Your first ever guitar

Wow , twenty years ago ?
Are you and old timer too ?That must have been a traumatic experience for you,
( and a Martin too .) I bet you still have nightmares about that one .
   My first was a Stella flat top that was old when I got it ( forty five years ago when I was ten yrs old , I guess that dates me  ) .Knowing what I know now it was an awfull guitar , but I did'nt know the difference at the time . To me it was the holy grail . I learned a lot of what I know on that guitar . That was untill my two older sisters
were playing piggy back in the living room and fell on it when I had it sitting in a chair
smashed the top in .
( I think they were just mad because I had more sisters than they did....... )

Just bought my first, a Yamaha F310 to get me started for at least a year.

BADEYE, I get scared, we almost need to go to a "nursery home for old people", I am born in 1955.
About the very first guitar, yes this has been already a few times a topic, but it's always nice to answer. I had a "piece of junk" belonging to my younger brother, BUT WITH an Electro-Acoustic element, and thinking about conquering the world. My studies did change plans. So my first guitar was a YAMAHA FG 300, for about $300 and 30 years ago. This was a guitar with a pick-guard like a Gibson Hummingbird. Also choices were quit limited in Europe. GIBSON & FENDER electrics, acoustic Yamaha was considered as a good guitar. Two tuners are broken, so 4 strings left and when picking a string, I'm amazed to hear a REAL GOOD SOUND.  I have the impression, that these Yamaha's are "wanted". I remember that thatguitar was really good, but my real interest started with a Black, reflecting finish, Gibson LP studio, followed by a Martin HD-28, I received from a junkie in need of money: 750$ (It was between 700-800$) and the rset is history.

My first guitar was given to me by my girlfriend.  She had tried to learn it as a girl and had it hanging around.  I married her, by the way.  I don't recall the brand of the guitar, but I do recall that the neck was warped and I could only get five strings tuned at a time. 

I was given some guitars by a friend as part of a moving deal.  He needed help moving, and I helped.  He had extra stuff and put it in a pile.  Anyone who helped move could take anything they wanted from the pile.  I took three guitars.  All beat up, two of them were 3/4 size.  I gave one of them to my sister so that she could have a guitar for giving lessons on, I gave one to my daughter, and I kept the third.  The third was a Yamaha Classical full size "student" guitar. 

My first guitar I purchased is an Ibanez SG knockoff.  It's on my wall behind me right now.  I never play it, but all the talk of barre chords being easier on an electric got me thinking.  So I'm restringing it today and it will get some use.  It's a beautiful sounding guitar.  Sounds far richer than the meager price tag would have one suspect. 

If you're including basses in the lineup, then my first bass I bought was a home-built bass someone had traded.  I bought it for $25 on a whim.  It was a plywood body that was painted black and had a lightning bolt painted in red on the back with the word "Whizbang" painted diagonally across the body.  I loved Whizbang.  It got me restarted with stringed instruments.  Whizbang fell apart catastrophically while I was playing it.  It was home built, but not well built. 

- Zurf

I hear you Zurf, My eyesight isn't what it used to be, have some creeking bones too, but still enjoy my self with friends.
We laugh a lot,and play music .

have a good one...  Badeye

It was a Hofner-Anno nylon string classical.  A beautiful instrument, with marvelous tone.  It was given to me by a close friend who had just lost his old landlord, with whom he was close.  He bought it for her.  She never played it.   He gave it to me.  I took it as a moral obligation to learn it, which I did.

I just gave it to a close friend of mine.  She's playing it every day now, too.

My first guitar was some generic strat out of a Sears catalog. I actually wish I still had it. I could probably make it a decent guitar now.

My Mum bought me my 1st guitar from a church fund-raising sale. She paid £7 for an old beat up nylon-stringed classical. It was held together with black tape and I loved it. It did me for a year or so. I learned a lot on that old thing.

I got my first guitar at age 15, which was 35 years ago. Does that make me an old-timer too? It was a $29 Fender student acoustic. What a piece of junk, barely ok to learn chords with. But I spent hours practicing chord changes and playing from a Beatles songbook that had chord diagrams. That, and practicing from my Mel Bay chord book got me to a place where my parents were convinced that I was actually serious about the guitar.

My first REAL guitar was a Guild D25 Mahogany. Got that for sweet 16.  In 1976, my first husband sold it for $100 to put a windshield in his '66 Impala.  The guy who bought it still has it and uses it to perform.  (Now that I’ve bought myself a new guitar, I’m no longer “allowed"  to tell that story, which was told with much emotion and full of expletives!)

25 years ago I bought a used 1968 Yamaha FG180 from the commune-dwelling daughter of certified hippies, who were the original owners. I  still have it. I had repairs done on it back then, and replaced the tuning machines with Grovers. My second husband managed to discourage me from playing and I didn’t play for about 20 years.  The poor Yamaha sat in a case that entire time, drying out.  Last year some friends encouraged me to start playing again, and I also had the guitar repaired again. It sounds great but I found it just too big to be comfortable playing it. (Is my age showing yet?)

Last year I treated myself to a new guitar. I was specifically looking for a smaller guitar and ended up buying a Martin CXE Black electric/acoustic. It's one of their least expensive guitars but it has a great sound, even though it's made from a combination of wood composite and laminated wood neck. No endangered hardwoods were used in its manufacture.  It’s very easy to play, sounds like a big guitar, and is much smaller then the Yamaha dreadnought.  It’s a great guitar but it’s cheapness shows. The manufacturer’s mark isn’t stamped on the wood; it’s a sticker, which wanted to come off until I pressed it on more firmly. And the gold lettering on the head is just stickers and one of them came off after I parked a clamp-on capo there. 

Access to music to play is key for anyone just starting out. I had limited resources for buying songbooks when I was a teenager. That was back in the Stone Age before the Internet.  I’m so glad I started to play again and I must say that I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Chordie!

couldn't agree more, recently started to learn on an Encore (the strat lookalike model) which i got off Ebay on a whim,

ok, fair enough, a lot of more experienced guitarists might mock the Encore brand but its not a bad little starter and it will do until i decide to spend out on something a little pricier.

as for the wonders of the web and learning, well, i've spent a good few quid on books, dvds and even cd-roms to learn the guitar and to be honest, after i'd learnt a few of the basic chords i started to look online for songs that are a bit more to my liking than the nursery rhymes you get in the books and my playing is improving at a much better rate

I love some of these stories. I guess first loves last forever!

My fiance gave me an inexpensive nylon-stringed classical guitar 17 or 18 years ago (I think it was from the JC Penny catalog, or is that catalogue?). I learned "Red River Valley" on it, and thought it sounded like a toy.

In my infinite wisdom, I decided what I needed was a good set of steel strings.

Two weeks later I couldn't get it to stay in tune, and, while playing "Tom Dooley", the bridge ripped itself from the laminate top.

I didn't play again for nearly 15 years, when the same woman (now my wife) gave me a Jasmine for my birthday. Not a Martin, or a Taylor, but a really nice instrument which I have been playing now for a little over two years.