I’ve been on Team Cheap Guitar for a long time. I own a veritable mom-and-pop shop’s worth of $200-$500 guitars — enough that I’m not entirely sure of the exact count (it’s somewhere north of a dozen). …

Tommy Emmanuel is a guitar icon. If you’ve heard him play, I don’t need to explain. If you haven’t, take some time to watch the above video. (Of course, Mike Dawes is equally amazing, although he has several decades of catching up to do.) But as I was watching…

When I was a kid, the adults in my life often said, “God gave you two ears and one mouth so that you would listen twice as much as you speak.” As a society, many of us seem to have forgotten that message. Much public discourse, to our detriment and…

In many ways, we are living in guitar heaven today. There are countless brands and styles of guitars, almost all of which you can purchase with the click of a button. And these guitars come in all shapes, sizes, and, importantly, prices. In one sense, this is great: you can…

When I was just getting started on the guitar back in the 1990s, cheap guitars were just that — cheap. One of my first guitars was a Squier Stratocaster, and it was not a good guitar. …

I occasionally take a break from my normal guitar-related content to share pieces of my story. This article details my experience leaving the corporate world. I hope it helps those of you who are on a similar journey. -Jon On the morning of January 15, 2021, I drove into my…

I built a guitar from scratch once. It was terrible. The Backstory We were replacing our old dining room table, and I noticed that it was just about half the thickness of an electric guitar. I realized I could probably cut two blanks out of it, glue them together, and have a…

If you’ve ever shopped online for a new guitar, you may have come across a piece of information that you didn’t quite understand. Sites like Sweetwater are great in that they will tell you the exact specifications for any guitar in stock — sometimes down to the exact weight of…

To (mis)quote Ron Burgundy, “It’s kind of a big deal.” If you haven’t come across this, yet, don’t worry — you will. And if you have, you probably have the scars to prove it. It’s perhaps the biggest, most heated debate of them all when it comes to electric guitars…