Best gifts for guitar players

If you do not play guitar, the honest shortlist is shorter than it looks: buy a headstock tuner if you want something certain, a stand if you want them to play more, and a headphone amp if they play electric and live near other people. Avoid strings and avoid straps. Everything below is the reasoning, and the specific traps that make the obvious gifts the wrong ones.

Every pick states its Starter Path band, and we have not played any of them — the method is on how we pick. Prices are live and stamped with the date they were read; specifications come from the makers' published pages, cited at the bottom.

The two gifts that go wrong, and why

Start here, because these are the two things a non-player reaches for first.

Strings. They look like the perfect gift: cheap, consumable, obviously needed. They are three separate incompatible product families. Steel-string acoustic, electric, and nylon classical strings are not interchangeable — nylon on a steel-string guitar produces no useful sound, and a steel set on a classical guitar puts tension on a neck built without a truss rod to resist it. Then within each family there are gauges, and a player who has settled on a light gauge will not thank you for a medium set. It is a five-dollar item with three ways to be wrong.

Straps. Electric guitars have a strap button at each end and any strap fits. Many acoustics have only the one at the base, and the other end is meant to be tied around the headstock behind the nut — which some players refuse to do, preferring to have a second button fitted by a shop. So a strap is either fine or useless depending on a detail you would have to go and look at.

Everything on this page was chosen specifically because it does not have a problem of this kind.

The criteria we used

Does it fit any guitar? The first filter. A tuner and a capo for steel-string both pass trivially; a stand passes with a caveat about finishes; a headphone amp passes only for electrics.

Will they already have one? The second filter, and the one that eliminates picks, cables and gig bags. A player a year in owns all three.

Does it change behavior? The third, and the reason the stand ranks as highly as it does. Most accessories make an existing activity marginally better. A stand makes the activity happen more often.

The picks

The D'Addario Micro Headstock Tuner#ad is the default answer. It clips behind the headstock, reads the vibration of the neck rather than the sound in the room, and is small enough to be left on permanently. Buy this if you want a gift that cannot be wrong. Skip it if you have seen a tuner already clipped to their guitar — that is the one duplicate risk here, and it is a real one.

The Shubb C1 capo#ad is the pick for an acoustic player who sings. A capo lets a singer move a song into a key their voice actually fits, which is a bigger change to what somebody can do than any tone accessory. The Shubb's screw-set closing pressure is the reason to choose it over a sprung clamp: it applies the same pressure every time instead of whatever the spring decides, which is what keeps the guitar in tune when it goes on. Buy this if they play acoustic and sing. Skip it if they are an electric player — capos are much less used there.

The Hercules GS414B PLUS#ad is the behavior-changing gift. Its auto-grip yoke closes on the neck under the guitar's own weight, which is the feature that matters in a house with a dog or a toddler. Buy this if their guitar currently lives in its case. Skip it if they already have a stand, or if the guitar has a vintage nitrocellulose finish and nobody has checked the rubber compound — our stands roundup covers that properly.

The Fender Mustang Micro#ad is the one that gets remembered. It plugs into an electric guitar's jack, headphones plug into it, and it delivers modelled amp tones with effects into the player's ears while the room stays silent. Buy this if they play electric and live with other people. Skip it if they only own an acoustic, where it does nothing at all. Our headphone amp roundup compares it against the cheaper alternatives.

What we left off, and why

Picks. Everybody suggests them and every guitarist has a tin of forty. They are also the cheapest thing in a music shop, which makes them read as an afterthought even when they are not.

Cables. Any electric player already owns two or three, and the one thing that would make a good cable gift — knowing the length they need for their room — is exactly the thing you do not know.

A gig bag or case. Genuinely useful and genuinely size-dependent: a dreadnought bag does not fit a concert body, and a classical guitar is a different shape again. Our cases roundup has the published interior dimensions if you are willing to go and measure.

A guitar. The big one. Fit, neck profile and body size are personal and physical, and a beginner given a guitar that does not suit their hands often concludes they are bad at guitar rather than that the guitar is wrong for them. If the point is to start somebody off, our page on first instrument gifts covers how to do that without choosing for them.

Lessons. Not an Amazon product and still the best thing on this list. A month of lessons outperforms every item here for a beginner, and our page on lessons against teaching yourself is honest about when that is and is not true.

If they are a complete beginner rather than a player

Everything above assumes the person already owns a guitar. If they do not, the calculation changes completely and the accessories become pointless — a tuner for a guitar that does not exist is a confusing gift.

For somebody who has said they want to learn, the two gifts that work are a method book (which costs little and signals you took them seriously) and a voucher or a contribution toward an instrument they pick themselves. Our first guitar guide is written to be handed to somebody in exactly that position.