
Can a Budget Guitar Be Transformed into Something Better?
How can you improve a budget guitar? This is a simple question with a complicated answer. To really tackle the subject, we’ll have to let's consider a few different areas.
These articles originally appeared in the November-December 2022 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.

How can you improve a budget guitar? This is a simple question with a complicated answer. To really tackle the subject, we’ll have to let's consider a few different areas.

On Christina Vane's album Make Myself Me Again, the slide guitarist is exploring what it means to reconnect with herself in a new, unfamiliar city where she seems to fit right in.
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On Up the Hill and Through the Fog, the Slocan Ramblers make a clean break from their folk-trad past and establishing three distinctive voices to make the group greater than the sum of its parts.

Stylistically, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead guitarist Scott Metzger's solo acoustic album, Too Close to Reason, covers a lot of territory in what he calls his “sonic landscapes.”

This meditative song uses two-handed tappings to fret notes in unprecedented ways.
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Dark Enough to See the Stars is what we call a happy album for Mary Gauthier—the happiest album in her career, recorded at the happiest time in her life.

“Clandestino” begins with a playful single-note figure drawn from the D major pentatonic scale.

Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” has nary an acoustic guitar in its swirling arrangement, but the song, in the guitar-friendly key of E major, lends itself nicely to an acoustic treatment.
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Learn to play the Jon Stickley Trio's unique interpretation of the bluegrass tune “Blackberry Blossom” on guitar.

Five promising young luthiers—Brian Itzkin, Oliver Marchant, Eve Meister, Max Spohn, and Olivia Elia—chat about their personal visions and approaches to the craft of building guitars.

Fingerstyle guitarist Steve Baughman shares an open-d acoustic guitar arrangement of the beloved Christmas carol "Silent Night" that lends itself nicely to slide treatment.
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Tested using a handful of different guitars and pickups, this amp impressed with an abundance of great tones.

Here are some patterns you can practice on their own and then use in traditional songs

Clocking in at 33 minutes—shorter than many Phish prog-rock jams— Mercy puts the spotlight on his singing and acoustic guitar work.

Here's an easy strumming version of “Low Bridge, Everybody Down” (aka “The Erie Canal Song”), a 1900s tune that takes a look back to the mid-1800s.
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Our reviewer found that for a big guitar with a big sound, the Takamine CRN-TS1 also offers an intimate quality that rewards an uncluttered approach, where notes are given the time and space to linger.

Contemporary fingerstyle guitar masters Andy McKee, Kaki King, Christie Lenée, and Mike Dawes reflect on the legacy of the revolutionary guitarist Michael Hedges.

Our reviewer found the Taylor 724ce to be an exceptionally comfortable instrument with an easy-playing neck and a resonant feel whether fingerpicked or flatpicked.
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Berta Rojas' album Legado features 12 tracks composed by or written in homage to a pair of classical guitar pioneers: Ida Presti (1924–1967) of France and María Luisa Anido (1907–1996) of Argentina.

Sephardic songs from 15th century Spain and tunes from the American folk tradition fuse together as the core of Lily Henley's album Oras Dezaoradas.

Since his retirement in 2018, former C.F. Martin & Co. mainstay Dick Boak has continued hand-building instruments like this dreadnought-ukulele-small-bodied-guitar trio.
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Contrapuntal lines are not necessarily intuitive for most guitarists, but the approach is certainly worth the investment and yields dividends equivalent to sonic gold.

These body awareness tips from the martial arts can help ward guitarists off unnecessary tension and pain before they become problematic.

Glenn Jones doesn’t see open tunings as an alternate to standard, but rather as the core to his approach to playing and composing on guitar, including on his album ‘Vade Mecum.‘
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The album is a collection from a wide spectrum of writers, styles, and eras, beautifully presented in (mostly) acoustic settings.