Best Brand Of Electric Guitar

This will depend very much on why you buy a guitar and what you want from it. If you’re looking for that one special instrument that you can use to carve out a career in the music industry, then perhaps something like a vintage Stratocaster will serve you well.

It won’t be cheap, but a solid instrument is a very wise investment if you want to be a professional.

However, if you’re a beginner, is it really a good idea for you to spend thousands on a rare guitar only to find out months later that you don’t enjoy playing the guitar?

Not really.

If the guitar is just going to gather dust in the corner, don’t spend a lot of money on it.

If, like most people, however, you want something decent, better than an entry-level guitar model but something that won’t cost the earth, then take a look at the Yamaha Pacifica.

It’s just over £300, provides a wide range of tones, sounds great in many styles of music, and it comes with the reputation of a household brand name like Yamaha.

The jury is still out for many when it comes to tonewoods and their role in electric guitars.

Those who feel that they don’t matter often point to the process by which a signal is captured and created in an electric guitar as proof that tonewoods don’t matter.

This approach does make a lot of sense in a way. After all, a sound is created by strings being plucked, which gets captured by the magnetic coils in the pickups, goes through the guitars tone controls, and then goes to a pedalboard, which in turn out to an amp where it gets shaped by more tone controls.

So does the wood even come into it?

In short, yes, it does.
Different woods will vibrate differently, but many think that tonewoods don’t matter in electric guitars because the woods are only one component of the tone.

Unlike the acoustic guitar, where the tone comes almost entirely from the wood used, the electric guitar has other things that help shape the tone, so the effect of the tonewood is buried a little under many other things.

But make no mistake, it’s still there, and it still matters.

Again, this really depends on what you want to buy. Some brands do excel with entry-level instruments, but their more serious guitars don’t cut the mustard.

So rather than tarring all guitars with the same brush, let’s go through each ability level and suggest one model for each that makes the best electric guitars for that particular corner of the market.

For beginners, you should look at electric guitars from a brand like Squier.

Squier, under the umbrella of Fender, makes less expensive versions of popular Fender guitars like the Stratocaster and Telecaster.

A Squire strat might only cost you £130 or so, which is a great deal for beginners. You get a solid guitar that’s made by a brand you can trust, and it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

For intermediate players, I’m going to recommend the Yamaha Pacifica that I mentioned a little while ago in this same article.

The Pacifica is a fine guitar that does cost a little more, but it’s very much worth the money for someone taking the guitar much more seriously.

It’s comfortable, has a great tone, provides excellent value for money, and it’s also made by a brand you can trust.

Then finally, for advanced players and perhaps even some professionals, you really should be looking to spend and spend well.

This Fender Telecaster would be a fine addition to any guitar collection. It has a beautiful tone, an incredible look, but it’s also a workhorse guitar. Something that band leaders and producers will want you to have!

There are a handful of brands that account for a large portion of all the guitars in the world.

These brands have made so many great instruments over the years that they have carved out a special place in guitar folklore, perhaps for the rest of time.

We here at Ted’s List consider the top 5 guitar brands to be Fender, Gibson, Ibanez, Epiphone, and Sadowsky in no particular order.

Does this mean that they’ve made the best electric guitar of all time along the way?

You’ll just have to find out for yourself by trying them all.

This may come as a surprise to you, but of all the guitars in the world, the Gibson ES 335 is often cited as being the most versatile of the lot.

If you don’t know this model by name, you certainly know it by look. It’s the big red hollow-body guitar used in the famous Johnny B Good scene from Back To The Future.
It was originally released in 1958 as a bridge between Gibson’s existing hollow body guitars and the feedback free Les Paul.

It’s never been out of production and has been used in every genre you can think of. Often by real heavyweights of that genre too.

B.B. King had one. The Pixies use them. The Smiths have used them. Eric Johnson has one, and so does everyone else on this truly inexhaustible list.

If you want to find the most versatile electric guitar of all time, then look no further than the Gibson ES 335.

When it comes to the most famous guitar brand, it’s very hard to look anywhere other than Fender because they’ve influenced the way that electric guitars work for generations.

In the Stratocaster and the Telecaster, they’ve created some of the most iconic and most imitated guitar models out there.

They’ve been the manufacturer behind the sound of one of the most iconic electric guitar players of all time in Jimi Hendrix, and over 80 years on from their birth as a company, they are still a household name.

Honourable mentions here must go to Gibson for their creation of the treasured Les Paul, SG and hollow-body models in their lineup. These are truly fantastic guitars.

However, Fender just takes the cake. Look back over their history if you get the time.

It’s just too hard to argue with that kind of pedigree.

We can talk about the best electric guitar brands quite easily, but the best electric guitar is a much more complicated conversation.

Here it has to be said that there can be no single right answer. How could there be? We’d have to define what we mean by best.

Does best mean the most popular? In which case, it might be the Stratocaster.

Does it mean the most recorded? In which case, it might mean Nile Rodgers specific Stratocaster, which has been recorded on an estimated $2bn worth of hits!

Or could best mean the most playable guitar ever? The one with the greatest level of craftsmanship?

Of all the guitars on the market, we’ll never know which one is the best because we could never agree on just one definition of best.

Honestly, how long have you got? There are so many expensive guitars on the market today but what makes the question even more complicated is that many of these guitars can become costly for different reasons.

One such example is vintage guitars. An authentic Stratocaster can be worth over $20,000 or – rather more mind-blowing – an original 1957 Les Paul can fetch as much as $100,000!

These instruments are almost no longer guitars but collectors’ items like antiques.

And the curious thing is that both Fender and Gibson have started making vintage reissue models that have modern construction, which emulates the older instruments.

These aren’t cheap. A reissue guitar may set you back anywhere between $3000 – $5000.

It’s impossible to put a set figure on this question because certain guitars can also gain value if they are of historic significance.

Queen guitarist Brian May’s guitar, the “Red Special”, is a fine example of this.

Initially, it was designed and built by May and his father. Before Queen made it big, its value was probably no more than the cost of its parts. But it would be astronomical to buy now because of its historical significance.

A quick look at this article of the top ten most expensive guitars ever sold at auction will show you the power that history has to inflate the price of a guitar.

An authentic 60’s Stratocaster might cost you $20,000 in today’s money, but if that same Stratocaster was played by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock in 1968, the price goes up to $2,000,000.

Better get saving!