a very expensive one, but damn well made by a Canadian company called La Patrie. It was loud as hell and had the sweetest tone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members VengefulTikiGod Posted April 13, 2009 Author Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 You won't find a worthwhile classical guitar at your local guitar center. A high-quality classical guitar has one of the most beautiful, warm timbres you'll ever hear. Right. That's the tone we hear in recordings and lust after, only to be disappointed at guitar center... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members VengefulTikiGod Posted April 13, 2009 Author Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 Tone is in the fingers. Is that you, Esteban? A good guitarist will still sound better on a quality instrument than a cheap one. I can handle an axe well enough, thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 A good guitarist will still sound better on a quality instrument than a cheap one. Yes. But you said that all classical guitars sounded bad. Which is not true. So I was trying to find out what the common denominator was between all those classical guitars that you played... and here it was: you! All joking aside, I'm not sure what classical guitars you've tried, and I have to admit I have never been impressed by the classical selections in the mainstream US shop I visited. They usually have a few great steel strings, but the classicals all tend to be budget models. Try playing a few higher end ones when you get the chance, to see what a classical guitar can be. Developping an appropriate picking technique still helps, though. On cheap and expensive guitars alike. :poke: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members LaurentB Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 (...)All joking aside, I'm not sure what classical guitars you've tried, and I have to admit I have never been impressed by the classical selections in the mainstream US shop I visited. They usually have a few great steel strings, but the classicals all tend to be budget models. Try playing a few higher end ones when you get the chance, to see what a classical guitar can be.Developping an appropriate picking technique still helps, though. On cheap and expensive guitars alike. :poke: Very true! Classicals often are the budget guitars in shops indeed. But especially the picking technique you mention is also important. I really have to get adjusted when having played my steel string for a while and then switching to my classical, or vice versa. It takes different techniques to make them sound good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members riffmeister Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 Strings make a difference, but most of the inexpensive CG's I've played don't sound so hot (at least the ones in Guitar Center for example). It takes a bit more finesse to build a good sounding CG than a steel string acoustic because the tension is a lot lower with nylon strings. And technique is also a bit more important on a CG than a steel string acoustic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Melodeous Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 I've yet to find a decent CG in any of the main-stream music stores. Come to think of it, I've never played a decent CG for that reason. I've heard plenty of them but that's all. I have a Yamaha and have exhausted the search for strings I thought might make a silk purse from a sow's ear but we guitarists do tend to believe in alchemy. I'm waiting for Riff to put a $2K ding in one of his floor models. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Terry Allan Hall Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 Inexpensive (sub-$1K) CGs are almost always improved considerably by the highest tension string set you can put on them. The higher the tension, the harder the top is driven. Whether or not that'll make enough of an improvement depends on the individual instrument and the player's skill, of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members kwakatak Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 Tone is in the fingers. This. How are you playing them? I'll admit that they don't strum well and require more of a "pluck" (bare finger, very little nail) technique as opposed to using a pick of any type. EDIT: Yamaha Junkie has a nice crossover Epiphone Masterbilt A/E nylon that's pretty nice and didn't cost a lot. He's also been digging up info on similar Yamaha offerings in an effort to stoke up my GAS. (just between the you and me and the rest of us I don't think it's working! ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members darkwaters Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 My first classical was a $500 Yamaha. It took a year for me to get over my delusion that it sounded good. I then bought a $1000 Tak CD132SC cedar top at Steve's in Toronto that is beautiful and sounds great with good volume. I'm not keen on the electronics in it, though, and, in retrospect, I didn't need electronics anyway. Oh well, live and learn. It's a cutaway, which I'm personally a fan of, but classical players, being a generally conservative bunch, despise cutaways and electronics, so if you think you might be selling it again eventually, consider a non-cutaway, non-electronic spruce top capital "C" hand made classical. Bottom line, like others here I agree that in order to get something decent you'll really need to hunt around (maybe even order from away. Grenada, Spain maybe ?) and be prepared to shell out some serious $$$$. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members GuitarVlog Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 But you said that all classical guitars sounded bad. Which is not true. So I was trying to find out what the common denominator was between all those classical guitars that you played... and here it was: you! A friend of mine said he found so many defective classical guitars that buzzed when he played a particular chord on them. It wasn't the guitars, it was his fretting technique. He played my guitars and they buzzed on him. Then I played the same chord on my guitars and they were clean. I've found good-sounding, new, factory-made classical guitars in the sub-$500 range and a few even in the sub-$200 range. It is possible that you are running into instruments with old strings that have been played well past their death. When my local Best Buy opened its music shop just before the holidays, all the display Cordoba classical guitars were fresh with new strings. They sounded very good. Even the CP110 sounded decent. It's now April and I played some that hadn't sold (or were kept as "display and play" samples). They sounded terrible. I visited a small town shop that had a luthier's lower-end guitar. It sounded dull and had been hanging for two years with no string change. The basses were heavily oxidized and it was covered with a lot of dust. The shop owner changed the strings and the guitar blazed to life with deep thundering basses and sweet trebles. Even the shop owner was surprised when I played a simple study. All my classicals are usually strung with hard-tension Savarez carbon trebles (Worth strings are carbons). Basses are either Savarez, D'Addario, Hannabach or Aranjuez. I haven't used Aquila Nylguts but I understand that those are very good strings. Technique is also very important. Knowing how to use flesh-and-nail is critical to tone production. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members simplygoodmusic Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 Remember that if you are playing a guitar with a noisy background, it'll sound tiny no matter what. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Fred Fartboski Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 Why do all the classical guitars sound... bad? Maybe you just don't like the way they sound. What do you expect them to sound like? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Hudman Posted April 13, 2009 Members Share Posted April 13, 2009 Classical guitar is a different animal. You can find a really nice imported steel string for under a $1000 that can compare well to guitars that cost more. You are going to have a hard time finding a classical guitar equal to that sub $1000 steel string. There are decent student classical guitars available in the sub $1000 range. Yamaha has a few models in the $350 - $700 range that get recommended by classical guitar instructors at the college level. Takamine is another popular student level classical guitar in the $350 - $700 range. Godin's LaPatrie line is anothe nice student level guitar in the $400 - $600 range. Alvarez Yari makes some nice classical guitars in the $600 - $1200 range. I played several nice Cordoba classical guitars in the $800 - $1200 range. My pick would be Yamaha. People get tired of the Yamaha recommendations here, but they are hard to beat. They get a lot of respect on the classical guitar forums. Many folks recommend that you play a $300 - $700 Yamaha until you can afford a $3000 + handmade classical. With that being said, as a general rule the strings are bad on EVERY type of guitar at Guitar Center. They don't start off that way...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members VengefulTikiGod Posted April 14, 2009 Author Members Share Posted April 14, 2009 Yes. But you said that all classical guitars sounded bad. Which is not true. So I was trying to find out what the common denominator was between all those classical guitars that you played... and here it was: you! All joking aside, I'm not sure what classical guitars you've tried, and I have to admit I have never been impressed by the classical selections in the mainstream US shop I visited. They usually have a few great steel strings, but the classicals all tend to be budget models. Try playing a few higher end ones when you get the chance, to see what a classical guitar can be. Developping an appropriate picking technique still helps, though. On cheap and expensive guitars alike. :poke: Forgive me, I guess I was implying that all the guitar center ones sounded bad. I have heard nice ones before and man, what a difference. I think the advice about getting a good Yamaha student model and eventually upgrading to a $3k range classical is good. Also, thanks to TAH, I imagine that high tension strings could really help out the situation on the cheaper guitars. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted April 14, 2009 Members Share Posted April 14, 2009 My reaction is also explained by the fact that I'm a Euro and decent classical guitars seem to be easier to find in Europe. Most reasonably-sized cities will have at least one shop that stores good if not outstanding classical guitars. And then I remembered my trips to the US... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Phlat Phive Posted April 14, 2009 Members Share Posted April 14, 2009 Tone is in the fingers. Exactly. Right hand technique is of crucial importance to making a classical guitar sound like a classical guitar, or a flamenco guitar like a flamenco guitar for that matter. Having said that, I usually find the classical guitars I've tried out in non-specialised music shops have old, dead-sounding strings, which will make them sound sub-par in the hands of an experienced player as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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