Music & Instruments

Nylon or steel strings, and keyboards counted by their keys:

those two choices settle most of what people come looking for. Among guitars, a nylon-string classical is the soft-necked one most beginners and school students start on, a steel-string acoustic is louder, brighter and harder on the fingertips, and an electro-acoustic adds a pickup and preamp so it can go straight into a church sound desk or an amplifier. Electric guitars and basses need an amp, a second purchase that is easy to forget. Pianos and keyboards split three ways. A portable keyboard has light keys, speakers and accompaniment rhythms, and suits a child or someone picking out chords. A digital piano has a full-size keyboard of weighted keys and is what a piano teacher will ask for. An arranger workstation, Yamaha’s PSR-SX or Korg’s Pa series, is the portable grown up, and the instrument a worship keyboardist ends up wanting. DJ equipment runs from all-in-one controllers that plug into a laptop to separate players and a mixer, and accordions come as button boxes or piano-keyed, played quite differently.

Church worship teams and the gear they pass on:

drive a good share of the second-hand trade in Guatemala, from large congregations in the capital to one-room chapels in Jutiapa. When a church upgrades, its old keyboard, bass rig, kit and mixer often come up as one set. Small churches regularly swap an acoustic kit for an electronic one to keep the volume down, which puts decent acoustic shells on the market. The players trade up too, from portable to arranger. A portable Yamaha PSR-E keyboard is around Q2,000 to Q2,500 new, while an entry arranger from the PSR-SX or Korg Pa range starts near Q9,000 and climbs well beyond. Used arrangers hold more of their value than portables, because church keyboardists are always looking for one and a few years of age costs them little; what does pull the price down is a dead key, a scratched screen or a missing original power supply. A portable that spent years on a child’s desk is another matter: new ones are cheap enough that few people will pay much for a worn one.

The battery box of a used electro-acoustic:

is the first thing to open, because a battery left in for months leaks and corrodes the contacts, and a preamp that crackles or cuts out when the cable moves in the jack means a repair. On any guitar, look hard at the headstock: Gibson and Fender logos turn up on copies, and a genuine one carries a serial number that fits the model and era. On a keyboard, play the top and bottom notes at full volume to hear any speaker buzz and plug in a pedal and headphones to check the sockets. A Shure SM58 offered at a bargain price is nearly always a copy, since it is the most counterfeited microphone there is. With a DJ controller, ask which software it runs: some unlock the full Serato DJ Pro just by being plugged in, others only work with the free Lite version, and that matters as much as condition. Gear brought from the United States needs no converter here, since the voltage matches, but ask for the original adapter, not a generic one.

A guitar’s headstock and a keyboard’s back panel in the photos:

carry the brand, model, serial and the state of the jacks; add a clear shot of any knock. Say exactly what comes with it, whether case, stand, adapter, pedal or cables, and record a short clip of it being played, through an amp if it is electric. A church selling a full worship set should also list the pieces singly, since another congregation’s bassist may want only the amp. A keyboardist coming from Chimaltenango to try an arranger will bring headphones and want to run through the styles they actually use on Sunday, so have it on its stand, plugged in and switched on before they arrive.