Lauren Bateman (YouTube, June 2020) advises female beginner guitarists to prioritize body width and neck thickness when choosing an acoustic. She compares three guitars — a wide "boat oar"/dreadnought (not recommended), the narrower Ibanez AE series (recommended budget option, ~$300–$500), and a wider-but-comfortable Crafter (high-end, ~>$1000) — and emphasizes trying a guitar for comfort (arm-over fit) and, if possible, spending more for better playability and electronics.
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Hey, guitar enthusiasts, Lauren Bateman here. And in this video we're going to be talking about what is the best guitar for a female beginner player. And as a female, I feel like I can offer some great insight into that. So what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to show you three different types of guitars. I'm going to talk about one of the most important things that I feel you should look for as a female player when you're purchasing your first guitar.
So in my hand I have actually my first ever guitar that I learned guitar on about 20 something years ago. And this is what we call a boat oar. And this is what I would not recommend. And I'm going to show you why I won't recommend this. So if you're a guy, this is just an Ibanez, basically hundred dollar guitar. Now if you're a guy, this might work out really well. But for a woman it's tricky because the thickness the guitar is so wide. And for a lot of women, some of you might feel this way, even if you have a guitar currently, you feel like you're climbing over the guitar. And one that I would recommend not getting is what we call a dreadnought guitar. They're very wide. Now, the wider the body, the bigger the sound. But I'm going to show you a guitar in a couple seconds here that solves this issue. And it's a guitar that I've recommended to multiple students of mine because it has a narrower body. So let's go and I'll show you that guitar. Okay, so I have two guitars now and I don't know if you can see this in the, in the video, but you can probably see a little bit that how wide this guitar is, is much wider than how this guitar is. So let me show you this guitar because this is the one I usually recommend to my beginner female students. Now this guitar here is the Ibanez AE series. That's stands for acoustic, electric. And there's a couple different models. There's a $300 version and there's also a $500 version. What's the difference in the price range is really the electronics you get in the side. So in the more expensive version you get better electronics, particularly if you want to play live. But if you're not going to be doing that, the $300 model is fine. It comes with a built in tuner. And the great thing about this, it has a slightly rounded back which makes it a little bit more comfortable to hold, but it's not a complete rounded back like an ovation, which I particularly don't like because I think they slide off. So this guitar, when you put it and you put your arm around it, it is much more comfortable to hold. And that is the single biggest thing that female guitarists need to look for when they're purchasing a guitar is the width of the body. And unfortunately, to get thinner body guitars, you usually have to spend a little bit more money or you end up with a boat oar, like I showed you earlier. Now, another nice thing to mention on Ibanez is that the back of the neck is a little bit thinner than that boat or the neck is really thick, which. The bigger the neck, the more you have to reach around the frets. So this is a little bit slimmer and great for women, especially if you have smaller hands. Most of my female students end up with this guitar, and they also come in really cool colors. So this one's in purple, but I think you can get them in like red and blue, blue or even gray. They have some really great colors. So you can be fashionable and play the guitar as well. And what I'm going to show you in the next section of this video is the guitar that you probably see me use in my videos, which is my crafter. I'm going to show you the difference between my crafter and this guitar here. And here I am. I'm back with my crafter. And you can see that my crafter is a little wider. Not by much, but it's a little wider than my Ibanez here. And it's still very, very comfortable. It's still thinner than the full boat or Ibanez. But this guitar has a few more added benefits. So I'm going to talk about that now. People always ask me, Lauren, what kind of guitar are you playing? It looks very comfortable. I like the little hummingbird pattern. So this is a very expensive guitar. One, it's made of bubinga wood, which I don't even know if they make guitars in that anymore. It's a very warm sounding wood. And. And I have very advanced electronics. So this guitar cost over a thousand dollars. And when you spend that much money on guitar, what you're really paying for is the electronics for performing live. When you get into a more expensive guitar is the strings. The strings are so close. I don't know if you can see that. I'm going to do a close up here. Look how close my strings are to the fretboard. This makes it so much easier to play than a really cheap guitar. So the biggest thing when you're buying a new guitar is to sit with it, put your arm over it. You can watch my video on how to hold a guitar if you don't know how to, and just put your arm around it and make sure it's comfortable. Because when you're buying a guitar, especially when you're a woman, the most important thing is making sure it's comfortable, because if you feel like you're climbing over the guitar, it's not going to be comfortable to play and you're going to want to give up. So I recommend, especially if you're going for an acoustic guitar, spend a little bit more money if you can, and get something that has a little bit of a narrower body. It's way more comfortable to play, and I think you'll be happier overall.
