If you are one of those who would like start playing an acoustic guitar you will have to face one of the most common questions about which kind of guitar is the best to start with: Steel Strings vs Nylon Strings.
Unlike many other blogs where you can find a simple list of all the pros and cons of both, here you will find a straightforward answer. For sure this answer is based on our personal experience, but considering that this experience spaces on both kinds of guitar, our opinion could be useful for some.
If you are a beginner and your dream is learning how to play a guitar, whatever kind of guitar, with your fingers and not with the pick, the nylon string guitar is the perfect starting point. Not only nylon strings are very softly and gentle on the player’s fingers, whereas the steel ones are really hard and painful to be pressed, but the classical guitar will allow you to gain a correct technique free from bad playing and posture habits.
A correct playing technique is essential to explore properly all the different kinds of playing techniques you can think of. This is the reason why it is very common for classical guitarists to move on acoustic guitars with steel strings or on electrical guitars. Extremely rare instead is the case of acoustic guitarists able to properly play the classical guitar too.
It is evident that this kind of analysis doesn’t take into account in anyway characteristics such as the quality of the sound of the two different kind of strings, the kind of music the student would like to play or the choice of playing on ourselves or with others. Our answer is simply based on the attempt of suggesting the fastest and technically safest path to become an accomplished fingerstyle guitarist.
