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- Guitar Center:
Up to 30% off acoustic - Musician's Friend:
Up to 40% off electrics - Sweetwater:
Last chance to save on pedals
Welcome back to deals of the week, your one-stop shop for the best gear deals in guitar town. The Memorial Day sales have all but died down now, but two fresh sales mean there's plenty to get stuck into this week.
Guitar Center has launched a brand new acoustic guitar sale, offering up to 30% off acoustic instruments from Martin, Gibson, Taylor, and many more. Meanwhile, over at Musician's Friend, you can bag deals of up to 40% off in their Electric Guitar Month sale, which runs until June 21st.
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 half-price pedals and free software. 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
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: Save on accessories
- 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, with the sales expected to start in June. It's not the place to pick up instrument deals, but you can bag some big savings on accessories and essentials. Most retailers run competing sales too, which are much better for 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.
