Getting a Great First Acoustic Guitar - That You’ll Want to Play - Fender CD60 Dreadnought Acoustic

That first guitar or starter guitar matters hugely. I have met plenty (near a hundred) who tell me that they started guitar but their first guitar was really hard to play, and didn’t sound “right” and they couldn’t make the chords in the lesson books or that they saw online. So they gave up. The guitar went into a closet, or under a bed or somewhere down in the basement with all the other stuff that didn’t work out.

Sure, I get that playing a guitar or bass or violin or saxophone is not for everyone, and it’s been a really long time since my first guitar, which I earned selling greeting cards door to door (yes I am that old). I remember joyously smashing it to bits when we had to move to a much smaller place when I was 12 or so because it was so hard to play that I gave up until Mom and Dad got me an electric guitar from Sears that was at least playable and a badly beaten solid state amp that cost $20. Having a guitar that I could play without pain and suffering made the difference between becoming a lifelong player (more or less) and not having this marvellous hobby.

For many folks, an acoustic guitar sounds like the best place to start. It can be, if the kind of music that the player enjoys is suited to an acoustic. If the fave sounds are Scandinavian Death Metal, the acoustic is a poor choice. However acoustics can be less forgiving than electrics and may help build more accuracy. All well and good, but the most important thing in a first guitar is that it be easy and fun to play.

As I started checking out guitars in the $300 price range for a starter acoustic (first to prove that you could get a decent acoustic for $300 and second because spending a lot more on a starter instrument probably doesn’t make sense unless there is a clear and long standing commitment to play), I picked up a number of options. Without naming any of the questionable ones, I found that in the price range, only Yamaha and Fender had options that I would be comfortable recommending. The rest had really high action, or nut slots cut too high, or necks with twists and bends. A lot of the options had the resonance of a piece of granite and sounded dead from the word go. Many also came with strings more suited to manual strangulation than playing music. I was actually quite dismayed by the volume of instruments that I would not recommend to a new player or the parents of a new player, or the grand parents of a new player. You aren’t going to get a decent starter guitar on Amazon, or at Costco or Best Buy. This is why we have music stores staffed by musicians who love music. COVID-19 has resulted in a boom in new guitar sales as people want to pick up the hobby, but I, like industry analysts worry about the stickiness of the pastime once COVID restrictions are lifted. As folks go to buy online, the likelihood of a quality instrument at a fair price arriving in playable out of the box condition is small. If you can go into a music store and there are very few decent players in the price point that you can actually see and hear, how do you make decisions when getting to a music store is near impossible?

That’s my point. I took this on as a bit of a challenge to myself, since I am not buying instruments in this range. I don’t get paid for these reviews and don’t receive free gear or swag or influencer money. I do this because it matters to me.

So after culling down my options to Yamaha and Fender, I looked at availability. There were more options from Fender in terms of style and colour in stock at the different stores I checked. For that reason, I elected to do an evaluation of a Fender Classic Design Dreadnought.

The Build

Translating marketing speak this means that the guitar comes from Fender, looks like a traditional acoustic guitar and has the dreadnought body shape. Dreadnought comes from being used as an adjective to describe battleships, so its plausible fit is questionable but it’s a standard design available from pretty much every acoustic guitar maker. It is a deeper body, with a large lower bout (bottom end) and smaller upper bout (top end). Standard dreadnoughts are symmetrical meaning that the same body can be used for right or left handed players simply by changing the nut and bridge saddle orientation, and installing the pick guard on the other side. Many less expensive guitars don’t even have pick guards, also known as scratch plates, making the switch even simpler. If you are a lefty, you will find more options in traditional dreadnoughts than in any other guitar body style.

This model is a very standard design. Like pretty much all acoustic guitars under $1500 and for a lot priced over that, the body used solid wood laminates. At this price point all the pieces are laminates, the top being laminated spruce, with the sides and back laminated mahogany. It’s hard to lose with spruce over mahogany, but there is a costing limitation that keeps these to being laminates.

Now is a perfect time to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to laminated wood. Let’s start by dumping the notion that laminated wood sounds bad. This is not a true statement. It does sound different from solid wood, and one is free to draw his or her own conclusions by live comparison in the same room at the same time. Otherwise any such comparisons are BS.

Laminated wood is just thin sheets of wood glued together. In some methods (such as boat decking ply) the sheets are glued with their grain perpendicular to increase rigidity and reduce flex. Laminate used for guitar building are not done this way. They are also NOT particle board, masonite or sheeting plywood. Those referring to instruments in this manner are doing a disservice. In a guitar build, laminates are used because it is much easier and much less expensive to get a thin sheet that is good and usable than it is to get a thick slab that is good and usable. While wood does indeed grow on trees, fine woods are rarer than not so fine woods and command a price premium. Guitar makers want woods that look nice, meaning no knots, gaps or irregularities. A couple of really nice top and bottom pieces can contain sheets that are not so beautiful without negative impact. It is true that the glue does negate some of the natural resonances, and that is one reason why one might choose to spend $5000 on an acoustic guitar with an Adirondack Spruce top, or to go for a particular wood type for the sides and back. Laminates are also different from veneers, where a veneer is a very thin sheet of typically expensive wood glued to a solid piece of less expensive hardwood.

In the CD-60 the top is laminated spruce and the tap tone from it is very good for the price point. The sides and back are laminated mahogany and the tap tone is also good. In both cases, the resonant frequency falls off in volume quite quickly compared to a solid top and solid sides and back. However, let’s cut the usual crap. Unless you have hearing that extends well past 10,000 Hertz, are doing your comparison in a nice live and isolated studio room and have perfect auditory memory (here’s a tip - you don’t), you will hear a difference but if you were not doing the comparison of like laminates and solid woods, you might not know which one is which, so perhaps worry less about this.

By the way, those online guitars you see for cheap? Probably not even laminates. Most likely plywood or worse, thin solid sheets over a glop of glue and sawdust, aka top finished particle board. Has no tone to speak of and makes for a poor sounding guitar.

The CD-60 is a purely acoustic instrument. Spend more money and you might find a similar instrument with an acoustic piezo pickup added. If the guitar will be played amplified most of the time or used into a recording interface, this can be a nice thing, but if you don’t need this, well then, you don’t need this, and worst case, you put a microphone in front of the guitar as has been done for 90 years or so. All the samples in this review were created in this way.

When a guitar is not being played, it should be stored in a case. When most guitars in this price point are delivered solely in a cardboard box, the CD60 does include a hardshell case.

Playability

A guitar that is hard to play does not get played. A guitar bought online shipped without a costly and time requiring set up could be a nasty surprise. That’s another reason I chose to go with Fender for this article. I picked up over seven different Fender acoustics, three of them different CD-60s and they were all perfectly usable from the moment once I tuned them up.

I cannot say that this is true for the lion’s share of the acoustic guitars that I picked up in this price point. Most would turn away a potential player. The Fenders, and so too the Yamahas, were consistent right out of the box, although there were a lot fewer Yamahas available. Something about a pandemic getting in the way of deliveries. When we buy a guitar, we get it as it comes from the factory. No store has the time or the wherewithal to do a full set up on every guitar that comes into stock, no matter the cost. When buying a really expensive guitar, I might work with the store management to get the instrument professionally set up before taking it home, but a good set up will cost at least $75 so it’s never going to happen on a guitar that sells for $300. Margins on good guitars are poor, no responsible seller is in business to lose money on every deal. I do know that there are buyers who think that margins on instruments are like margins on jewelry or designer anything, where they typically start at 500%. Those people are often wrong but never uncertain. That more music stores do not tell such folk that they don’t need their business stuns me.

Thus the CD-60 is playable right after taking it out of the included (!) hardshell case once you tune it. Hence my usual refrain that every new guitar should be bought with a Snark tuner. Oh how I wish I got compensation for every Snark sale that I influenced, but I don’t. I recommend them because they are the best tuner for the money period. The case is nice and well lined. My sample suffered a minor misalignment on the centre latch, easily adjusted and not found in other samples that I checked.

The choice of laminated woods make sense here. There is solid data that tells us that starter guitars are more poorly cared for than really expensive instruments. Laminates survive the hardships of too little humidity and temperature changes than solid woods. You can leave a laminate out of its case in a typical residence and its not going to suffer the same way as a solid wood guitar will. A case humidifier is a great idea of course when it’s really dry, but not everyone puts the guitar back in its case after playing. I’ve had the CD-60 out of its case the entire time, but in fairness my playing area has a dedicated humidifier. Nonetheless it does get cold at night and there has been no movement in the neck relief in this guitar.

The neck is made from mahogany and has a dual adjust truss rod for neck relief. This means that it can be adjusted from the headstock or from inside the sound hole. The fingerboard is genuine rosewood, a real treat considering laminates from other makers costing $1500 or more use synthetics such as Richlite which is paper and a phenolic resin pressed into a shape in a heat press. All the joy and sexiness of a piece of cheap flooring. The indicator dots are white pearloid. The neck shape is a very comfortable soft C, ideal for players with small or large hands. Unlike most all the other acoustics, there were no sharp fret edges at all, as things should be, but more commonly are not. The nut and bridge saddles are Graph-Tech Nu-Bone a massive step up from the much more common plastic. Does this make a difference? Absolutely. Nu-Bone is more slippery so there is less string hang up and less tendency for tuning stability issues.

The CD-60 comes with Fender’s DuraTone 880L coated strings in what we call twelves or a range from .012 to .052 a very common gauge for acoustic guitars. Coated strings are a great choice as they are much less likely to corrode and will last much longer before going dead. Some purists prefer uncoated strings and if they like that, good for them. The reality is that a coated string lasts 3-4 times longer than an uncoated string and that’s probably the best option for a starter guitar. These are an 80/20 Phosphor Bronze blend and are decent enough, but I am personally not a fan of Phosphor Bronze strings in general and would probably choose D’Addario Nickel Bronze (Monel) strings in a slightly lighter gauge to make it easier on the fingertips of the new player until calluses develop, perhaps a set of elevens.

A quick ease of playability test is the F barre chord. If you can make an F barre chord on a guitar without it causing pain and / or sounding like mush, the guitar is definitely on its way to being playable. The F barre chord is one of the first chords learned and is typically the hardest to play for new players. An easy to play F barre chord is a huge confidence booster.

Sample Track

This short sample shows the sound of the Fender CD-60 in a recorded environment. The guitar was recorded using a RODE NT-1A microphone into a Zoom F8 field recorder completely flat as 192 bit WAV. The file was imported into Logic Pro X and duplicated for stereo sound. In the out mix, a UA 610B preamp was used with a minor cut at 200Hz and a minor boost at 4.5K. Next came a Pultec EQ using an acoustic guitar air and body preset. This helped address the high absorption in the recording area and brought back the natural highs. Then signal then went through a Teletronix LA-2A Compressor at the gentlest compression setting and finally some natural reverb was added to give the sound what you would hear in a live room using a RealVerb Pro Room Modeler. While this may sound like a lot of post-processing it is really very minimal and what you would find as the baseline in pretty much any recorded audio track for the web. The project was output as MP3 which is as we all know aggressively and destructively compressed.

I think it sounds very nice with that classic mahogany dreadnought bass and mid emphasis.

There are many, perhaps too many, guitars in this price point sufficiently bad to really discourage the new player. The Fender CD60 is a proven exception to the mantra that inexpensive is equitable to poor quality. The CD60 is a superb instrument for the price point and a great starter acoustic guitar.

I wish to thank the owners of The Arts Music Store for arranging a short term evaluation unit to allow me to complete this review. I was not compensated for this work, I did it because I thought it would be an interesting article. I have used image links to The Arts Music Store purely because I shop there and they are fine people not for affiliate revenue.

Until next time, peace.