[PATRICK PLAYING SOME CHORD PROGRESSIONS ON THE ALVAREZ RF8]

PATRICK OGLE: Hi. I'm Patrick Ogle for Gearwire, and I'm holding an Alvarez RF8 Folk Style guitar. The back and sides of this guitar are made of mahogany. It says "select spruce" top, and I'm suspicious as if that might mean that it's a laminated top. I can't tell if it's solid or laminated. It looks kind of like it might be a laminated top but I could be wrong. But either way, it's a decent sounding guitar. It feels kind of small; I guess that's the folk part of it. It doesn't have a -- I actually made a mistake; when I was looking the information on the guitar, I looked up the wrong guitar and I was rushing around and I walked in and I looked over and my brain told me it was a dreadnought and I looked at it and I'm like, "Wow. That's a strange-looking dreadnought. It is a point in fact NOT a dreadnought. They say it's folk style which is kind of like an OM a little bit, not quite.

It plays pretty nice. It's very bright. If you compare it to some of the other guitars, obviously bigger bodied ones -- you know, we talked about the Washburn D10SCE cutaway; it doesn't sound big like that. It doesn't have the deepness of that. Same thing with the D10S, same thing with a lot of other larger bodied acoustics, but it still sounds nice. It still has like it has a high. It's a very high sound, very bright sound.

[PATRICK PLAYING SOME CHORD PROGRESSIONS ON THE ALVAREZ RF8]

It's a good guitar for beginners again. Maybe even a little bit easier to play than the Washburn D10S guitars it's because for another reason the action on the one, that at least as it came out of the box, is pretty low but not so ow that you get to have problems with it. This guitar lists at something around $319.99 and you can probably get it for 220 bucks. That is a really -- I mean if you handed me this guitar and said it costs $700, I would be, "Nah," about it. I wouldn't say it was horrible but I'll be, "Uh." It doesn't feel real substantial. It's kind of a light guitar. It doesn't -- I wouldn't say that it feels [PATRICK TAPS AROUND THE SOUNDBOARD] this almost has to be a laminated top. I won't swear to it, and it's kind of hard to look in the hole; that's where you want to look down here and see if its grain goes all the way through, and it's kind of hard to tell on this one.

But for 220 bucks, it's a pretty good guitar. I wouldn't recommend this guitar for somebody who is real serious, who already has played a lot, an acoustic player, a folk player, unless it's a second guitar or something you're just going to have around and sit on the back porch with because it doesn't sound that. It sounds okay and it feels pretty good; it's just not real substantial. It's not something like if you play a lot, you don't want to be dragging this guitar around with the idea that I have a feeling it might be a little bit fragile. It's kind of a bare bones thing. It looks like a hundred other guitars.

I don't know a lot about Alvarez Guitars. What I associate them with, I knew there were people who played them who were these jazz guys I knew many, many years ago, and they were all really good. They had Alvarez Guitars and I just always assumed that they were all really expensive because those guys had them, and then it dawned on me later on that even though they were really good players, they didn't have any money so, you know, I don't know what the range of Alvarez Guitars are though I did my research for a while on that. But it's not. That's not what it's about.

It's about this guitar, and I would say that it is something for somebody beginning, and I know a lot of times -- you know, when I say that, people think I'm like putting the guitar down. Look, it's a $255 guitar. It's not meant for somebody who's going to take it out on the road and play it. You know, you're not going to get these fantastic, rich, wonderful sounds out of this guitar but it still sounds pretty good. It's fine for sitting around playing. It's fine for learning on, and that's what it's meant for. That's what this guitar is built for, and it achieves its goal perfectly. Low cost guitar as high a quality as the cost will allow. You're rarely going to find fantastic guitars, new, for 250 bucks or less. You're just not. Forget about that. Get that out of your head. That's from another time period. That's from the Depression.

But for what it is, it's a pretty good buy, especially I mean -- you know, I always said people get mad again when I say, "Kid." "It's something that a kid -- you might get for a kid who's first starting out learning how to play." Again, that's not denigrating the guitar; it's what it's made for, so that's in a nutshell is what you want for the Alvarez RF8.

There's another Alvarez that is a bigger body style like a dreadnought. It's the Alvarez -- this is the RF8. For "folk", I assume the "F" stands for because the other one is RD8, which I'm assuming stands for "dreadnought", and the pricing on those are about similar; they're about 20 bucks more than this guitar. And so, if you wanted something with a bigger sound, that would be the one to go with, the RD8 as opposed to the RF8, and you know it's still I -- you know, I don't have one of those here to hold in my hands but I'm -- you know, they're going to be similar quality, and so those would be, you know, if you want something a little bit bigger, deeper sound, get that one. If you want something that sounds real bright, get this one. The other one's going to be bigger and heavier but not I'd imagine substantially so.

And as I've talked about in the Washburns, when you hold the guitar it's one of the things that it's hard to get at across in the video but you hold them and sometimes they feel like sturdy. They feel they have a feel to them. They have something about them that makes you feel confident that if it would like slip out of your hand and drop it, it's not going to smash into a million pieces. I don't really get that from this guitar. This guitar feels kind of a little bit fragile, and so you probably don't want to be throwing it in the trunk of your car without a case or anything, but generally it comes with a nice case so you don't have to worry about that. Take care of your guitar. Don't mistreat your guitar, and your guitar will treat you well.