As fun as purchasing a new guitar can be, sometimes this isn’t the most sensible move! Here are four reasons why, and don’t worry I’ve made all of these mistakes!
Distraction from practise
Sometimes you can become convinced that you need a new guitar to improve your playing, or to play a certain song. Whilst this can be true, such as you’re trying you play a song that features a heavy use of a tremolo and you don’t play a guitar with a tremolo, or you want to play a song in an alternate tuning but you own a guitar with a locking tremolo so you can’t change the tuning easily, but these scenarios are not common. Usually the current guitar or guitars we own are adequate for the job, but we convince ourselves they’re not because we want to distract ourselves from the real answer to the problem. Practise, practise and more practise!
Option paralysis
Sometimes having lots of guitars is fun, but you can end up worrying about what guitar to play rather than worrying about what you’re playing or what to practise. I’ve been in this predicament a few times, quite often you need not do what we end up doing, play guitar. You can just spend half an hour picking different guitars and then not getting into a settled practise routine.
Space
This one is simple, I’m quite lucky to have my own Home Studio space, but even then I have to be careful so I don’t fill up my room with guitars! When I used to live in house shares I had to get creative and keep guitars in wardrobes and under the bed, often these are guitars I didn’t need or play. They just sat there taking up space.
Because you have the money to spend and you want one
This one is cheating a little bit as it’s the same as the last reason of the previous blog, but it’s true in this situation as well. Sometimes we get a little bit of money and we want to spend it, and usually it’s on a guitar. The problem with this is that sometimes we end up buying something for the sake of it and it never gets played!
So there are four reasons why buying a new guitar can be a bad idea, I hope this has been of help. Make sure you check back next week to catch my next blog post!