Any guitar you care to think about is online in a virtual guitar store, there are some real bargains to be had online, but there are some real advantages in visiting a bricks and mortar guitar store to actually feel the guitar you’re interested in.

Some of the reasons to visit a guitar storing person:

• Touching and feeling

Every guitar is different, two guitars may look the same, be made from the same materials and have the same brand or maker and size of strings, but one will always sound better to a particular player than the other. This does not mean one is inferior or worth more or less, it’s an individual taste thing only musicians will understand. The other guitar will appeal more to another player, every guitar has a personality of its own.

Regardless how long you spend online you cannot get that feel just from a monitor

• Online research

It’s a very good idea before you go into a guitar store to take a look online at the selection and prices of the guitars in your area. That way you will already have a good idea of what’s available and the prices you will expect to pay or different guitars.

You can quickly see what’s available that will suit the type of music you want to play.

• Check out all the guitar stores

The more guitar stores you visit, the better the chances of finding a guitar that suits you in the price range you have budgeted for. It’s always worthwhile going into a guitar store during their quiet times as then you will be more likely get better service and the sales people will be less stressed, so more inclined to accommodate you,

Ask you can try a few different guitars, if they say that they do not allow people to try them, then you’re in the wrong store so find a better one. Most of the sales people in music stores are accomplished musicians themselves so understand how important it is to sample a good selection of guitars to make an educated choice

• Negotiate a deal

Often the price of popular guitars in a guitar store will be a little higher than on found online, this is often because of the lower overheads of internet marketing, but when dealing with a guitar shop you have the advantage of being able to negotiate a reduced price or score some freebees, such as guitar strings, a guitar strap, maybe even music lessons. Take a copy of the advertised online price as a bargaining point they may want to reach a compromise.

It’s always a good idea to be on good terms with the local guitar store in case you need repairs or help in the future

Most guitar stores are now online so you can do a personal run through first, then take advantage of the benefits of online shopping once you know exactly what you want.

Learning to play the ukulele can be a whole lot of fun and also a little challenging. Because a ukulele is easy and quick to learn it’s an ideal first instrument. Most students can learn a simple tune in their first lesson. Playing a ukulele can bring the player and also those listing a lot of pleasure and cheer up your mood quickly. Almost any tune can be played using the ukulele with a few modifications that you will soon learn. Music helps to release a chemical in the brain called dopamine, which are pleasant, natural mood regulators as well as endorphins which are known as the happy hormones because their effect is to cause people to feel happy.

The sound a ukulele makes is a very pleasant, uplifting and happy sound like most of the Hawaiian sounding music usually played on a ukulele. Finding a ukulele for sale is not hard, in fact, you can easily get a quality ukulele online from Guitars 4 U at a very reasonable cost.

Learning the ukulele

A ukulele is a small instrument that is ideal for young people or people with small hands. As there are only four strings on a ukulele and the strings are made of nylon they are much easier to strum and press the fingers down on the frets to produce the right notes.

There are a lot of simple tunes that can be played on the ukulele with many chords or sounds made using only one finger. This means you can learn a simple tune very quickly and then because this gives most students a great sense of achievement early on, they are encouraged by their success to advance quickly and tend to derive a large amount of pleasure from their lessons.

Mood booster

There is no doubt that learning a low key instrument such as a ukulele helps with a student’s mental development and encourages them to form a desire to learn more complicated instruments like the guitar or piano, learn to sing and enjoy music in general.

It also helps with their social development and interaction with other people so music students tend to feel closer to others that they interact with and to form more meaning full and satisfying relationships that involve higher elements of trust, empathy, respect and cooperation.

These life skills are vital for growing peoples all round development and future happiness making learning the ukulele not only pleasurable, but healthy.

Purchasing a ukulele

When are looking for a ukulele for sale or you want to purchase a ukulele you will find a great, reasonably priced, quality selection on our site, Guitars 4 U have a good look at all the different models and sizes in our online selection and contact us through the contact page for any questions or queries. If you don’t find what you want or a suitable ukulele, we will try and locate one for you.

Yearning to play the ukulele is an enjoyable pastime and can open the doors to a full and satisfying appreciation of music in all its forms. Many people who start playing the ukulele progress to the guitar and other musical instruments. If you’re looking for a good quality reasonably priced ukulele Guitars 4 U have a fantastic range online for you to view and purchase.

Buying a new guitar from a shop can be exciting and sometimes challenging.

These top tips will help you choose the best guitar for you from the guitar shop.

Guitars are crafted instruments that rely on science and the skill of the crafts-people creating them to give them the right feel and sounds that make them a pleasure to play and listen to.

Just like the guitar payer’s, each guitar has its own distinctive sound and qualities, but there are guitars of better quality than others, not all guitars are the right match for everyone, so there some things you can do to find the right one for you.

If you’re at the beginning stages of learning to play a guitar, you will want to find a guitar that feels comfortable for you to hold and strum. The neck should be of a size that allows you to reach around and across the fretboard with your fingers. If you have large hands, you will probably need a normal sized to wide neck, but with a small hand a thinner neck may be more appropriate.

Once you have been playing for a while, your fingers will be a lot stronger and more flexible so the things you will be looking for being more subtle, such as the tone of the guitar and the sounds it makes for you.

Have you decided on the type of guitar you need? It really depends on which type of music you wish to play. Maybe you prefer an acoustic, classical or a guitar that has an amplifier pickup.

• An electric guitar has many advantages, but also has limitations, so you need to carefully consider which you want. Maybe an amplified acoustic guitar will provide the right sounds for you.

Tone and Sound

Guitars are made using different materials with wood being the most popular as it’s a great medium for sound transfer and responsiveness. Some types of wood give a guitar a bright sound while others allow for deeper richer tones.

• Ash wood gives a bright sound and helps sustain chords and notes
• Alder is a light wood that has a nice balance between rich tones, high, midrange and low frequencies
• Basswood provides balanced and warmer tones, it’s often in mixed wood guitars
• Mahogany is extremely resonant and produces rich and twangy sounds
• Maple is often used on the neck and fretboard and provides bright sounds that can balance a guitar’s tone
• Rosewood is usually used on the fretboard to provide a rich and velvety sound

Electric Guitars

Tonal wood is much less important with electric guitars as their sound is more electronic by nature. The important thing with an electric guitar is the strength of the guitar frame to support the strings and electronic components as well as being comfortable to play and listen to.

Harmonics and tone

When choosing a guitar, the harmonics and tone a player can produce on a given guitar is a major consideration along with the ease and comfort of playing

The reality is that the best guitar from a guitar shop is not the cheapest or the most expensive guitar, but the guitar that fits the size and style of the person playing and the amount of enjoyment it brings to everyone. In short, when it comes to buying a guitar, it’s really a matter of personal preference, style and fit as well as available budget.

Playing guitar for beginners should be a fun, exciting and enjoyable experience, but there are a few very common mistakes people can make when first starting out that if avoided will increase the likely hood you will continue playing and enjoying this fantastic musical instrument

Holding your guitar properly

It can be challenging for new players to learn how to hold their guitar correctly. The curves of a guitar when held properly hug your body and feel natural, but sometimes this takes practice and technique to master. When you’re standing you can use the guitars curves to hug your rib cage, when sitting the curve forms to your knee as well as rib cage allowing your arms to be free and your hands will be able to develop better strumming and fret work techniques

Forgetting to tune your guitar each time you play

All guitars go out of tune, some when you putthem down or pick them up again to play so before you start playing you need to check and re-tune or make fine adjustments. This will improve the sound you’re making.

Learn proper techniques

When you teach yourself or learn from friends or videos, it can be difficult to learn the proper strumming and picking techniques as well as to make good chord changes. A professional teacher will help you master your technique early as once you have learnt an imperfect method, it can be very hard to re-learn the correct way. Learning the proper fingering techniques for playing chords makes playing much easier and more enjoyable

Learn to use the Barre Chord method

Barre chords a played by holding your finger across the frets while placing the other fingers in the appropriate positions for the tune you’re playing. Once you master this technique, it will really help you improve your playing

Don’t try to learn from too many people

It’s important to learn the basic playing technique from a competent professional teacher, once you have become comfortable with a concept you can move on to another. A technique that works well for one person may not work for you, A professional teacher will be able to help you develop your own unique style, too many different styles can cause confusion and result in a muddled style that’s hard to play

Avoiding playing in front of others

When you play in front of other people it helps to build your confidence, especially when playing in a group

Avoiding learning theory

Sometime learning theory can be a little boring, but when you have a good understanding of guitar theory, it helps you with your ability to perform chord progressions and improve your overall playing

Not building on what you already know

When you feel you have mastered one concept, it’s time to stretch your knowledge and abilities and try to push yourself to learn new things, innovative techniques and methods so you’re playing improves and advances. Don’t just keep playing or practicing the same old scales, chords tunes or songs. That way you will keep up your interest and develop your own personal style.

Guitar playing for beginners needs to be fun and light hearted as well as being done in a responsible and professional way to ensure new players don’t learn bad habits or techniques that will hold back their guitar playing enjoyment and development.

Guitar strings don’t only need to be changed when the break, but they also need to be changed when they get older; they lose their sound quality and become dull.

Most well made guitars improve with age, but guitar string’s do not, as they age their intonation and tone are affected by the buildup of oils from the fingers along with sweat and dust causing the strings to sound dull and become difficult to play as well as being prone to breaking.

When you fit new strings the tone improves, becoming brighter and it’s easier to play with less stress on the fingers and stays in tune longer.

Some things to keep in mind when changing your guitar strings

If you don’t replace your strings correctly, your guitar will be hard to tune and will detune easily.

There is a variety of string brands available, it’s a matter of personal tasted which brand you find the best.

String Composition

Electric and Acoustic guitar strings are made with a central core of metal, usually high carbon steel that has wire wound around it. The type of wire wrapped around the core determines the sound of the guitar.

Some types of guitar strings are:

• Nickel, usually used for electric guitars
• Stainless Steel gives a brighter tone
• Phosphor Bronze gives a warmer tone and is usually used on acoustic guitars
• Nylon is usually used on classical guitars and ukuleles

String Gauge or diameter

Guitar strings usually come in sets, although you can purchase individual strings if required. These sets are referenced by the diameter of the first or smallest string and the last string, so an example of a set of string sizes would be 009-042.

Beginners usually start with lighter strings as they are easier to play and reduce the pressure on your fingers. As you get used to playing, you can increase the gauge of the strings to suit your musical taste and style

Replacing your Guitar Strings

Unless you have a very cheap or old guitar it is safe to remove all the strings at once

• First, remove all the strings
• Polish your guitar to remove any dirt or grime
• Then, secure the 6^th string tailor bridge of your guitar
• Place the string through the tuning peg and align it with the nut slot
• Pull the string through until you have about 5cm or 2 inches of distance to the fretboard when you pull it away. This will give you about 3 revolutions of the tuning peg
• Bend the string towards the right and pass it under the string to form a loop
• Bend the string sharply upward and hold it in place while turning the peg in a clockwise direction. Ensure the winding goes downwards and using a guitar tuner, turn the peg to get the correct pitch
• Pull the string outwardly at the midway point to stretch it and then retune it repeating until it stays in tune after repeated stretches
• Cut the string excess so it leaves a small tail that is out of the way
• Repeat for the remainder of the strings

An acoustic guitar, as well as electric guitar, needs the strings replaced on average every three months to ensure your continued playing pleasure and avoid any breakages when playing.

Knowing when to change your acoustic guitar strings comes from experience, but until you discover for yourself how often you need to change strings a god rule of thumb is to change them every three months or 100 hours of playing time. This is simply because strings tend to wear out by playing or by the atmospheric conditions and break down.

If you take good care of your acoustic guitar strings, they can last a lot longer, but often older strings don’t sound so good, they are hard to get in tune and keep there and they become prone to breaking. Often they will not feel right to the touch, so make playing more difficult

• What Happens to Acoustic Guitar Strings

These are the signs that your acoustic guitar strings are wearing down and may need replacement

1. Corrosion

The moisture in the air starts to rust your acoustic guitar string after you first start playing, this is accelerated because of the moisture from your fingertips as you play is also very corrosive and adds to the condition. This moisture slowly attacks your guitar strings, killing the quality of the tone and their strength

• Kinks

As the strings come into contact with the metal frets wire on your acoustic guitar, causing very small dents to form along the string’s length. After a while, these dents start to weaken the string and change the feel and tone of your acoustic guitar. Eventually, they will cause the string to break, often suddenly while playing

• Loose Windings

An acoustic guitar has treble and bass strings, the treble strings are constructed from a single strand of wire, but the bass strings are made using a thin wire cord with another wire tightly wrapped around them to allow them to each the correct gauge or thickness

On a standard acoustic guitar, there are usually four base or wound strings and two treble or plain strings.

Over time and with use the sting’s windings become loose, which causes the string to become unpredictable both in sound and strength so they are likely to break or fall apart.

With nylon strings the windings can break off and leave the nylon core intact

Protect Your Acoustic Guitar Strings

You can help to prolong the life of your strings if you wipe them down properly using a soft cloth such as an old t shirt or a special thin cloth sold for this purpose.

Conditioning Your Acoustic Guitar Strings

You can purchase special guitar string oil conditioners that are designed to place a thin coating of protective oil on them to prevent corrosion from both your fingers and the air

The amount of time you spend playing your guitar can affect the time your strings will last. Most professional players who play often would likely change strings before each new playing session because they do not want them to break while playing. Most amateur players will find every three months about the average.

When you should change your acoustic guitar strings is largely a personal decision that’s based on your playing times, style and preference. Some players like to use specially coated strings like those commonly found on new guitars in music shops, others prefer uncoated acoustic guitar strings.