How this site decides what to tell you

Who writes this

Every word on Strum Avenue is written by one person, Shmulik Dorinbaum. I am 44, I have two kids, I live in Israel, and I have spent more than twenty years writing, recording and performing music. I release under the name שמול, and you can check that on Spotify rather than take my word for it. That is the point of putting it here: a credential you can verify in ten seconds is worth more than a paragraph of adjectives.

There is no editorial team behind that name and no rotating cast of freelancers. When a page is good, that is me. When a page is wrong, that is also me, and the contact details on the about page work.

How the model reviews work

This is the part most sites are dishonest about, so here it is plainly. I have not personally played most of the guitars reviewed on this site. Nobody has played all of them. A site claiming a month of hands-on time with two hundred instruments is describing something that did not happen.

What each review is actually built from:

• The manufacturer's full specification sheet, read rather than paraphrased from another blog.
• Owner reports at volume, hundreds per model, gathered from marketplaces and player forums, with attention to what owners complain about after a year rather than in the first week.
• Demo recordings of the same model compared back to back, ideally by more than one player, since half of what you hear in a demo is the player.
• Where relevant, my own experience of the same body shape, bracing pattern or tonewood combination on instruments I do own.

Scores cover tone, playability, build quality, value and aesthetics. When owners split on something, the review shows the split instead of averaging it into mush, because "half of buyers found the factory action too high" is useful and "7.5 out of 10 playability" is not.

How the technique and maintenance guides work

These are the opposite case and I claim them fully. The chord lessons, practice routines, setup guides and playing technique articles come from actually doing this for two decades: the shapes I use, the order I would teach them in, the maintenance I do to my own instruments, and the mistakes that cost me time before somebody corrected me.

Where something is a matter of taste rather than fact, the page says so. Reasonable players disagree about thumb-over fretting, about whether a beginner should start on nylon, and about how much a bone saddle really changes. Anywhere the honest answer is "it depends", you will get the dependency rather than a verdict.

The chord diagrams and the chord finder are a third thing again: generated from music theory rather than drawn by hand, which is why they stay consistent and why the tool can answer for chords no hand-built library would bother to include.

How the buying guides rank things

Lists are ordered by price ascending, never by commission. Amazon pays roughly the same rate across the instruments covered here, so there is no financial reason to push you towards a more expensive guitar, and if there were, the ordering would still not change. Where a cheaper guitar beats a dearer one on the thing you are shopping for, the guide says that outright.

How the money works

Product links carry an Amazon affiliate tag. If you buy through one, this site earns a small commission and your price is identical. That is the entire business model. No manufacturer has paid for a review, a placement, a score or a mention, and no brand sees a draft before it goes live.

Corrections, and one that already happened

In June 2026 this site was audited against its own standards and failed. It carried invented aggregate ratings, fabricated review counts, a testing protocol that never took place and a contributor persona who does not exist. All of it was removed in a single pass: the fake ratings, the fake dates, the invented studios and arrival dates, and a section of the about page claiming ownership of guitars that were never here.

It is written down here rather than quietly buried because a standards page that only lists virtues is not a standards page. If you find something else that does not hold up, tell me and it gets fixed or removed, not softened.