The old saying, “you get what you pay for,” has particular significance in the acoustic guitar market, where fine tonewoods and expert craftsmanship are fundamental requirements for great sound. If you can afford to spend $1,500 or more (often much more) on a really good guitar, you might as well skip over these pages and just go do it. But if you need to keep the cost of a new ax as low as possible, you’re not exactly out of options. Far from it, in fact, as today’s market is exploding with very affordable guitars—most made in the People’s Republic of China—that play well, sound good, and look pretty sharp too. And let’s face it, if you’re considering an acoustic-electric guitar equipped with an under-saddle pickup to plug into an acoustic amp or P.A. for coffeehouse gigs, you probably don’t need to spend the huge bucks anyway. That’s because most acoustic-electrics, regardless of cost, use piezo pickup technology—a type of pressure-sensitive transducer that almost always imparts certain sonic colorations that will make your big-buck acoustic guitar sound less natural even under the best of conditions. Not to imply that a $300 acoustic-electric can sound as good through an amplifier as a model costing five times as much, but it’s probably wiser to allocate a lesser amount for something fitted with electronics and put your real money into a high-quality, purely acoustic instrument.