Budget for your guitar

In terms of acoustic guitars, the quality and type of woods used have an enormous impact on the sound, and if you are in a position to spend thousands of dollars on a high-end guitar with lovingly hand-made solid spruce or cedar top, rosewood neck, ebony fingerboard and finely worked shell inlays, that’s great. The error here is to assume that this is the only kind of guitar to aspire to.

But you do not really have to spend thousands of bucks to aquire your first instrument and still find a more than decent one.

Solid Top Guitar

When you're shopping for a classical guitar the top is, by far, the most important feature. 

The soundboard - also called "top" - is the most vital component because it vibrates like a diaphragm to create the guitar's tone and project your personality. Soundboards in better guitars are made from solid spruce or cedar, soft woods that vibrate easily.

As a solid wood soundboard is played over months, even years, it grows in beauty of tone and volume.

Laminated soundboards are resonate far less than solid wood and don't "break in".

However, plywood is stronger than solid wood and makes a good choice for outdoor use.

Back & Sides

Not only the back and sides, provide a structural support for the soundboard and neck, but they also form a resonating chamber:
- they amplify the sounds from the strings and top.
Rosewood is traditionally used for backs and sides but other hardwoods such as mahogany, are excellent and less expensive alternatives to rosewood. Less expensive guitars - under $1000 - have a plywood back and sides, first of all because it's a cheaper material.
Again, plywood do not have the musical properties of solid hardwood but are stronger, less prone to cracking and relatively inexpensive. Nevertheless, if you can afford it, a well designed and constructed solid wood guitar offers the ultimate tone.

Necks & Fingerboards

Necks can be constructed of mahogany, or cedar. The wood need to be well dried to avoid twisting. On the most expensive model the neck is reinforced with an ebony strip.
Fingerboards are made from dense hardwoods such as ebony or rosewood.
Ebony is preferred due to its durability and stiffness but is a more expensive material.
Rosewood fingerboards are the norm in mid-priced instruments.

Next step in your choice - What kind of sound you want?
Read the article:
- Spruce or Cedar?

Buy Classical Guitars.com

Spruce or Cedar?

A lot of folks are inconditionally love Spruce, others just live by the Cedar...
Where is the truth?

It actually really depends what you are looking for... and you have different qualities of Spruce and Cedar used to build guitars. All with different characteristics.
Let's a take a look.

Spruce (Spruce Top guitar)

Its high stiffness combined with the lightweight characteristics of most softwoods, makes it a natural for high velocity of sound.
A strong fundamental-to-overtone ratio gives Sitka spruce a powerful direct tone capable of retaining its clarity when played forcefully.

Sitka Spruce from North West Canada and Alaska -Its high stiffness combined with the lightweight characteristics of most softwoods, makes it a natural for high velocity of sound.

Red spruce is relatively heavy, has a high velocity of sound, and the highest stiffness across and along the grain of all the top woods.

Like Sitka, is has a strong fundamental, but also a more complex overtone content.

Engelmann Spruce from North America is prized for its similarity in color to European (German) White spruce as well as its extreme lightness in weight which seems to produce a slightly louder and more projective or “open” sound than Sitka spruce.

Cedar (Cedar Top guitar)

Western Red Cedar from Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest of the United States.It has long been used as a soundboard material by classical guitar makers for its vibrance and clarity of sound.

It’s extremely light weight compared to spruce, and the tonal result is a slightly warmer tone, more open response.

An interesting characteristic of Red Cedar is that it sounds broken in, even when it’s new.

Cedar looks a lot like redwood:

darker and reddish compared to spruce.

Since World War II, cedar has been used extensively by makers of classical guitars. Cedar-topped guitars are characteristically lush, dark-toned, and bursting with flavor. They are often less powerful in projection than their spruce cousins, however, and they tend to lose clarity near the top of their dynamic range. Having enough bottom end is never a problem for a cedar guitar, although preventing the sound from getting muddy sometimes is. Because of its pronounced weakness along the grain, I find cedar to be used to its best advantage in smaller-bodied guitars or with non-scalloped braces. Redwood is usually darker in color than cedar and often displays the same general tonal characteristics, leaning slightly toward darker tones, less definition in the bass, and lower velocity of sound.

http://www.buy-classical-guitars.com/