Music Instrument Market

Greetings, folks! In our today’s article we are going to talk about where to buy musical instruments and different stuff for them. Apparently, this turned out to be not as obvious as I expected.

To begin with, I feel that I have to confess to you that by the 4^th month in Korea I became really bored and I exhausted pretty much all activities I could thought of to do here. It made me to look for some new ways to entertain myself.

I started playing guitar this summer and I made some progress in it, however, I had to stop when I came here. That is why I thought that I should find a guitar here and go on practicing. Unfortunately, it was not as easy as I expected. After searching the internet and asking around I figured out two ways to get myself a guitar.

The first one is online marketplace where people are selling different things to each other. However, this solution is only accessible if you speak Korean because the platform itself is in Korean and you would have to communicate with the seller in Korean.

The second one is the huge musical instruments’ marketplace that I will tell you a little bit later. I went there, however, I hesitated to buy a guitar because I would only need it for a month or so. Luckily, I was able to borrow a guitar from my friend (which turned out to be the best option in my opinion). Although, I had buy and change a few strings on the guitar I borrowed. So I found out that the marketplace I mentioned is almost the only place to buy both instruments as well as strings.

So enough of the background, let’s talk about this place itself. It is located on the Jongno 3-ga station (exit 5; 종로3가역).

Source: Google Maps

You should also note that it is not the unified store but rather a bunch of small stores that are located on the first and second floor. There are multiple entrances but here is one of them:

If you go around this building you will find a few stores that are kind of outside, and that is where I bought strings if you are any interested.

Once you get inside you will get a true sense of how big this place is. No seriously, this place is HUGE! So just to give you an impression (I have to note that I entered from another entrance since I was walking around to take pictures for you), I got inside and here I’m looking to my right:

And you can see the end back there, however, when I’m looking to my left, that’s what I see:

I cannot see the end, so let’s “go” further in that direction.

So we find a café on our way and oooover there in the far back is the end of this gallery. Although, there is a parallel gallery there that is equally long and some branches with some more shops. Don’t know about you but is seems pretty impressive to me.

So there are different stores there that sell the new stuff as well as the used one. I don’t really know if you can bargain there but I would bring my Korean friend there if I were to buy something there. However, I want to emphasize that by different stuff I really mean everything, Really, they have all kinds of instruments there.

You’ve already seen lots of guitars but here are violins.

Here are some saxophones:

The drums, of course:

DJ mixers as well as pianos and pianos:

And even some bizarre instrument’s that you wouldn’t think of and that I even don’t know the name of:

So the bottom line is, if you want to buy anything related to making music, this is the place you go. It both offers a wide range of products as well as the prices are more than reasonable. However, you might want to bring a Korean-speaking friend with you.

Article by Pavel from Russia