Old Town School Music Store

Hi, I'm Tim Joyce. I'm the retail director and I run the Old Town School Music Store at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. The first thing we tell a lot of customers is the three sort of categories that guitars break down into. And we qualify that by saying that the first level is guitars that are laminate guitars. And then you move up to guitars with solid tops and then you move into guitars that have all solid wood. In a laminate guitar you can sort of see that it is a laminate guitar. If you look inside the sound hole you can almost see the three layers of wood. There'sort of a lighter color here. In the middle there's a darker color and then in the bottom you also have another lighter color. It's three layers of plywood. Usually one goes this way underneath. There's a layer that goes across this way and then another layer that goes on top. And that's the one that you see on the top. And the benefits of plywood guitars are they're extremely sturdy. They're, you know, the hold up to the weather, the h And then you can get into, You can have a laminate guitar that has a pickup in it, etc. And that's when the cost goes up. But within the range of laminate guitars they're all, They're all laminate. There's just plywood glued together and you don't get that much sound out of the guitar So the body shape is a bigger thing and it's, If you feel good playing the smaller body guitar and you're a small person then, If you feel good str Why don't we listen to, So we'll start with this Alvarez and I'll just str So that's a laminate guitar. Now we'll move to a solid top guitar. We'll grab a blue ridge. This is a slightly different sound because the body size is a little different as well. This is a Dreadnought shaped guitar but it's got a solid top but laminate back and sides. The benefit of the solid top is you're going to end up with more sound. This top actually moves and resonates and that's what gives you the bigger sound. In a solid top guitar what you're looking for is the same principle. You can look in the sound hole and you can see whether it's a solid top or not because when you look here you see the grain of the wood coming up this way and then it actually goes all the way through the sound hole which means that's one piece of wood there. So you can sort of be assured that you have a solid top guitar. You often know when it's a solid top guitar because of the price. You'll be able to just take a look and say okay this guitar is in the $800 range. It must be an all solid wood guitar. There's other things you can look at too. You can look at the back of a guitar and there'sort of figures in the wood and things in the wood that happen and if you flip over to the center you can look through and see if that goes all the way through. On a lot of guitars you can'tell or they'll use a laminate that is different on the outside and on the inside. When you get into the solid top and all solid wood guitars there's other things that are going to make a guitar sound different. The body shape is one thing. The type of woods that are on the top and the back and sides are another. That's when we sort of get into once we've figured out that this is the direction you want to go in you can end up discussing what sound you Do you want something a little more mellow sounding? Are you going to be str Do you need to pick up? That's when we get into those kind of questions. Then we'll move to an all solid wood guitar. This is a lair of A with a solid top, back and sides. The benefit there is that the whole guitar is sort of doing some resonating. This model is an L shape which is slightly different. It's kind of halfway between the small body orchestra or OM sizes and the dreadnought. So as you can hear it has much, You can actually feel the guitar when you're playing it. You can feel it, And that's the side of a good guitar. And then you get into, when you get into this level of guitar, you're getting into the different types of tops that are on them and the different woods on the back and sides. And, So if you're coming in to buy your first guitar, there's a few things we want to find out first. Our goal is to help you, So what I want to try to do is find out from you what kind of music you If you're just starting out, if you're, I'm not going to take you to the top row to the $3,000 Martin. I might let you play it because you should know what that kind of guitar sounds And the big thing is to find out what your goal is musically. So if you say, if you say, I really If you say I want to play classical, then we'll go over and look at nylon string guitars. So there's,