Are guitar starter packs worth it?

Starter packs are the default recommendation in a lot of guitar shops and the default suspicion online, and both positions miss the same thing. A pack is not one product. It is one good product and five cheap ones sold together, and the whole question is whether the good one is good enough.

What is actually in the bag

A typical electric pack contains six things, and they are not equally serious.

The guitar. Ninety per cent of the value. Everything below is a rounding error by comparison, and yet it is where almost all the marketing attention goes.

The amp. Usually a small solid-state practice combo in the 10 to 15 watt range. This is the second-most consequential item and is normally fine for a bedroom.

The cable. Almost always the cheapest possible instrument cable. It will work, and it is the component most likely to develop an intermittent crackle within a year. A cheap replacement is genuinely cheap.

The gig bag. Thin nylon with no padding worth the name. Adequate to carry a guitar to a lesson in a car, not adequate to protect one on a bus.

The strap and picks. Fine. Straps are straps, and picks are consumables that every player ends up choosing by feel anyway.

The tuner, if included. Frequently a very basic clip-on. Adequate. A better one costs very little, and the difference matters more than the strap does.

The test: would you buy the guitar alone?

This is the whole method. Take the guitar model out of the pack, look it up, and ask whether it would appear in a list of instruments you would recommend on its own merits.

A pack built around a Squier Sonic Stratocaster#ad passes. That is a full 25.5 inch scale, sealed tuners, a 9.5 inch fingerboard radius and a synthetic bone nut — the honest floor for an electric, and an instrument that will not make a beginner’s first year harder. It is a guitar we recommend by itself in the electric guitar roundup.

A pack built around an unbranded body shape with no published specifications fails, and the accessories are precisely why it exists. When a seller cannot make the instrument look attractive, they make the quantity of items look attractive instead. The consequences of that choice are set out in are cheap guitars worth it.

The amp question

The bundled amp is usually a genuine, if basic, product. The Fender Frontman 10G#ad is the archetype: a 10 watt solid-state combo with a 6 inch speaker, a clean channel, an overdrive channel and an aux input for playing along to music. That specification is not exciting and it does the job.

Where a bundled amp genuinely falls short is headphone practice, because not all of them have a headphone output — and for a beginner in a shared house, that single socket decides how many hours the guitar gets played. If quiet practice is the constraint, the Boss Katana Mini#ad route or a headphone amp is worth planning for from the start, which we cover in do you need an amp to learn electric guitar.

Building your own for about the same money

If you would rather choose each item, four things make a complete starter kit and none of them are the gig bag.

The guitar. Everything else is negotiable; this is not. Our beginner guitar roundup is the starting point, and the price bands are in what a first guitar should cost.

An amp, for electrics. Ten watts is plenty for a bedroom. Options are in the amp roundup.

A tuner. The Snark clip-on chromatic tuner#ad reads string vibration through the headstock rather than through a microphone, so it works in a room with a television on. A beginner cannot yet distinguish an out-of-tune guitar from their own mistakes, which makes this the highest-value cheap item in the whole set.

Spare strings. A set of D'Addario EXL110 (10-46)#ad lives in the case so that a broken string is a ten-minute interruption instead of a week off. The string question in full is in beginner guitar strings, and the procedure is in how to change guitar strings.

Acoustic packs are a different proposition

An acoustic pack has no amp and no cable in it, which removes the two most substantial non-guitar items. What is left is a guitar, a bag, a strap, picks and possibly a tuner.

That makes the math simpler and the conclusion sharper: an acoustic pack is a guitar with a handful of cheap accessories attached, so the only question worth asking is whether the guitar is right. If the pack costs meaningfully more than the same guitar alone, buy the guitar alone and pick your own tuner.

The one thing a pack cannot include

A setup. The distance between the strings and the fretboard is adjustable, it is set at the factory to a tolerance rather than to a player, and it is the difference between a guitar that is hard work and a guitar that is easy.

On an inexpensive instrument this matters enormously, because a high action on a cheap guitar is the most common reason a beginner concludes that guitar hurts and stops. That is a solvable problem — the causes and the fixes are in why the guitar hurts your fingers — but no bundle solves it, and a shop that includes a setup is worth more than a bundle that includes a strap.

The verdict

Packs are neither the trap nor the bargain they are made out to be. They are a convenience product with one item that matters, and they are worth buying when that item is one you would have chosen anyway.

Buy the pack if the guitar in it is a model we would recommend standing alone, if you want one purchase rather than four decisions, and if you have never owned an amp or a cable before. Skip it if the guitar is anonymous, if you already own an amp, or if the pack costs meaningfully more than the guitar plus a tuner plus strings.