You probably won’t see any cheap electric guitars up on stage in the hands of your favorite rock star or country musician. But that doesn’t mean that you should rush out and buy a $1,500 instrument to begin learning how to play guitar. It doesn’t make much sense to invest a large chunk of cash until you have figured out whether you have any aptitude for guitar, and more importantly, if you enjoy playing guitar. 
As a longtime player who started out with a couple of cheap guitars, both a beat-up old acoustic and one of my sister’s castoff cheap electric guitars (I’m not too proud to admit it – pennies were hard to come by back in the college years), I can attest to the wisdom in not breaking the bank on a fine instrument until you have a few years under your belt.
My early guitar playing years were an on-again, off-again kind of affair, with my instruments laying dormant and dusty waiting for my frustration at my apparent lack of progress to dissipate enough to try again. But I stuck with it, and I have since graduated to much nicer custom guitars that I love dearly. I’m thankful I waited until I could do them some justice, but one of the big reasons I persevered with my guitar playing was that while I hacked away on cheap guitars, they weren’t terribly low-quality guitars. They had enough tone, feel, and quality to get me through to a pretty respectable skill level.
5 tips for buying cheap guitars
Cheap doesn’t mean crappy. You don’t want to pay much money for your guitar, but you also don’t want your playing experience to be characterized by one frustration after another with your instrument. Follow this advice to make sure that any cheap electric guitars you add to your rack are still good quality instruments with lots of tone and playability.
- If you buy cheap guitars online, be sure of the return policy. The only way you’ll know it’s a keeper is by playing it in person when it arrives. The guitar should feel natural in your hands. The neck shouldn’t hurt the crux of your thumb when you hold down your index finger across all six strings. And you have to like the weight and balance of the guitar, or you’ll never lug it around long enough to develop any skill. If the guitar fails any of these criteria for you, you can send it back.
- Play every string on every fret before buying cheap electric guitars in a store. Inexpensive manufacturing procedures mean that some instruments have “dead spots,” or areas where fret buzz prevents the instrument from making a clean note. The only way you’ll know is by playing every string on every fret.
- Test out your guitar/amplifier combination. Before throwing any cheap electric guitars into gig bags and walking out the door, plug them in to an amplifier representative of the kind of amp you use at home. Better yet, bring your own amp in to the store, if possible. Each guitar-amplifier pairing has a unique voice and feel, and you’ll be disappointed to discover that often the coolest-looking guitars don’t sound nearly as cool as they look.
- Wring out all the electronics. As you’re sampling electric guitars, be sure to listen to the tone created with the pickup selector in each position. While you don’t need to be moved to tears by every note, you do need to like the sound in every pickup configuration, and make sure you’re happy with the volume and tone control sweep functionality.
- Bend and stretch the strings a bit. How well does the guitar hold its tune? As you learn how to bend strings and play faster parts, you don’t want your guitar falling drastically out of tune. Even the best guitars will need to be tuned after the strings warm up and flex a bit, so don’t reject a guitar just because it doesn’t stay perfectly in pitch after a deep tremolo dive. Just make sure it’s close enough not to ruin the second half of your song after the solo.
Those tips should keep you safe. Buying cheap guitars is a terrific way to get started with guitar playing, but you need to buy a quality instrument regardless of price. Here are a few we think are a good place to start: