Guitar World deals of the week: grab the best early Prime Day guitar deals with essential guitar gear starting from just $4.99, plus the ideal last-minute Father's Day gift for guitar-playing dads
Our gear experts track down the best weekly deals on guitar gear, bringing you hand-picked savings on guitars, pedals, amps, and more
- Amazon:
Early Prime Day guitar deals - Guitar Center:
Up to 30% off acoustic - Musician's Friend:
Up to 40% off electrics
Welcome back to deals of the week! Today I'm going to be rounding up the very best of the early Prime Day guitar deals ahead of the main sale launching next week. There's already some great savings to be had, but the official Amazon Prime Day sale starts next week on June 23rd. Of course, we'll be covering all the ins and outs of the sale as it progresses, so stay tuned for the inside knowledge on all the best deals.
If you missed out on the Father's Day gift edition last week, then you're likely too late to get anything in time now. For instant gifting, however, you can grab gift cards from certain retailers, which are instant delivery, ideal if you forgot about Dad this year. Here are some of our recommended retailers:
- Sweetwater: Get 10% back
- Guitar Center: Instant print or email
- Musician's Friend: Start from $5
- Fender: From $25 to $500
As usual, I've picked out a selection of the very best deals on guitar gear that the wider Guitar World team and I have seen this week, so keep scrolling for my handpicked early Prime Day deals. I also send out a weekly email with the biggest and best savings on guitar gear, so be sure to sign up for The Pick: Deals to make sure you don't miss out on any discounts.
My top deals
Why I ❤️ this deal: It's stupendous value for money considering the amount of features you get.
Mooer has been around for a while now, evolving from a budget Chinese brand into a fully-fledged guitar brand in its own right. This Mooer GE150 budget multi-effects is a great option for players looking to make a deeper foray into guitar playing, thanks to 55 different amp sims, 26 cabinets, and 151 different FX, making it very complete indeed. Add in a looper, multi-function footswitches, and a built-in drum machine, and you've got everything the budding guitar player needs for way less than $130, an absolute bargain in anybody's book.
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Losing guitar picks is just part and parcel of life as a guitarist, and if you're anything like me you'll need to restock regularly. I leave them at gigs, rehearsals, recording sessions, lose them down the side of the sofa, or sometimes they just mysteriously disappear when I drop them on the floor, presumably lost to the ether. The elixir then, is this 12-pack of Jim Dunlop Max Grip picks, available for just $5.76 in the early Amazon Prime Day sales. That's $0.48 per pick.
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If you feel like changing up your guitar playing a bit this year, adding a guitar slide is a great way to open yourself up to some fresh techniques. I picked up the slide a few years back when I hit a rut in my playing, and even just for subtle little things, it made a huge difference. A simple solo suddenly took on a whole new timbre, sliding it down the strings with masses of effects pedals, resulting in some otherworldly sounds. This Ernie Ball Slide is just $8.99 in the early Prime Day sales, so well worth a punt if you fancy experimenting with your guitar tone.
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This D'Addario Thumb Pick is nearly half price over at Amazon at the moment. It's great for that country-style chicken picking, or just adding additional control to regular fingerpicking styles. Down to just $5.99, it's a cheap way to try a brand-new guitar technique, and who knows what hitherto undiscovered sounds you could unlock.
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Personally, I never miss a chance to bag a new set of strings at a discount, as I go through them like wildfire playing with my band and recording in my local studio. These D'Addario XL strings are super value for money at the moment, with a three-pack costing just $15.99 at Amazon, which works out to just $5.33 per pack.
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For the acoustic guitar players out there, this Ernie Ball Earthwood Acoustic Guitar Strings 3-pack has got a wicked 15% discount. Working out at just $5.10 per pack, it's a great value way to stock up on strings for the future, or outfit more guitars in your collection for less.
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Speaking of strings, if you want to make yours last longer, then wiping down after every playing session with D'Addario XLR8 String Cleaner will ensure you get much more out of your string sets. Every time you play, sweat, dirt, and grime from your hands go onto the strings, drastically reducing their life span, and the resulting black gunk you get on your strings is a direct result of that. Available for just $6.49 at Amazon, when used regularly this cleaner will make sure your strings stay fresh for longer.
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Guitar sales to shop
Each week I search all the major retailers and manufacturers for the very best sales for guitar players. Here's a list of what's available and where this week.
- Amazon: Early Prime Day deals
- B&H Photo: Money off pro audio
- Gear4Music: Clearance deals
- Guitar Center: Save up to 30% on acoustics
- Guitar Tricks: 1 month for $1
- IK Multimedia: 50% off software
- Musician's Friend: Up to 40% off electrics
- Native Instruments: Big software savings
- Plugin Boutique: 100s of plugin discounts
- Positive Grid: 20% off Spark Neo
- Reverb: Up to 46% off guitars & pedals
- Sweetwater: Up to 35% off pedal sale
- Thomann: Hot deals
- Universal Audio: Money off plugins
- Waves: 5 plugins for just $99.99
Upcoming sales
If you're not ready to shop just yet but are looking to save some cash for an upcoming sale, I've got the insider knowledge on which sales are coming up soon. Here's what you should be saving your money for:
- Prime Day guitar deals - Amazon announced that it would be launching Prime Day earlier this year, and has finally confirmed that it will be running between June 23rd and June 26th. The sale has grown over the years to be much better for guitar players, but you will find most retailers run competing sales too, which are much better for premium gear like guitars, pedals, and amps.
Top products
Part of my job is looking after all the buying guides here at Guitar World, which gives me a unique oversight as to which products are hot right now. Every week I look at what's getting the most clicks from our buying guides and list the top five products for you here.
Our clever widget sorts them by price and automatically picks up if there's a discount at a particular retailer, doing a lot of the hard work for me! If you're looking to see what other guitarists are interested in and get the cheapest possible price, then this is the place to start your search.
Why trust me?
You may be wondering, why should I trust what this random dude on the internet says? Well, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Matt McCracken and I've been playing guitar for well over twenty years. In that time I've gigged all over the UK, recorded in professional studios, bought and sold countless guitars, amps, and pedals, spent 5 years working in music retail for Dawsons Music and Northwest Guitars, and now I handle all things gear for Guitar World.
I am a guitar player first and foremost, and the reason I do this job is that I genuinely love all things gear. When I'm not working my day job, you'll find me in the rehearsal room with my band, helming the desk at my local studio working with other musicians, or writing new songs and testing gear in my home studio.
The main focus of my job is to test and research gear for our buying guides and reviews here, whether it's demoing the latest pedal release with my band, diving into the technical side of audio interfaces, or putting guitar cables head-to-head in group tests to determine which is the best. It gives me a great overview on what gear is out there right now, and unlike a lot of content you find online, I've actually had my hands on the gear I write about.
I'm also responsible for finding the best possible deals on gear for our readers, covering all the major sales events of the year like Memorial Day, Prime Day, Labor Day, and of course, the Black Friday guitar deals. I track prices of all the most popular gear throughout the year, so I know straight away whether or not a saving is the real deal or a dishonest retailer trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
How I choose deals
To determine whether or not a deal is worthy of inclusion in deals of the week it has to pass a few different hurdles. I'll ask myself the following questions about any deal before I decide whether or not to include it:
- Is the product genuinely good value for money?
- Is the discount amount real or has the RRP been inflated?
- Would guitarists benefit from having this particular piece of gear in their rig?
- If I've not had hands on experience with the gear, do I have a recommendation from a fellow staff member or musician?
I have various tools I can use to check prices if I've not been tracking it, like camelcamelcamel which can track the price of a product on Amazon. Generally because I'm looking at this stuff every week, I already have a good overview of what the product should cost.
Shopping tips
1. Consider your music goals - What do you want to achieve with your music over the next 12 months or so? Do you want to gig more? Learn a new instrument? Or finally, record your songs? Now could be the time to invest in gear that helps you fulfil your musical aspirations.
2. Create a wishlist early - The most sensible way to take advantage of any gear deals is to know in advance what you’re looking for. This will make searching much easier, rather than having to trawl through loads of deals you don’t want to find the ones you do, or pondering things you don't need. To help you create your dream shopping list, take the time to explore our expert and up-to-date buying guides and reviews.
3. Work out what you actually need - Check out your favourite brands, see what you need and will genuinely use - don’t waste your cash and fill your basket with stuff that will never truly see any action.
4. Streamline your current gear - Something else you should consider ahead of time is whether you have enough space in your collection for new gear. Could you offload some gear you don't use to make room and generate funds for some new gear?
5. Sign up to mailing lists - In addition to bookmarking this page, we'd recommend signing up to mailing lists of your favourite retailers now to get the jump on the best deals when they do come around.
Over to you
Spotted a deal that I missed? Drop me a line in the comments below and if it's still live I'll drop the best ones deal into next week's Deals of the Week.
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Matt is a Junior Deals Writer here at Guitar World. He regularly tests and reviews music gear with a focus on guitars, amps, pedals, modelers, and pretty much anything else guitar-related. Matt worked in music retail for 5 years at Dawsons Music and Northwest Guitars and has written for various music sites including MusicRadar, Guitar Player, Guitar.com, Ultimate Guitar, and Thomann’s t.blog. A regularly gigging guitarist with over 20 years of experience playing live and writing and recording in bands, he's performed everything from jazz to djent, gigging all over the country in more dingy venues than you can shake a drop-tuned guitar at. When not writing articles for Guitar World, you'll find him making a racket with northern noise punks Never Better.
- Daryl RobertsonSenior Deals Writer
- Chris Barnes
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