a new classical guitar recommendation

[voxss]

NUAGES.......Awesome

[grahambop]

NUAGES.......Awesome

Thanks very much! Now if I could just get some more time to learn some CLASSICAL pieces on the damn thing, it would be great!

I do play some classical pieces but not perfectly enough to record them to my satisfaction.

[ooglybong]

I actually have another similar story, and it was actually when I bought my first classical guitar. I needed to buy a "student grade" classical guitar (which you were talking anywhere from $1000-$2000, at that time anyways in 1999). I hooked up with the guitar teacher at the local university a few months before I started going there (transferring over from a community college). He was nice enough to go with me to look at some guitars in another city even...We drove like 100 miles to San Francisco to look at some guitars. The first place we went to was a luthier's studio in Berkeley (Marc Silber). We tried out a couple guitars and one really stood out as having a great tone. We then went to Guitar Solo in SF, which is a pretty well known classical guitar store. We tried out some guitars there and some we tried out were even from world famous guitar luthiers (not like I was actually going to buy one of those haha). Some of the guitars we tried out were like $5k+ and from famous luthiers in Spain and Germany etc...At the end of our trip we all were in unanimous agreement that one guitar stood out above all of the ones we tried (my teacher's wife who was a clarinetist with an M.M. in music, gave her opinion too, she judged the guitars purely on sound). Guess which one we all agreed sounded the best? The first one we tried out at the luthier's studio that was also, ironically, the cheapest one we tried out the entire day. It just had the most beautiful tone I had heard the entire day. It had the nicest richest bassiest tone of all the guitars due to the cocobolo wood used, and being a jazzer at that time, I had a preference for a bassier tone. My guitar teacher, who had a D.M.A in guitar performance btw, told me "If you ever decide to sell it, call me first ok?". The moral of the story: buy a guitar based on your testing it out, not based on the price or the brand.

I have a GREAT Yamaha CG-160S. Supposedly, it’s a beginner’s guitar, from what I gather. But it’s not really…...

I returned from National Guitar Summer Workshop " in Summer, 1987, from studying jazz, but they had also had a Classical Guitar Seminar going on at the same time. They played every day in a little campus stone chapel, and the natural sound in the room was (pardon the pun) heavenly. I dropped in a few times that week just to soak up that sound. Ahhh…

So I returned home and decided to get myself a classical, just for fun. My friend and I went out on that hot, dreary, damp day in August, went to maybe five stores, and literally every nylon sting we tried seemed to sound like crap, dull and thick, little resonance, plus most had neck issues with all the humidity. Buzzy-fret City everywhere. I almost gave up, but at the last store we stopped in, they had this cheap-but-minty Yamaha, hung waaaay down back with their “rejects” in the used section, and I figured: why not try one more?

I can recall the moment like it was just yesterday: I strummed a chord, played a few lower notes…… and a snare drum parked but ten feet away resonated with the guitar! I kid you not. And somehow, there were zero neck issues, too, every fret ringing clearly with great intonation. Plus it had a wonderful tone (and even on THAT day). It was only $169 in dead mint condition, and I bought a case for another $50. (That was a long time ago, but even then, that was stupid-cheap money.)

I have since had three outright 'official' classical players either offer me really stupid money for that guitar or (being poor themselves) they were at least in total awe of it. One guy wanted to trade me his $1,200 guitar for it, in fact.

In all my years, the one conclusion I've come to with guitars is that it's really all down to that one "magic" guitar that one can come across at just the right time.