Kid guitar
It matters how old and how big the kid is as to what guitar to recommend or get.
A lot of people think that if the kid is like 10 or a larger kid at a younger age, that you should avoid so called, "kid" sized guitars. Obviously if the kid is five years old a small sized guitar would be good.
The reason many say you should get a kid a full sized guitar if the kid is of the right age, size, is that the necks are standard size the fret hand coordination and muscle memory develops correctly. When a kid starts out on a small guitar the coordination and muscle memory will not transfer directly over to a full sized guitar and this can make for a new learning curve and be a stumbling block, but not insurmountable. The kid can still learn basic chords and scales, but will have to adapt them to a full sized guitar later.
I would say that a Squire mini strat would be a very good guitar and not too expensive from MF, no affln, or elsewhere, if you want a small guitar. Another child's guitar is the Epiphone Les Paul Junior, now popularly used by many adults but originally designed as a Gibson student guitar. The Les Paul Jr. is a single humbucker equipped guitar in its present Epiphone form available from any of the online retailers and would probably make a great kids guitar.
If the kid is large enough to handle a full sized guitar, rondomusic.com, no affln., has a couple black Agile AL 2000 Les Paul copies of excellent construction currently on sale for 175 dollars. One has a slim neck profile that might be good for a kid but a regular neck profile has plenty of room on the fretboard for finger placement without your fingers getting in the way of each other. These are excellent guitars and are probably better built than most of the Les Paul copy immitations costing two or three times as much. These Agile AL 2000's have dual chrome covered humbuckers of good quality and are layed out like a Gibson Les Paul with controls and general layout, with some minor design differences, mostly imperceptible to the average person.
Then of course is the amp. For around a hundred dollars you can get a real good amp, like the VOX Pathfinder 15R for 119 at places like musciansfriend.com. Or a really cool battery or wall current operated VOX DA5 small modeling amp with lots of great amp models and great effects that are highly adjustable, plus it has a microphone input with a separate volume control so your kid can sing along or someone else can sing along while the kid plays. Very cool for 139 dollars at MF or elsewhere. Uses 6 "C" cell batteries for 30 hours on a camping trip or whatever and has a switch to change the power output from 5 watts, to 2.5 or 0.5 watts. It is a super great amp.
These are just some of my ideas and hopefully you will find them of some use in making your decision as to what is best.
I would avoid really low quality off brand name guitars and amps that will probably cost you as much as a Squire or Agile, or even a Vox. This is the golden age of guitars and amps and there are great inexpensive ones available, as was never before possible historically; because these excellently made guitars are mass produced in modern factories using robotics and computer controlled machine tools. Very consistent and high quality guitars are continuously turned out and competition among companies is very strong, keeping the quality high and the prices low, in most cases.
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Originally Posted by Bloozcat
