Adult-sized guitars have long posed a challenge for children who wanted to play the instrument. Even adult students often feel a strain as they first wrap their hands around the neck of the guitar to reach over all six strings. So, you should buy your child a child-sized guitar when enrolling in guitar lessons in Brooklyn, right?
Child-sized guitars were born to answer this problem but did not eliminate the challenges. Quality, child-sized guitars are just as costly to produce as adult-sized guitars. The result is most children’s guitars are of lesser quality to save on costs and still have 6 strings requiring a wider neck than what is comfortable for a child’s hand.
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What is the Best Guitar for Kids?
A new brand of guitar called a Loog is receiving positive attention from the music education community. Before we talk about the advantages of this new design, it will be helpful to fully understand the difficulties young children often face with standard guitar design – the guitar is usually not the easiest instrument for a child to learn in part because of these challenges.
Is a Guitar Too Large For a Young Child?
Many young guitar students illustrate the challenges younger students have with the standard guitar shape. Many kids need to reach over the body of the instrument with the right arm. They may have a difficult time reaching the strings to strum properly – not to mention the risk of developing shoulder pain and shoulder fatigue this position causes.
Young students may also need to tilt the guitar towards themselves to see what the hands are doing. This is also a bad habit that can be difficult to break once developed. Young kids’ left-hand fingers barely wrap around to the front of the guitar neck. Their hands are certainly not large enough to play chords on a neck that size, and the arm is not long enough to reach the end of the guitar.
Loog Guitars Solve These Difficulties
After years of teaching guitar, I have tried several things to make the guitar more playable for young children from using capos to shorten the neck to muting the top strings that get in their way. While researching solutions to the problem, I stumbled upon an article about the Loog guitar, and Loog is the first company I’ve seen that addresses these issues.
They do more than just miniaturize the adult design. I visited the Loog retailer in Brooklyn and was impressed. The design and quality of materials used make these guitars real instruments and not toys. The guitar stays in tune well and the intonation is good. This is often overlooked in guitars for children.
Perhaps the most striking difference between the boy playing the Loog above and the girl playing the standard guitar is posture. The boy is sitting upright and his shoulders are relaxed, because he doesn’t have to slump over the guitar to see or reach the strings. He can easily strum all strings with his right hand, and his left hand reaches the far positions of the guitar neck without needing to stretch for them. Also, notice how the pointer finger of his left hand easily covers all strings. The Loog guitar features a narrow neck as it only uses the first three strings of the guitar. Children under the age of 8 are usually restricted to playing melodies one string at a time. With the Loog, younger students can play chords as well offering them new musical possibilities.
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