Your correspondent doesn't indicate a price range, and that's pretty critical. His or her decision system needs to include that. There's a big difference between a price range that requires a laminate top, one that can accommodate a Baby Taylor, and something that's over $1000.

First and foremost it depends on in which style of music you intend to play the guitar: thus a flamenco guitar is only moderately suited for a heavy metal group - and an e-guitar is not overly fitting for classical guitar concerts, neither are acoustic (steel-strung) guitars or 12strings.

Are you right- or lefthanded? Although there are a few players that can work with an "upside-down" guitar, choosing a guitar for your handiness is highly recommended unless the guitar is completely symmetrical.

How/where do you intend to mainly use the guitar? A guitar than can be used for camping in rain and sunshine is quite different to an original gut-string renaissance guitar that should not leave well-climated environment (but is nothing for a complete beginner either).

And there's of course the monetary aspect. New guitars start as low as $20 - these are probably only suitable for rainy camping, because the probable loss/destruction of the guitar due to wetness plus hot campfire won't hurt the purse too much. If you seriously consider learning guitar $300 for a "real" guitar will help a lot training your ears for the right tone.

But how to choose? Really do ask a friend or teacher who already is playing the style you want to learn to help you finding a solid (beginner's) guitar. They know what to look and listen for - and if you ask some time in advance they even can prepare and compare prices before visiting a shop. Plus they probably know the shops which have good prices and/or service you might have overlooked. Maybe they even know good sources for used guitars (former pupils or their own instruments), which are considerably cheaper than new instruments.

Basically: ask someone you trust and who knows the stuff you want to learn.

Don't have time for a full answer, so here's the quick list of words that pop into my head to do with guitar choice:

Price (a major factor!)
Music Style (what kind of music, after all even if you choose six string electric you still have the choice of Strat, Telecaster, Les Paul, etc.)
Acoustic
Electric
Seven string electric
12 string (acoustic or electric)
semi-acoustic
pickups
materials (for acoustic, different woods, different compositions have different tones/sound)
string type (nylon/steel/bronze/silver)
cutaway (on an acoustic, allowing access to higher frets)
lap steel
pedal steel
resonator (dobro/national/resophonic etc.)
Hawaiian slack-key
Bottleneck guitar
travel (small bodied acoustic, small electric, folding electric guitars etc.)
auto tune (small motors that tune the guitar for you)
Tenor (four string, favoured by people like Martin Carthy OBE)
baritone/longneck (usually at least two more frets than a standard guitar so tunes down to a D rather than an E)
body size (if you look at Martin Guitars you'll find they come in at least four or five different body sizes from travel/baby/parlour up to the dreadnaught/grand auditorium sizes)
neck profile (very important, especially on electric guitars, but also for acoustic)
humidity (some guitars will handle excessively dry or moist areas better than others)
double neck (six+twelve, six+bass etc.)
synth control (midi or Roland controller), real guitar with sensors or specialist synth guitar like synthaxe or Casio DG-20
whether the guitar should be new, used or collectable
bass four string/five string/six string (etc.!)
fretted/fretless
chapman stick (electric guitar variant designed for hammering on with both hands)
harp guitar (multiple strings with resonators etc.)
Ashbory bass (a bass guitar with thick rubber bands for strings, sounds more like an acoustic upright bass than an electric bass guitar)
lute/other historic or world variant (Mexican Mariachi bands with the big acoustic bass guitars, portugese guittarre or however they are spelled, cuatro etc.)

not even thinking about the case!

Hope that either helps or shows that the the decision tree is MUCH bigger and complex than you might have thought at first glance.

So for his decision tree, you could end up with

Music style: Jimi Hendrix
Which gives
Electric
Six string
Stratocaster style
And then there's price, quality, woods, colour and a whole bunch of other issues. Even getting it down to Fender, white, still leaves the choice between the inexpensive Squier model (100 pounds UK) up to a Fender Custom Shop model (maybe three thousand pounds) or a vintage collectable (up to 20,000 pounds and beyond). But in the "under 1000 pounds/dollars" there will still be several choices (which pickups, which wood for the body, which wood for the neck, what thickness of frets, which tuners, which bridge, which strings etc.)

First, consider: what do you plan to use the guitar for? Is this a guitar on which to learn, or is it a guitar with which to perform? If the latter, are we talking coffee houses or concert halls? There are plenty of relatively cheap guitars that are good for learning.

Play a lot of guitars in the store. Find out which ones feel good to your hands. The action (height of the strings, roughly) can be changed, but playing around can help you to figure out how high or low of action is good for you.

Listen to the sound quality. Some people like brighter sounds, some mellower. If you can't hear the difference, it might not yet make much difference which guitar you pick as a starter guitar (as long as the action is reasonable). String gauge (and newness) also makes a difference in the brightness of a guitar.

Tune the guitar. Make sure that the tuning pegs move smoothly. Play the guitar. Make sure the tuning holds. (Note that either just-put on strings or old strings will not sound great - just-put-on strings stretch, and don't hold tune for perhaps the first day unless you know how to help them stretch more quickly. Old strings will stay at the pitch they're set to, but tend to be difficult to tune to the right pitch).

If you want a really good guitar, I can now (after a fifteen minute lesson a few weeks ago from the guitar repair man) describe some of the finer points to look at. However, from the question I'm guessing that this is someone looking for a first guitar.

Sort of touched on in other comments, but as he is a cadet in the miltary...

When you are traveling at a moments notice, with limited weight and/or storage space, size matters.

What braider said, plus I'd really put emphasis on picking a guitar which is what /you/ (the person buying it) want. My first (and only) 6-string acoustic only cost 115 pounds (about US$200 at the time) but was the one /I/ liked out of the range in the shop. Also note that things like action (how high the strings are off the frets), what weight and type of strings you like and to an extent the tuning can and should be adjusted by a person skilled at "setting up" the guitar after purchase. New guitars, particularly the low end 'production' models, often have very high action because it's easier to lower it to taste than to raise it. My guitar effectively tripled in value with a 50 pound ($90) setup by a guitar repairer recommended by the shop.

You've gotten some really complicated (but absolutely right on target) answers from a lot of knowledgeable people. I'm going to go into the exact opposite space and simplify things a little, so you don't put so much time and effort into trying to decide that you eventually give up because it isn't worth said effort. Note: I have been playing guitar for 48 years, playing a *lot* of professional gigs for 38 of them (and some earlier than that) and have taught guitar for a local community college.

This will be your first guitar. I have had much better results teaching people on acoustic guitars (even if they and I all know that they'll be playing electric in six months) than starting on electrics. I've also had better results teaching people on cheap nylon-string guitars (sometimes called "classical guitars," sometimes called "nylon stringed folk guitars") than on cheap steel-strings. A cheap steel stringed guitar is likely to be extremely hard to play, putting grooves in your fingers and being hard to keep in tune. A cheap nylon string guitar will be far easier to play, and because there will be less tension on the neck, it's not going to warp and be harder to keep in tune over the first year you have it (or any other period of time). I would say that a $100 nylon string guitar will be on a par, for playability and sound, with a $250 steel string guitar. Note: Buying a guitar made for steel strings and putting nylon strings on it generally doesn't work, though there are a few exceptions; having a friend right there in your home town will help you decide if there is an exception there, or not.

And thanks immensely to vampirdaddy (whom I don't know) for mentioning the issue that you might be left-handed. It is standard for guitar teachers to tell lefties, "Play right-handed. Your left hand will be doing the fretting, which is the hard part, and you'll eventually be better off.)" Unfortunately, this is nonsense. I know a good number of left-handers who play right-handed; usually they are extremely musically frustrated people who have difficulty synchronizing rhythms with other musicians and can't improvise. Yeah, it works *occasionally* -- Glen Campbell is left-handed playing right, and when you connect with your first guitar teacher, he or she may have another example in your home town -- but there are far more uncomfortable and frustrated lefties who tried to play right-handed and found out that it only just barely worked. I don't know that much about the "upside down" variety, though a folkie I like and respect, Bill Staines, plays upside-down -- but Staines tells the lefties he talks to that they would be better off playing "full lefty," strings reversed to make the guitar a mirror image of a right-handed one, as it's less limiting.

As far as "base" -- don't even think about it at this point. This instrument is generally called "electric bass," and if you aren't sure that's what you want to play (unless some friends want you to be the bass player in their band), go with a regular guitar. You can learn bass later, once you know a bit more about what a bass is and does. It's *not* a good instrument with which you accompany your own favorite songs in a music circle; yeah, a circle with one good bass player can sound better than a circle without one, but the bassist needs to play well and have an excellent ear; it might go better to play guitar for six months or a year first, even if playing bass like Paul McCartney is your long-term goal -- learn to become a musician first, and *then* pick up the bass instrument, which will stretch your musicianship. So yeah, I'm going to be consistent -- buy a nylon string guitar and get someone to show you some stuff.

If you need any more help from me, my LJ handle is markiv1111 and my name is Nate Bucklin. Regards to all (and, "ohiblather" -- yes, I read your posts!)

Nate

I have this really nice used Taylor for sale.....

Bill, I'm curious. I said a few different things on the nylon vs. steel string issue. Which of them might you differ on? I *think* I said I have had better luck teaching beginners with cheap nylon string guitars than beginners with cheap steel stringed guitars; I'm not sure how that's amenable to disagreement at all. I also said that a $100 nylon string guitar is equivalent to a $250 steel string guitar; if this is cause for disagreement, I'd like to know what you base this disagreement on. Something I did *not* say, but which we may very well agree on (perhaps to your surprise?) is that with the overwhelming majority of folksingers and related basic players going for steel strings, you may as well start with a steel string guitar and get used to it, and this way, you're far less likely to need to "upgrade" your guitar six months to a year down the line. But I'd like to keep the topic open, not because I want to use my experience to trump everybody else, but because I actually discuss teaching issues with other people quite seldom, leading me to feel I *need* outside input, just to keep my opinions a bit more balanced. Bill, please get back to me on this; I really do want to know.

Regards,


Nate

And now, for the non-professional, non-musician view:

About eighteen years ago, I bought a guitar. Standard $100 nylon-stringed cheapie, to be honest; I was a teenager then and couldn't afford much better. And for what I did with it (one college-level guitar class plus some occasional plinking at it), it was fantastic. It moved around with me when I moved, it made a great decoration when I wasn't using it, it gave my friends another toy to play with when we were all screwing around in the house, and it held up to nicks and dings and other assorted and sundry learner's mistakes quite well. My major complaint? I had tiny hands, and I quite literally could not totally encircle the neck of the guitar with my hand, so I had to modify my fingering entirely to make up chords and the like... but it kept me creative.

When I got married, my wedding gift from a couple friends was a proper steel-string guitar in a beautiful carry bag. Beautiful woodwork, gorgeous sound... they quite likely spent around $600 on it, all things told, and it both acted and sounded like it. It was a little more temperamental, it needed to be tuned more regularly, and it needed to be handled with a lot more care.

And you know what? I barely used that guitar. I mean, yes, I /did/ play the steel-string, but my old nylon was my kick-around-and-goof-off guitar. If it weren't for the fact that eventually the cheap glue joint at the base of the neck worked its way free, and the nylon-string is currently sitting in its case in two pieces, I'd probably still be goofing off with that guitar more often.

I appreciate the music my steel-string makes; when treated with the right respect, the tonal quality is fantastic, the strings are little chimes of joy. But sometimes, you don't need something that great for someone who isn't that great of a player, and in my case, I think I matched my $100 nylon-string guitar fairly well. :)