Guitar
Gift buying for a guitarist can feel intimidating. Once you get past the fear of entering a music store, that is. It’s daunting thinking about whether they already have it, whether it’s the correct gauge and upsetting somebody that knows a lot about guitars. Everybody that plays guitars knows a lot about guitars. That sentence isn’t fun to write, but it’s true.
Buying gear for people that care about gear is like taking an exam you didn’t study for.
We speak from experience here. Between us we’ve been playing for decades. We’ve sent the wrong thing before. We know spending hours trawling reddit only for your carefully selected gift to land with a thud.
This isn’t a list of stuff we thought was obvious just to fill up space. We skipped past gifts that felt like placeholders and selected things that would make any player want to rip-open the wrapping. Some are wonderfully practical. Once you realise how much a guitarist depends on the small things to feel comfortable on stage it doesn’t sound boring anymore. Function matters. Having something that’s badly suited to what they play or use is frustrating because it silently screams “my partner doesn’t understand me”.
We also considered who these gifts will be for. Somebody who’s been playing for twenty years will have a completely different Wishlist to the fifteen year old picking up electric guitars for the first time. We wanted gifts that could work for as many players as possible without being so vague that nothing means anything.
We’ve included gifts for the seasoned player that will know what half the things here are and appreciate you recognising they’re worth knowing about. We’ve included gifts for beginners. Things that will help build a kit without talking down to people. We’ve also included some stuff that will catch any guitarists attention; things that you pick up, inspect and casually place somewhere they’ll see it every day.
Keeping this list short was intentional. We’d rather recommend you a smaller number of great gifts than overwhelm you with things we didn’t care about.