I'm going to buy a guitar for beginners and i wondered what strings are better steel or nylon?
I urge you to read the answer from OU again and ignore the others - who obviously haven't got the first clue of what they're talking about. You pick the guitar for the type of music (and sound) you're after. You can play basically everything on a steel string that you can on a nylon string, plus a whole lot more... And no, a classical guitar is NOT easier to play than a well adjusted steel string with light strings - in fact it's the opposite. A classical guitar has a wide, flat fingerboard, something which makes chords much harder to play. Furhermore, the scale is longer (the scale is the distance between the nut and bridge - the length of the vibrating string if you will). This longer scale increase the distance between the fret (increasing the reach), and also increase the string tension. Finally, the action (string height) is larger on a classical/nylon string guitar as opposed to a steel string guitar which has been properly adjusted. Most guitars off the shelf have an inferior set up for a beginner, and this is why many have this funny idea that a steel string is much harder to play. You may also want to check out guitar body sizes (steel string) that is smaller than the large Jumbo or Dreadnought varieties. In essence, if you play classical music, or classical finger style guitar - choose a nylon string instrument. If not, then get a steel string and have it properly adjusted. Make sure you try out a lot of models as the necks, bodies, woods etc, differ a lot.
Musical type speaks volumes on the subject of this problem. Folks that want high quantity shall be unhappy with unamplified nylon string guitars. From my point of view, the elemental difference between steel and nylon is that this: steel strings ring and nylon strings resonate. The volume produced via steel is quite often a lot bigger than nylon however, to my mind-set, the sound resonance produced with the aid of the wooden of your guitar is essentially masked by steel strings. In case you have a decently made guitar (generally, around a thousand dollars and up), the sound interaction between the wooden and the strings in a nylon guitar is magical across the whole frequency range. With a steel string guitar, the sound produced via the vibrating string overpowers the timber resonance at all but low frequencies. In my view, i'll take a nylon string guitar any day for the sensitivity won from the interplay between timber and vibrating string.
Yeah, you have some really bad answers here. You don't buy a nylon string guitar because you are a beginner, you buy one because you want to play classical music. You also cannot move between nylon and steel strings on the same guitar. Unless you want to play classical finger style music you need a steel string guitar. Just have extra light strings put on it and you can most likely have the action lowered a bit also, both of which will make it easier on the fingers. But the bottom line is this, if you want to play guitar you will have to go through a stage where you fingers get a little tender. Just keep your practice sessions short in the beginning, like 15 - 20 minutes at a time until the calluses build up.
