If you’re just starting on your guitar journey, chances are you’re searching to find a great sounding guitar without a hefty price tag.
The Jasmine S35 is a guitar that makes the cut, and you couldn’t go wrong choosing it as your first guitar.
Looks good? Check! Sounds Great? Check! Easy on the pocket? Absolutely.
You’ll find the Jasmine S35 to be an excellent beginner acoustic guitar, with a brilliant sound, and an easily affordable price.
In this Jasmine S35 guitar review, I’ll lay out all of the main features and explain why it’s a solid first or even second guitar to have.
Jasmine S35: A Couple of Things You Should Know
The Jasmine S35 has a rich heritage. Its original design comes from the Japanese acoustic and electro-acoustic guitar manufacturer Takamine, where the Jasmine gets its rich and balanced sound.
The ‘S’ in S35 means this guitar has a smooth satin finish, which helps optimize the resonance and sound quality. And is also one of the cheapest that Jasmine makes.
The Jasmine S35 sounds very good and is available for what is a budget price for an acoustic guitar.
It’s a good looking guitar, lightweight, and easy on the eye.
It’s what the lower end dreadnought acoustic guitars should be.
How Is The Jasmine S35 Made?
You might wonder why some guitars are a good deal cheaper.
One way manufacturers reduce cost is by making the top section of guitars from two pieces of wood and then laminating them together.
If the manufacturer made the whole top section from a single piece of spruce, which is the wood the Jasmine S35 uses, it would be considerably more expensive.
Of course, there is a difference in tone between a one-piece guitar and one with two pieces, but beginners will never be able to discern this difference with this spruce top.
While creating a guitar with two pieces results in a cheaper product, the Jasmine S35 still needs to have strength and stability in its build-quality. To make the necessary strength and stability, Jasmine places an X-brace inside the body of the guitar.
For the guitar’s sides and back Jasmine uses Agathis wood.
It’s a relatively cheap and plentiful wood from South-East Asia, firm but lightweight, softwood similar to basswood. Giving the guitar a wonderful tone once set up correctly.
The Jasmine has twenty frets with Pearloid dot inlays, a nato neck, and a smooth rosewood fretboard, as is the bridge. Rosewood is generally the go-to wood for acoustic guitar’s fretboards-being a hardy wood resisting wear and tear.
The Jasmine has a Slim Neck Profile, very helpful for beginners and others who like to play electric guitars.
Nato is wood from the Mora trees and has similar tonal properties to mahogany. In fact, it’s frequently talked about as eastern mahogany, although the two kinds of wood are not related.
The Jasmine S35 has a dreadnought style body with a 25.5 scale.
Dreadnought acoustic guitar style was designed by C.F. Martin & Company in 1916, producing a more significant and louder-sounding acoustic guitar.
The guitar’s popularity quickly caught on and was the most common guitar chosen for bluegrass, country, rock, and blues.
Dreadnoughts are powerful and loud guitars. The design calls for a boxier style, with the body being deeper. The Dreadnought is capable of strong lows and mids for a full sound.
Jasmine S35 Acoustic Guitar Hardware
The Jasmine S35 has a set of chrome-covered tuners on the headstock. The tuners do an excellent job of keeping the strings nicely in tune, and they are closed-back to keep them free of dirt and other bits of rubbish you don’t need in there.
At the bottom of the Jasmine, as we mentioned, is a rosewood bridge and nut, with a synthetic bone compensated saddle.
You might find the Jasmine has a high saddle, as does most budget-priced acoustic guitars.
It would be worth it a little while down the road to replace the plastic nut, saddle, and bridge pins for higher quality, brass pins, and bone saddle and nut.
Another idea if you like a softer sound is to replace the saddle with a Graph Tech PQ-9272-C0 TUSQ Acoustic Compensated Saddle and the strings with Ernie Ball Earthwood Silk and Steel Extra Soft Acoustic Set, .010 – .050. Just a suggestion.
Playing The Jasmine S35
When you first pick up this acoustic guitar to play, you might find the action a little high.
But with minimum adjustment, there’s no buzz or empty frets.
If you’re a beginner and unsure whether your new guitar is set up correctly, here’s an easy test, place a quarter under the 12th fret; if there’s room over the top of the coin and it doesn’t touch the string, it will need setting up.
Take the Jasmine S35 to a guitar shop and pay them to set your action. It will cost you a few dollars, but it’s well worth it when you hear how nicely the guitar plays.
Your advancement as a guitarist will come on in leaps and bounds.
You’ll probably need to retune every couple of days if you don’t use the Jasmine S35 much or every day if you’re playing it a lot.
If you’ve never played the guitar before, you might want to replace the strings with extra light ones (to minimize finger pain.)
An excellent choice is the “D’Addario EJ15-3D phosphor bronze acoustic guitar strings, extra light.” It’s easier for a beginner to play an acoustic guitar in the early stages, with lighter (thinner) strings.
The Jasmine S35 is a brilliant guitar, feels good to hold, and really plays nicely.
Being such a lightweight acoustic guitar, you’ll find it’s easy to carry and not at all uncomfortable to play for long periods.
The Jasmine S35 has an advanced X-bracing fretboard and a slim neck that will give players comfortable access to the higher frets.
Because it utilizes the Dreadnought guitar style body, it’s quite a big guitar for young kids; teenagers won’t find it a problem, though.
However, the guitar is lightweight, has a nice satin finish, and has a slim neck, which compensates for the Dreadnought style.
Final Words On The Jasmine S35
Anyone buying a budget level acoustic guitar will naturally not be expecting much for the money.
Acoustic guitars in this price range all sound much the same.
But the S35 manages to surprise.
There’s plenty for beginners to be happy about, and even intermediate players looking for a cheap second acoustic guitar will not be disappointed.
What isn’t available in the price range of the S35 is solid wood manufacture, which is a vital element in all high-value acoustic guitars.
Aesthetics are mostly to pamper the guitar player’s ego; what really matters is how a guitar actually sounds. How the guitar plays is something that everyone will become accustomed to in their own time.
One of the Jasmine S35’s main features and helps produce its quality sound is the advanced X-bracing. Locating the S35’s braces close to the acoustic hole improves note detail and means the guitar’s top can resonate more freely for an improved sound and, at the same time, reduces the weight of the S35.
To say the Jasmine S35 is at such an affordable price, it really does impress when you pick it up and play it.
If you picked up the S35 acoustic guitar without knowing what it was or the price and began to play it, I think you would be in for quite a shock.
In this review for the Jasmine S35, we say it’s a significant investment, not in money, but sound quality, especially for beginner guitarists, and it’s not too shabby for intermediate players either.