I’ve consistently heard that Yamaha is the best option for sub $1000 guitars. They’re not the best looking guitars, but they just have solid build quality and can be relied on to work correctly as an instrument, have no particular issues, and tend to hold up to wear and tear well.
Both of my guitars are cheap Yamahas: the acoustic has held up to 15 years of use with minimal maintenance without any issues (although its action is a bit high and I haven’t wanted to fuck with trying to fix that myself), and the electric is newer but I have no complaints about it and only a few things on my “I will see about adjusting this the next time I’m restringing it” like the neck is set just a little bit wrong and I haven’t bothered setting up the floating bridge yet.
Yamaha is solid, Ibanez is solid, Solar is decent for the money if you get a model with stainless steel frets for under 1k, but there’s also a myriad of smaller Chinese/Malasian/Indonesian brands cropping up on Amazon in the $500 and under range that are honestly kinda crushing it in terms of value.
Modern CNC processes have really leveled the playing field. At this point I’d trust a brand with 3 good reviews for a particular model from independent sources over just a name on a headstock.
I’ve consistently heard that Yamaha is the best option for sub $1000 guitars. They’re not the best looking guitars, but they just have solid build quality and can be relied on to work correctly as an instrument, have no particular issues, and tend to hold up to wear and tear well.
Both of my guitars are cheap Yamahas: the acoustic has held up to 15 years of use with minimal maintenance without any issues (although its action is a bit high and I haven’t wanted to fuck with trying to fix that myself), and the electric is newer but I have no complaints about it and only a few things on my “I will see about adjusting this the next time I’m restringing it” like the neck is set just a little bit wrong and I haven’t bothered setting up the floating bridge yet.
Yamaha is solid, Ibanez is solid, Solar is decent for the money if you get a model with stainless steel frets for under 1k, but there’s also a myriad of smaller Chinese/Malasian/Indonesian brands cropping up on Amazon in the $500 and under range that are honestly kinda crushing it in terms of value.
Modern CNC processes have really leveled the playing field. At this point I’d trust a brand with 3 good reviews for a particular model from independent sources over just a name on a headstock.