For a beginning guitarist, the difference between and acoustic and an electric guitar may not appear to be so obvious. I mean, they both have six strings and frets right, so why should you have to choose?

Well, the main difference between the two instruments is that making your decision will set the course for whatever style of music and career you may engage in from then on. Here are some detailed differences between acoustic and electric guitars.

1. There’s a difference in playing precision needed.

With electric guitars, due to the distortion and effects available, the amount of precision to make a guitar riff sound good is less. When playing on an acoustic guitar, the tones are very pure and mistakes can be heard much easier. Acoustic guitars are good to start with since they allow the player to know what skills and talents need to be improved upon.

2. Obviously, they’re made of different materials.

With acoustic guitars, the instrument is usually made up of mostly wood. There might be a plastic back depending on the model, but the amount of electronics used is minimal or non-existent.

For electric guitars, the materials used can be wood, metal, and quite a few electronic pieces installed throughout. Either way, you should keep some consistent maintenance on the instrument you choose.

3. The craftsmanship of the instrument varies.

Personally, I believe that in order to make an instrument that requires a very delicate and powerful natural reverberation like an acoustic guitar, a certain amount of audio physics and engineering is required. For that reason, I believe the acoustic needs a better craftsman to produce, whereas electric guitars can be poorly made but output decent tones due to the accompanying equipment and accessories.

4. One is slightly more difficult to play chords over the other.

Certain electric guitars are made to be played very easy and fast. The frets are lower and the strings are placed very close to the guitar neck.

However, acoustic guitars are known to really “whip your fingers into shape” with how much effort needs to be used for pressing down chords. I’m not saying it’s unbearable, but there’s definitely a difference between the two guitars.

5. Playing by yourself for a crowd can either be enjoyable or somewhat of a nuisance.

If you’ve gone to an open mic night and heard someone playing an acoustic guitar, you may have thought of it as decent or quite enjoyable. Oppositely, if you heard someone in the same place playing an electric guitar by him or herself, you may have thought it to be very annoying.

Acoustic guitars are more desirable to hear for solo musicians over electric guitars any day.

6. There’s a difference in the amount of equipment you’ll need to perform.

Sure, electric guitars can really rock, but you also need an amp, some cables, and any pedals that you desire to alter your guitar tone. With acoustic guitars, you need the guitar, a pick, and maybe a tuner and you’ll be set.

7. Each guitar is best for different genres.

Of course you can play any genre you want on either instrument, but the truth of the matter is that one will be better than the other. Metal or hardcore is best played on the electric guitar, while folk and classical can be heard differently on the acoustic.

I’m sure that there are tons of other differences to these two instruments that I haven’t attempted to cover, but these should probably give a beginner some sort of direction on where to go. Whichever guitar you decide to begin with, promise yourself that you’ll try the opposition eventually to understand the full circle of music that you can be experiencing.

The differences between acoustic and electric guitars are myriad. In addition to one requiring electricity to be heard and the other one not requiring anything but a skilled set of hands, the way in which each one is made and the uses of each one stand in stark contrast to one another.

An acoustic guitar is a hollow-bodied, six-stringed instrument. The sound produced by an acoustic guitar comes from the vibrations created by a note or notes being plucked or strummed on the strings and echoing throughout the hollow inside of the instrument’s body. Steel-stringed acoustic guitars are made of wood, and the tops of acoustic guitars are usually made from spruce, although some are made from rosewood or maple. Other acoustic guitars are nylon-stringed, or classical, guitars. These are usually smaller, and the strings are tied to the bridge in a knot rather than held in with a peg like on steel-stringed acoustic bridges. Classical guitars are used in a variety of musical applications from jazz, traditional latin folk music, to, of course, classical guitar compositions. Classical guitars are most often played with the fingers, but a plectrum may be used to play either steel-stringed or classical acoustic guitars. Blues, rock, and most Western folk music is played on steel-stringed acoustic guitars. While acoustics are traditionally played without the need for electric amplification, acoustic-electric models–acoustic guitars equipped with electric pickups–are quite popular for acoustic artists whose professional needs call for amplification.

Electric guitars, on the other hand, can be hollow-bodied or solid. In the twenty-first century, hollow-bodied electric guitars are less commonly-used than solid-body variations, but a number of rock, blues, and jazz musicians still prefer the tones they produce. Hollow-bodied electric guitars usually have f-holes (like a violin or cello) as opposed to the single, large, circular hole in an acoustic guitar body. The first solid-body electric guitar, the famous Les Paul model, was introduced in the 1950s, and since then the solid-body electric guitar has become a staple for guitarists involved in all genres of popular music. Solid-body electrics feature either a bolt-on neck (like the Fender Stratocaster) or a set-in neck (the Les Paul, for example), and can make use of either single-coil pickups for use with clean channel amplification or humbucker pickups for use with distortion. Electric guitars, unlike acoustics, are rarely manufactured with natural finishes. The bodies can be made from a number of different woods, but the most common are alder, ash, or mahogany. The mahogany bodies of most Gibson guitars are credited for the warm tones their guitars produce. There are, however, a limited number of electric guitars that make use of synthetic materials since all the guitar requires to be heard is amplification as opposed to a hollow cage of wood. Even so, the most popular electric guitars are made from wood and are believed to provide superior tonality than those made from anything else.

More Acoustic Articles

Sound proofing a room

If you’re creating a space that will be used to contain a huge amount of sound and noise (like a death metal band’s rehearsal space), the best way to do this would be to build a room within a room. The room itself should have a thick cement floor, walls and ceiling. This forms an outer shell which is the space’s last line of sound proofing, and must be dense enough to absorb even the loudest low frequency sounds.

Within it, another room must be made whose walls, ceiling and floor (ideally) may be made of cement as well to ensure maximum density. Drywalls filled with sheetrock or fiberglass can also be used. This inner room must be smaller than the outer room and is generally placed in the middle of it, allowing for a space between them where the resultant escaping sound is trapped even more. This ensures that only a minimum of sound meets the walls of the outer room, thus increasing the chances of a 100% sound proofed room.

Treating a room

Treating a room requires less material than sound proofing it, but requires more patience and knowledge as there will be frequent listening tests and adjustments to be made in order to create a tailor-fit sound. There are three ways to treat a room, either by sound absorption, reflection or diffusion.

Sound absorption is important in an acoustically treated room/studio because it eliminates standing waves and early reflections from surfaces. Taming these undesirable sounds also creates a clearer and more precise stereo image, as in the case of a mix engineer’s suite. Sound absorption is achieved through the placement of porous material such as cloth and fiberglass in strategic areas. These act as traps that absorb high and mid frequencies, and are generally placed around the room and on the ceiling. To trap low frequencies, denser absorbers (called bass traps) are placed in locations that form corners, such as between walls and in spaces where the room’s wall’s meet the ceiling.

Diffusion serves to scatter sound hitting its surface in random directions. Though less ubiquitous than absorbers and reflectors, diffusers serve an important purpose of preventing redundant travel of sound waves. Diffusers are generally crafted with a mathematical model as a guide to ensure the randomness of its surface. Once sound arrives on the face of the diffuser, it is distributed in an arbitrary manner.

The next time you decide to create a quality listening space, define first whether or not you would like to sound proof it, treat it, or even both. Knowing what you would want to do ahead will save you energy and money by letting you focus on what would be the priorities for your acoustic project.