Guild D-320 review – the new benchmark for entry-level acoustic guitars?
$299/£279, guildguitars.com
The affordable acoustic guitar market is brutal. With so many options available from so many brands – big and small – it is a veritable 1998 King Of The Ring of a cage match trying to stand out and get noticed.
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And into this Royal Rumble comes Guild guitars – with parent company Cordoba now ensconced as part of the Yamaha group – promising to offer something to the budget guitar buyer that very few others can at this price point: proper, bona fide acoustic guitar heritage.
Because look, with the greatest respect to some of the biggest players in the sub-$500 acoustic market – names like Fender, Sigma, Epiphone, Gretsch, and of course Yamaha themselves – they don’t really have the acoustic guitar heritage of say, a Martin or a Gibson.
Image: Adam Gasson
Guild on the other hand? It’s Nick Drake, it’s John Denver, Neil Young, Pete Townshend, Brian May, Jeff Buckley, Eric Clapton… and a new generation of artists like Beabadoobee, Father John Misty and The Japanese House. They’ve all helped to make Guild a proper, bona fide A-list acoustic guitar brand that has heritage and cultural cachet that few others can match.
And that, for me, is the really interesting thing about this D-320 guitar – and the new Guild 300 Series in general – normally you have to pay quite a premium to buy a guitar that has both a brand name you won’t want to tape over and a build that you can rely on for years to come. This might change all that.
What is the Guild 300 Series?
The 300 Series is a new line of import acoustic guitars that look to shake up the entry-level guitar market by offering a quartet of classic-vibed acoustic guitars with solid traditional tonewood tops for less than – and the clue is in the name here I suspect – $300.
The range consists of a pair of 14-fret dreadnoughts and a pair of OMs, all identical except for the solid top wood used – the guitars with ‘20’ in the model name, such as this D-320 have solid mahogany tops, while the guitars with ‘40’ have solid Sitka spruce.
Image: Adam Gasson
All the guitars have the same laminate mahogany back and sides, with rosewood bridges and fingerboards, and suitably spartan aesthetics. The guitars are satin-finished, with the solid top having a nicely rustic open-pore treatment that lets you feel the woodgrain. Binding and purfling is neat but simple black plastic, with a nicely done multi-ring soundhole rosette.
The fingerboard has simple pearloid dot markers, while the headstock is suitably austere, with just a simple but iconic pearloid Guild logo breaking the cleanliness of the rosewood fascia.
Given that these guitars come with both premium materials and a legacy brand association, there are of course some compromises to be made here – there are no electronics here should you wish to use this in an amplified situation. But given that even a high-quality acoustic pickup is unlikely to set you back more than a few hundred bucks, it’s still a crazy value proposition.
For example, the cheapest Martin acoustic with a solid top will set you back more than double what the D-320 does. And while the Mexican-made DX-2E is a genuinely great guitar for the money, has a gigbag and an electro system, and is made in Mexico as opposed to Asia, it really does ram home what a compelling prospect the 300 Series is.
Guild D-320 – build quality and feel
Upon unboxing the D-320 and sitting it against my desk, I am once again reminded how good we have it now as guitar players. Back when I was starting out, a sub-£300 acoustic guitar was a pretty agricultural thing. The D-230, with its open-pore solid mahogany top, looks like an old friend.
Image: Adam Gasson
Even though the dreadnought shape probably isn’t the brand’s most iconic acoustic – that’ll be the F or M series – there’s something about an all-mahogany Guild that just looks right. I guess we can thank Nick Drake for that, but it also helps with that open-pore satin finish – it can look a little anaemic and unfinished on spruce tops sometimes, but here it just adds to the vibe that this is a well-travelled friend, and not a straight-out-of-the-box guitar from Asia.
Speaking of that box, the guitar did come direct to me from the factory, without any set-up, and as soon as I sat down with the guitar, it became instantly apparent that its long journey had done a mischief to the neck, and left it with a visible bow that rendered even cowboy position chords a bit of a strain.
A quick turn of the truss rod (easily accessible through the soundhole) soon resolved this, and while it’s obviously not great to have a guitar turn up with such an issue. I can probably give it the benefit of the doubt that it was fine when it left the factory. After all, it has travelled across continents, time zones, seasons and all sorts to get here, and an acoustic guitar is nothing if not susceptible to changes in temperature and humidity.
Image: Adam Gasson
The fret job is tidy and clean, though the frets themselves could do with a bit of a polish – despite the dullness however, it doesn’t seem to compromise the feel or playability.
Inside, the guitar is very clean and tidy, with neatly executed X-bracing, and while the kerfed linings aren’t the most expertly crafted things I’ve ever seen, I am forced to remind myself that this is indeed a $300 guitar.
Guild D-320 – playability and sounds
With the truss rod adjusted, the guitar is a much more inviting prospect – the action is still a little higher than some acoustic guitars squarely aimed at enticing electric players, but it strikes a good balance between accessibility and string buzz, with notes fretting cleanly all the way up the neck.
The neck itself has a comfortable, if slightly generic C-shape, with a relatively slinky neck depth of 20mm at the first fret and a hair shy of 23mm at the ninth – baseball bat aficionados will want to look elsewhere. String spacing is again pretty tight – just 32mm at the nut and 49mm at the bridge – but you get the sense that given the guitar’s price point, it makes sense to offer an instrument that is comfortable and easy to fret chord shapes with, even if it makes it not the most fingerstyle-appropriate instrument. In practice, if you’re just plucking away at some chords however, it’s perfectly fine – though it does require you to make sure you keep your wits about you.
Image: Adam Gasson
A mahogany dreadnought is an interesting thing – the nature of the wood naturally works somewhat in opposition to the dread’s natural tendency to be a great big canon of a thing. The result is a sound that’s bold and stringent without ever feeling shouty – there’s a warmth and a woodiness to the tone that’s charming, with a gently rumbling bass as opposed to being beaten about the face by it.
It’s a character that absolutely laps up alternate tunings, and with the help of the rather handsome open-gear vintage-style tuners, excursions into DADGAD and open D are rewarded with a deep and sonorous tonality that makes this guitar well-suited to folk guitarists or solo singers.
The best part is that with a solid top and a thin finish, you know this guitar will likely get better with age as the wood dries out – and it’s an impressively characterful instrument already.
Guild D-320 – should I buy one?
The budget acoustic guitar market is unbelievably competitive, but the D-320 offers a compelling package for a killer price. While the lack of an electronics system might be felt by gigging players, if you’re after an affordable acoustic to play at home and maybe record occasionally, this offers playability, tone and vibe in spades.
Ultimately, it’s a Guild acoustic guitar with a solid top for less than the price of a boutique reverb pedal… what more do you need to know?
Guild D-320 alternatives
There are loads of guitars that offer similar specs to what the Guild is offering, but they struggle to compete in the vibe and brand stakes (and let’s not pretend that doesn’t matter). One that comes close is Epiphone’s J-45 Studio ($299/£349), which has a solid top and a smattering of the Gibson’s vibe for not a lot of money. Guild’s stablemate Yamaha is of course a big player in this sector, and the trusty FG800J ($229/£219) is another impressive and solid-topped contender. If you’re after another mahogany-topped guitar, then Fender’s CC-60S ($229/£189) is another more than decent alternative.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
