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Pros:
- Good quality tonewood
- Great sound
- Comfortable
Cons:
- Needs restringing pretty soon.
- Nato is not the best material.
Yamaha has been producing their FG acoustics for over 50 years and their expertise made it possible to create products that are affordable to the mass public. Yamaha delivers good quality, great sounding and affordable product with their FG820. No matter whether you are a beginner or an experience player, this one might be a great fit for your needs.
Build
This is a solid-top dreadnought guitar made of good quality tonewood to create the best product that will be comfortable in your hands and sound astounding. Yamaha went with solid spruce for their top wood which is an affordable, yet a great quality wood that strengthens the volume, produces amazing sound and is durable. Back and sides are mahogany which is a nice material for these specific parts of the guitar. I am not a big believer that you need the top-notch products and tonewood to create the best guitar, I believe that the construction is vastly more important and how it all fits together affects the sound but nice quality tonewood has never hurt anybody and Yamaha is well aware of that. They are bringing the best quality material for this price range and it will be visible when you start playing. FG820 is also equipped with nato neck and rosewood fingerboard with 1.69″ nut width. A lot of people are not big fans of nato, it is rather a cheaper material but overall, looking at other material used in this guitar I do not think that nato neck will ruin anything.
Hardware
Yamaha FG820 has rosewood headstock overlay and rosewood bridge. Personally, I like rosewood, I have quite a few guitars that had this or that part made of rosewood and it has only ever helped the sound and the tone on my guitar. You also get die-cast tuning machine and urea saddle and nuts, and finally you get a handy-dandy truss-rod tool.
Yamaha FG820 Sound
This model boasts not only great construction and looks but also great tone and playability (well the previous two kind of impact why it sounds good). It also has clear midrange and great bass. The warm sound and great volume will ensure that you will enjoy playing this guitar no matter if you are a beginner who is just grasping at the first concepts or a well-seasoned player. The only issue I guess is with the strings, they seem to dull pretty quickly but you will just need to restring if that happens to you and you are good to go.
Conclusion
Combining quality and affordability to achieve the golden medium is not an easy task, especially when you have dozens and dozens of competitors trying to do the same. One way or another, there needs to be some form of a sacrifice made, either in tonewood or hardware. The success of a product depends on where the company decides to economize and Yamaha seems to manage and find a line between affordable, good quality and cheap, bad quality products. Fortunately enough, they tend to not cross the line over to the cheap side and that is obvious with FG820 which brings good material, great sound and build for a reasonable price.
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