Which Instrument Should You Learn?
Every single-instrument site has to answer this question with “ours”. We teach dozens, so we can afford to be honest: here they all are, compared on the three things that actually decide whether an instrument suits you — how many strings sit under your fingers, what they are tuned to, and how low the thing sounds.
Let us narrow it down
This picker narrows the list by asking what you actually want from an instrument — how many strings, how low it should sound, whether your guitar shapes ought to carry over — and it needs JavaScript to run. Without it you lose nothing important: the comparison table further down holds every fact it reasons over, for every instrument at once.
How to read the table
- Strings is the single biggest predictor of early difficulty. Four is a friendlier place to start than six; six opens more repertoire. Neither is wrong.
- Tuning is listed low string to high. Instruments that repeat one interval all the way up (all fourths, all fifths) reward pattern-thinkers; the guitar's one odd interval is why its shapes are so specific.
- Lowest note tells you the register you will be living in — whether you will be holding down the bottom of a band or sitting on top of it. It is computed from the tuning, not from marketing copy.
- Deep home is where the deepest material for that instrument lives. Today that is String Warrior for every one of them; as the network's instrument sites open, the rows that have one will point there instead.
Every instrument name links straight to its chord library, so you can see what your hands would actually be doing before you commit to anything.
Every instrument, compared
Tunings are written low string to high. Every row is generated from the same instrument data that draws the chord diagrams, so this table cannot drift from what the pages teach.
Still torn between two of them?
Pick the one whose sound you already hear in your head. Technique transfers far more than beginners expect — a year on the ukulele is not a year lost to the guitar, and a guitarist who picks up a bass is not starting over. The instrument you will practise is better than the instrument you should practise.
If the sticking point is money rather than sound, our buying guides are non-affiliate and will happily tell you to spend less. If it is “where do I even begin”, the beginner path starts at tuning up.
Once you have chosen
Open your instrument's chord library from the table above and learn three chords. That is genuinely enough for hundreds of the songs in our songbook, and it is far enough in to know whether you and the instrument get along. Then set up a practice routine — the diagrams follow whichever instrument you picked.