The dreaded death grip and why you need a good beginners guitar

How hard does it have to be to learn to play guitar?
A while back, I was invited to go to a mini concert hosted by a guitar teacher friend of mine.
There where little children from 6 years, all the way up to guys in their thirties.
All of them students of my good friend the guitar teacher (I’m not going to give his name, because I’m about to blast him).

Seeing as things where running a bit behind schedule, I was asked to help tune the guitars for the concert, seeing as some of the kids weren’t to good at it. This alone was a bad sign, but what I discovered when tuning these guitars really broke my heart, and it’s something I think you should watch out for when buying a first guitar for a beginner, whether it’s your own first guitar or if one of your children is going to learn to play guitar.

Here’s what I found.
Some of the kids had such cheap lousy guitars that even I, with my 30+ years of guitar playing experience had difficulty playing.
Now you may not think that’s a big problem, after all, I’m a little bit pampered when it comes to the guitars I play, but I can assure you that most of those kids will drop their guitar lessons very soon, and if they do carry on they will suffer from something that can be one of the most debilitating handicaps for any guitarist.
I’m talking about the dreaded Death Grip.

What is the Death grip?
The death grip is what happens when a guitar student develops the bad habit of applying way too much pressure on the guitars fretboard in order to press a note or a chord.
Lousy guitars which have strings set unreasonably high above the fretboard and which have heavy gauge strings (Acoustic guitars are famous for this, and is one of the main reasons I recommend an electric guitar to learn guitar on) are one of the main culprits in forcing a student guitarist into believing that an excess amount of finger pressure is required in order to play the guitar.
Now there is only so much power in a finger, so the next thing that happens is what results in the death grip. In order to play the guitar, the guitarist grabs the guitar neck with all of his might with the fretting hand.

You can’t play a guitar that way, because your hand and fingers need a smooth flowing and natural action to move from one note or chord to the other. The Death grip will stifle your guitar playing efforts till the day you die unless you sort it out now.

Why this guitar teacher friend of mine did nothing about the situation is not a mystery to me. Firstly – He himself suffers from the Death grip so how would he know. (I know, he shouldn’t even be a guitar teacher if that’s the case) and
Secondly – He’s too much of a coward to tell the parents that they need to buy their children a better guitar to learn on (I questioned him about it and this became obvious, as he didn’t want to offend them and lose the students).
I don’t have that problem, I tell it like it is.

You need a decent beginner guitar, preferably an electric beginner guitar, to get your guitar playing fingers off on the right foot.