Start your rock and roll career with an acoustic guitar

Start your rock and roll career with an acoustic guitar

Who doesn't want to play a guitar? The guitar has become the de facto universal symbol of the contemporary musician, rock and roll of course, starting sometime in the 1940's with the appearance of folk and country singers in the United States. Although the guitar appeared on the entertainment stage before 1950, the appearance of Elvis Presley with his gyrating hips and slender figure, strumming a guitar and handling it as if holding a lover, along with his mellifluous voice, set the guitar as the indispensable accompaniment to rock and roll singers on the entertainment stage, perhaps forever more. Thanks to Elvis and those earlier rockers who followed him, the guitar has gained an unprecedented popularity that still holds today. Those who aspire to entertain in the rock industry know that being able to play the guitar is surely a requirement if one is to find their own place among the stars.

You will have to learn to play the guitar before you can start wooing those rock lovers that cover the globe. You'll need your own guitar. You can find a good teacher or you can teach yourself. There are many good teachers and many effective self-teaching courses to be found. Most teachers will expect you to have your own acoustic guitar; the electric guitar requires a guitar amplifier, equipment you don't want to be lugging around. Elvis did not use an electric guitar, but an acoustic one, and he used an electric guitar amplifier to raise the volume of the vibrating strings so as to be competitive with the throbbing of the drums. The volume of vibrating strings is not very loud. If you strung six strings up and down a pole, you would barely be able to hear their vibrations when you plucked them. That is why the body of the acoustic guitar is hollow. This hollow body serves as a guitar amplifier; the vibrations of the strings are translated from the strings into sound waves within the hollow body, and the guitar wood vibrates, causing sound waves to be cast inside the body and projected out through the round hole.

At first consideration, you may conclude that relying on the hollow body of an acoustic guitar to be the guitar amplifier is not in line with rock and rolls' reputation for being, among other things, a loud music, that you simply cannot perform on stage without an electric guitar. The electric guitar does not rely at all on the body of the guitar to project sound. It consist of a solid guitar body with rectangular microphones to pick up the vibrations of the strings, and on an electric guitar amplifier to project the sound. You know you'll need an electric guitar sooner or later, so why not just start off with an electric guitar? Spending money on an acoustic guitar that will never be used on stage seems like a waste of money. Loudness is, after all, a quality of rock and roll that cannot be ignored.
There is a simple solution: an electrical guitar amplifier for acoustic guitars. It consist of a microphone and the amplifier connected to speakers. There's not much difference between an electric guitar and an acoustic one that's electrically amplified. In fact, the acoustics produced by a hollow body are of a much greater quality than a solid body guitar. You may find that the acoustic guitar you start with may be adequate for your performances throughout your entire career. Start with an acoustic guitar and, if it becomes necessary, go electric later. And one more nice thing about an acoustic guitar that you don't get with an electric one is the ability to play it anywhere, relying on the acoustics hollow body to be the only amplifier you need. Go acoustic first.