Boutique Acoustic Guitars

Shopping for a boutique acoustic online can feel like a strange exercise. You can read every spec on the page, watch three demos, and still have no idea whether the guitar will do what you want once it is in your lap. Nut width, body size, and scale length tell you almost nothing about whether your hands will get along with an instrument, and a top that sounds tight on day one may be the one you keep for thirty years as it opens up.

The only real fix is a wall with enough guitars on it to compare, and a staff that knows each one inside and out. We keep close to 100 boutique acoustics at our Lexington, Massachusetts showroom near Boston at any given time. We are proud to be Collings Guitars' largest dealer worldwide and were Froggy Bottom's very first dealer, and we are also an authorized dealer for Santa Cruz, Atkin, Iris, Fairbanks, Goodall, Raymond Kraut, Dudenbostel, Vazquez Rubio, Burgin, and Guitarras Esteve, to name a few. That runs from OMs and 000s through dreadnoughts, slope-shoulders, small-body 0s and 00s, nylon strings, and the occasional Weissenborn or archtop.

We have carried some of these builders long enough to know how their guitars age, which is not something a spec sheet or a demo video will tell you. So tell us how you play, what guitars you are familiar with, and what you wish that guitar did differently, and we will point you at the two or three here worth your attention. We will also tell you when nothing on the wall is quite it and you would be better off waiting. Some people sort that out over a phone call and have the guitar shipped. Others drive in from across New England to spend an afternoon with them at our showroom, about 20 minutes from downtown Boston.