How we pick
The method behind every recommendation on this site, published in full — including the things we will not tell you.
By Sawyer V. · Published · Last updated
Every review site in this category has a page like this and most of them are three paragraphs about caring deeply. This one is long because it is the actual method, and because it is the only thing we have instead of a testing lab.
1. The Starter Path — the framework behind every pick
Every instrument we cover is read against the same four bands. That consistency is deliberate: a parent who works out how to read the guitar page already knows how to read the drums page.
Below the floor
The instrument fails at something the player physically needs. Not “it’s cheap” — a specific mechanical failure with a name.
A guitar whose tuning machines drift, or whose soft plastic nut binds the string so tuning happens in jumps, cannot be kept in tune by a beginner. And a beginner cannot distinguish an out-of-tune instrument from their own bad fretting, so every chord that sounds wrong becomes evidence that they have no ear. A keyboard without touch response plays every note at the same volume, so dynamics cannot be practiced at all — the student is not doing it wrong, there is nothing to do. A drum kit whose pedal a child’s leg cannot reach is not a small kit; it is one they cannot operate.
This band is why the site exists. The buyer’s real fear is spending money on something that quietly ends the hobby, and this is the mechanism by which that happens.
The honest floor
The cheapest configuration that genuinely works, defined by a checkable list of specifications rather than by a price.
For a guitar that list is: sealed-gear tuning machines, a synthetic bone or graphite nut, an adjustable truss rod, and a scale length that suits the player’s size. For a keyboard: 61 full-size keys with touch response. For a ukulele: a bone-substitute nut and saddle with geared tuners. For a drum kit: genuine completeness — four stands, a pedal, a throne and cymbals.
The price follows from the specification and will drift. The specification does not.
Enough
The buy-once tier: what a beginner will not outgrow inside a year or two. Most readers should land here or at the floor, and our pages say so plainly rather than pushing everyone upward.
For an acoustic guitar this is a solid top. For keys it is 88 weighted keys. For a ukulele it is better wood and factory-fitted strings. For drums it is bronze cymbals rather than brass.
Where overspending starts
The point at which more money buys capability a beginner cannot yet use. A nicer top wood, a better-finished fretboard, more velocity layers in a piano sample, maple shells instead of poplar.
All of those are real improvements. None of them is something a first-year player can hear or feel. Naming this band is what makes the other three credible: a site that only ever argues upward is a sales page with a methodology section attached.
Two rules travel with the framework. The bands are defined by specifications and arithmetic, never by our opinion of a brand. And every roundup states which band each pick sits in, so the recommendation and the reasoning arrive together.
2. What our evidence actually is
Four things, and they are all checkable by you.
Published manufacturer specifications. Scale lengths, nut widths, key counts, polyphony, shell dimensions, pad sizes, wood types, bracing patterns. Every specification we quote is linked to the page it came from, on every product card and in the sources section of every page. If we cannot find a published figure, we say so rather than approximating one.
Manufacturer manuals and setup documentation. What the maker says about assembling, adjusting and maintaining the instrument, which is frequently more revealing than the marketing page.
Published dimensional conventions. Guitar fractional sizing, violin sizing by arm length, drum shell diameters, ukulele size classes. These are long-established conventions and we cite where we took them from.
Arithmetic against what a beginner physically needs. This is the part that is ours. What fret spacing does a hand of a given size need? How far forward does a 22 inch bass drum put the pedal, and can a six-year-old’s leg reach it? How many keys does a first-year method book actually use? Those calculations are the work, and they are reproducible — you can check them.
3. What our evidence is not
We have not played these instruments. Not one of them. There is no test lab, no collection of review units, no panel.
The reason we say this so plainly is that the alternative is to imply otherwise, and implying otherwise would be a lie that is easy to tell and impossible for you to check. Nearly every competing page in this category carries some version of “reviewed and demoed” or “in our testing.” A published, reproducible method is a weaker claim than a testing claim, and it is one we can actually stand behind.
So instead of “we tested twenty guitars,” we publish the spec comparison and what it implies for a beginner. Instead of “it felt great to play,” we publish the scale length and nut width against the player’s measurements. Instead of “this one sounds best,” we publish what the specification difference is — solid top versus laminate, humbucker versus single coil — and what that difference does, without claiming we heard it.
Where we describe patterns reported by owners, we say that is what they are. They are never presented as our own testing.
4. How prices work
Every price on this site is fetched live from the retailer, and every price is displayed with the date it was checked. Today that date is January 1, 1970.
There is no code path on this site that can render a hardcoded price. A single module owns the price data, and when a figure is older than 48 hours the component renders “check price” instead of a number. That is enforced in software rather than trusted to whoever wrote the page, because a stale price is worse than no price: it looks authoritative and it is wrong.
The same rule applies to product schema. We do not emit a structured-data price unless a live one exists. And we do not publish prices in prose — a number typed into a sentence is a bug on this site, because sentences do not update.
5. What gets a pick dropped
Four triggers, and any one of them is enough.
A specification change. Manufacturers revise models without renaming them. If a revision moves an instrument out of its band — a nut material changes, a scale length changes, touch response disappears — the pick is re-evaluated against the current specification, not the one it earned its place with.
Discontinuation or sustained unavailability. A recommendation you cannot buy is not a recommendation.
A price that leaves its band. The bands are defined by specification, but if an instrument’s price rises to where a materially better one sits, it stops being the right answer at that band.
A pattern of owner-reported failures. Not a bad review — a pattern, described as what it is.
We re-read every roundup against current specifications and availability at least every six months, and every guide at least every twelve. The editorial policy sets out the corrections process.
One thing that does not happen: a price refresh does not change a page’s last-updated date. Prices update daily and that is not a content change. Dating a page as freshly updated because a number moved teaches you, correctly, to stop trusting our dates.
6. Our commercial relationship
Chord & Case earns a commission when you buy through our links, at no extra cost to you. We accept no free instruments and no sponsored placements.
The commission does not determine which instruments we recommend or the order they appear in. Where a cheaper option is the better buy, it is the pick — the whole “where overspending starts” band exists to argue against spending more, which is the opposite of what a commission would incentivize.
Every outbound product link routes through our own redirect so we can count clicks, and every one is marked as a paid link. The full arrangement is on the disclosure page.
7. How to tell us we’re wrong
Email info@chordandcase.com, or use the contact form.
Specifications change and we make mistakes. If a figure on this site does not match the manufacturer’s current documentation, tell us and we will check it against the source and correct it. Corrections are made on the page rather than quietly, and the correction process is described in the editorial policy.
Everything on this site is written by Sawyer V..