How long is a full-size guitar?

Don’t pay too much attention to the overall length of a guitar. In fact, I’ll go one further: Don’t buy a guitar that is advertised with its overall length in the description. I’ll get to that in a minute.

The only length that really matters is the scale length, which is the distance between the nut and the bridge, between which are all the playable notes on the guitar.

The bridge is the big black thing in the middle of the body. The nut is the white line at the end of the fingerboard.

The scale length has some effect on how the guitar feels to play, and on how tight the strings need to be wound to be in tune, but a whole range of scale lengths are available, and all are perfectly adequate. Other than that, the dimensions of a guitar can be pretty much whatever you like, from a fairly conventional acoustic guitar shape like the one above, to the weird and wonderful:

This is a playable full size guitar:

So is this:

You’ll notice that both of these guitars are barely longer than the scale length- there’s nothing beyond the nut and next to nothing behind the bridge.

So’s this:

If you’re keeping up with all the technical stuff you’ll notice that this guitar has a longer scale for the low strings than for the high ones. There’s also a long headstock and a large upper bout. This thing is probably a foot longer than the first two, if not more.

The overall length of a guitar is meaningless to its quality as a musical instrument, and is only really useful to know if you’re buying a case, or shipping a pallet full of guitars. It has next to no relevance to the player.

OK, so why shouldn’t I buy a guitar that says how long it is?

Because no serious guitar manufacturer or retailer describes its guitars in terms of their length (except occasionally to warn you that they might not fit in a standard sized guitar case). Seriously. Go and look at some websites. I’ll wait.

Because we can confidently state that no serious guitar manufacturer describes guitars in terms of their overall length, we can also be fairly confident that anyone selling you a guitar that they describe as being “42 inches long” or whatever is not a serious maker or retailer of guitars. If they’re not serious about making or selling guitars, what expectation can you have that they make good guitars?

Guitars have to be made with a fairly high level of precision or they won’t work properly. If the bridge, nut and frets aren’t in the right places in relation to each other the guitar will never play in tune. If the guitar isn’t properly set up it will probably be uncomfortable or even impossible to play. If the nut is cut wrong the strings won’t ring out properly. If the wood isn’t of the right quality it will warp and bend under the pressure of the strings. Poor quality hardware may mean the guitar won’t play in tune, or won’t last long.

A serious guitar maker will ensure that the guitars that leave their factory are well built and at least adequately set up. A serious retailer will check again before they sell the guitar. Any other retailer- toy shops, big-box non-specialist unit-shifter places etc.- will not have staff who know how to perform quality checks on a guitar, and their buying departments likewise are going to be ignorant of the quality of the instruments they’re getting from suppliers, so they could be selling the bargain of the century or a piece of shit that isn’t even decent firewood. Guess which you’re more likely to end up with?

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