A few quick thoughts... I know I'm all over your thread.seenoevil II wrote: ↑Sun Apr 26, 2020 10:12 am
Maybe in the post brick and mortar age there needs to be something like Warby Parker or Amazon fashion. You pick 5 guitars you want to try, they ship them to you, you pick the one you want to keep and send the rest back. The shipping would be horrendous, but this is already an expensive game.
Anyway, maybe I'll get real liquord up, tie a banana around my forehead and pull the trigger as it were. This quarentine is getting really long.
A Hummingbird standard is made from different woods than the Hummingbird Studio (mahogany versus walnut). Make of that what you will, I'm just pointing it out.
Also, people do Warby Parker guitars. Not people with my kind of money, but I see some guys order a few guitars and they return the two they don't want. Your bank account has to be able to have bought the three guitars in the first place, though.
Secondly, I'm not recommending a D-18 or J-45 to you for the sake of just telling you to get a well known guitar.
But: those guitars are kind of considered to be the jack of all trades in the world of the steel string acoustic, you know?
And I'm still not saying that those guitars are for you, how would I know?
But what I'm seeing, though, is that you yourself don't know. I suppose that you could otherwise dedicate yourself to driving around guitar stores and trying everything you see on Craigslist. But I live in a large metropolitan area, and there are still tons of guitars out there that I never have seen. No one I know carries acoustic Guilds, that's for sure, at least not the high end made in the States stuff. I don't think anyone carries Larriveé anymore, and frankly Gibson is such an obnoxious brand to carry that a lot of dealers don't bother with dealing with the incredibly burdensome demands that Gibson requires to carry them, preferring instead to just deal them used.
I live right down the street from Eddie's Guitars, though, so I could find Froggy Bottom and Huss and Dalton and whatnot.
Where am I going with this? Shit, I don't know. Anyway, the reason I would suggest one of those guitars is because it would be a massive step up from your Yamaha, it would hold it's value well, it stands a very good chance of being a guitar you would use for the rest of your life and even if not, you would learn quite a bit about what you were looking for over the year or so you spent with your D-18 or whatever.
You'd be like, shit, too much bass on that thing, I'm having to EQ it out of everything I record, or you'd think, yeah, but I am really heading in a fingerstyle direction and could really benefit from a 12 fret 00 sized thing. But until you have something to compare it to you just don't have all the facts you need.
Or I could be totally wrong. But it seems like you'll have a hard time making a move with the information you have now, so you should get more. I also don't know how much you can really get from just playing what they have in stores over and over. But that's just me.
Best of luck to you- I'm not sure I'm helping at all at this point, but I did want to clarify why I'm saying what I am.
Also, this is all stuff that I actually did, and you can probably tell what a happy and well-adjusted person I am.