[chongjasmine]

What do you recommend?

[beanbag]

hello! i've moved your thread as this is a more appropriate forum for your question.

please feel free to search around the guitar forum and look at what others have recommended in the past.

speaking from experience, you're going to be hard-pressed to find a good quality guitar for less than $200, but sometimes you may find success looking at used guitars. you can try searching local online postings, although those can be dubious, or you may try stopping by a local music store to see what they have available.

from a steel string perspective, yamaha makes some budget guitars, fender has some budget steel-strings and i believe takamine does too.

if you already know how to play a little bit, sit down and play the guitars and see how they sound to you. if you do not play, take someone who does or ask an employee to play them for you. at the end of the day, what's most important is how it sounds and feels to YOU.

i have played guitars that cost well above $2K--i'm not fancy or important enough to have tried the insanely expensive ones lol--but my favorite classical will always be my cordoba classical guitar, my starter classical which i have played for years and used as my teaching tool back when i taught lessons (it cost somewhere around $500) and my martin steel string, which cost $600 when i was 16 but sounds richer and more beautiful to me than a whole row of crazy expensive taylors. (also i like the sound better than some of the crazy expensive martins i've tried for that matter.)

ultimately what matters most is does your instrument sound good to you, and will it inspire you to play?

[Giga Hertz]

I've played some reasonably decent Yamahas and Fenders around that price range.

[Giuseppe]

Go to a shop and try all the guitars within your price range.

Find the one you like the most.

I tend to focus on the sound and how it feels to play it.

[darfaz]

I would try to find a Yamaha with a solid top at $200USD. They are consistently such good guitars. I have never played one, but Eastman's budget line is just a little more than $200, and I would absolutely give them a look.