It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
i like cheap guitars I like expensive guitars, when I can afford the up charge if I like the guitar I buy it I never pontificate over what the upcharge is destroys the pleasure of buying something.
I am currently amazed at Tanglewood Crossroads 99.00 well setup ooo cheap beater acoustic all laminate but I marvel that something that is a laminate and built for so little money can sound and play so good.
These days there are good guitars for every budget £1500 for fancy top yes please 99.00 for a mahogany laminated blues guitar yes please.
I will personally spend more time worrying about what is heppening to people in the Tanglewood factory than the upcharge on a fancy PRS.
your mileage may vary
Bollocks are them things that live in fields and charge around at walkers and hikers.
A Wood is is where you take your girlfriend for a pleasant walk looking at bluebells on a summer afternoon. That's the posh girlfriend with the fancy top. (Not your skank on the side wearing a halter).
And £1,500 is what you need to spend to keep her - the posh one - happy.
Now what's that nonsense you talking about a 'guitar'?
You can, in our modern, Far East, CNC, mass-production age, get a decent, giggable guitar for £200, or less. This will make a perfectly decent musical instrument.
You can also spend literally as much as you like, and many posters here have purchased "custom shop" hand made guitars costing many thousands of pounds.
Whether any, and at anything over £1000 you are talking, tiny, tiny, incremental difference in quality or "tone" is worth it is very much in the eye of the beholder.
The argument could be made (I'm not making it, just throwing it out there) that at the higher end guitars are valued precisely for their cost and indication of high wealth, at least by a certain type of collector.
But perhaps, its better just to get on with it.
There are fundamentally two types of musician on here, hobbyists and professionals. Their gear needs to give them pleasure, and do the job, respectively.
So if a £200-£500 guitar ticks that box for you, as it probably would for me, great. If you feel you "need" a £3000 or £30000 guitar to be happy, and you have the spare money, well you cant take it with you...
Instagram
Basschat go by quality spec and price to find alternatives to big brands, but I don't think this has caught on for guitarists - many are still happy to get pumped for thousands, whereas you only get the odd sheep falling for the music man 'old smoothie' stingray bass...literally two extra pole pieces and a 2 piece pickup cover stuck together lol.
Guitarists have it easy really.
But yes, forgetting any tonal quality, your guitar's looks define your overall image.
Whether you are a pro musician or dentist noodler, image for most people is everything.
There is a great disparity on affordability and perception of costs with guitarists and guitars though. For the majority of people actually buying and target market for this type of guitar price isn't really an issue, it's loose change.
It's the same with all the main brands like Gibson, Fender USA and PRS. It's more normalised with the custom builders as enhanced finishes seem less expensive where the base instrument is typically more expensive anyway.
This philosophy and ethos is the same for tech, fashion, home furnishings, art and auto industries etc.
Not saying any specific example is worth it but it's not as simple as "the price of a piece of wood".
electric proddy probe machine
My trading feedback thread
I remember a back/sides acoustic set I saw for sale (from a luthier in America) a few years back of a wood that makes the above seem a little pedestrian. It was figured snakewood, and I've not seen a piece like it since... Incredibly dense stuff, and beautiful finish on a fretboard, but no idea how it would work on an acoustic. I can only imagine the sweaty palms when bending those sides!
Adam
I had a look around and could find quilted maple caps for up to £300 but not a lot more. Happy to double that for working on it but it's still less than £1000. I'm not knocking it but interested.
A very good quilt top thick enough for a Les Paul can go for up to 600-700.
Adam
There is something called the 'rule of four'.
If something costs a manufacturer £100 to buy then it has to be charged to the customer at 4 times that to make it economical.
There are a lot of reasons for this but you have to factor rejection (some bits of wood look fine when you buy them but as you start cutting away you find flaws that you cannot see otherwise), machining errors (these happen) as well as the cost of marketing the products, shipping them to suppliers, allowing for dealer margin and a bit of profit to justify doing it at all, as well as paying staff and for the buying and replacing machinery.
Oh and rent, tax, electricity and all that.
The big boys can buy in volume and cut wood down, they can use leverage on suppliers to get things cheaper.
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
Music: https://www.euclideancircuits.com
Me: https://www.jamesrichmond.com
its worth noting with wood choice, like many other things in life, you pay a lot more for very little extra.... and with electrics it’s price is purely decided by aesthetics. You are not paying extra for a higher grade of tone wood with increased graincount/stiffness etc.
You can get decent quilted maple for about £100-150 for a les Paul. It won’t be perfect at that price. It won’t be consistently light in colour, it may even have some small flaws. It will make a perfectly fine guitar that sounds as good as any with higher priced wood. I would rather build with this kind of wood most of the time. If you want perfection, you pay more
Instagram