What's Cheap?

[dave_mc]

That's only build cost BTW there's the distri uter and retailer markups and transport costs <sigh>

yeah, that's what really hits us hard here. there's something wrong when you can import something from its country of origin more cheaply than you can buy one in the shops...

[Roobubba]

I don't understand how anyone can justify charging more than £200 for a fender telecaster for instance. Think about what it actually is and you'll realize that it simply CAN'T cost more than £200 to build even the top-of-the-line custom shop models. It's silly.

Come round to my place and play mine.  Then tell me you wouldn't pay more than £200 for it  ;)

I can tell you now that, even after playing it, I certainly wouldn't give you 200 quid for your tele :)

[MrBump]

I don't understand how anyone can justify charging more than £200 for a fender telecaster for instance. Think about what it actually is and you'll realize that it simply CAN'T cost more than £200 to build even the top-of-the-line custom shop models. It's silly.

Come round to my place and play mine.  Then tell me you wouldn't pay more than £200 for it  ;)

I can tell you now that, even after playing it, I certainly wouldn't give you 200 quid for your tele :)

Roo, you DO suprise me!

[mikeluke]

I guess that value is in the eye of the beholder...

Does it make you feel good when you play it?

My 89 Les Paul cost me £700 - my Jap Epi Junior cost me £70 - is the Gibbo worth 10x the Epi? They are both value for money in their own way.

Now for my 'broken-record plug' - best VFM Strat IMHO is an E-Series Jap Squier - you get excellent build quality for not a lot of money - if you can live with the vintage trem and only 21 vintage frets - under £200 if you are lucky.

Mike

PS - What is a Telecaster?  :lol:

[AndyR]

I think 'cheap' guitars are a bit of a false economy really. You know you're more than likely to sell them on one day so you can get a more expensive guitar. This will keep happening until you get a really well made, quality guitar that you know you won't sell on. More often than not you would have lost more money on trading than you pay for a top notch guitar. Just my opinion.

That's really quite interesting, I don't think like that. Thing is, I never sell anything. I might have to soon, the rate I'm acquiring since January, but that's another matter!

I tend to buy guitars based on what they're worth to me, what I can afford, and whether I justify owning it at the moment.

Eg I bought a Dano recently, and at £165 (I think that's what I paid, might be £175, I've seen them at £150 on the web), once I'd found one that actually played ok in the shop, I regard it as well cheap. The ones that didn't play were also ok for the small amount of DIY setup that would have been required, but I passed on them a week or two earlier.

The Dano was so cheap that I regard it as: "OK if I get a couple of years' good fun out of it, it's paid for itself in my book..." It can then fall apart, hide in the attic, get given to a nephew, whatever it feels like doing... (unless of course I fall utterly in love and I never stop playing it!)

I tend to regard all my guitars as possessions/friends that are "working off" what I put into them cash-wise, rather than as "capital".

My £550 strat (+ BKPs & scratchplate) has to work a little harder than the Dano, but that's no problem, just watching her across the room makes me happy!

But my £950 Explorer (plus BKPs) has to work her @rse off!! (which is why I was so keen to get the right pickups into her a few weeks back so that I could fall in love)

Whereas my Epi SG, which I bought second hand at least 10 years ago for £110, has gigged, been recorded, done a load of really hard work, and she's really earned her £110... she's been rewarded with Riff Raffs, but I'm not too attached, sooner or later I predict she'll be back in the attic and a better guitar I haven't met yet might have the Riff Raffs (and her Tonepros machineheads!!).

My Epi LP has a similar tale to tell, except she's already been stripped of her Mules (got the Explorer's 500T's) and her Tonepros (got  the Tokai Love Rock's machineheads), and she's in a gigbag waiting until the attic opens its gaping maw...

I've got a couple of Variax's gathering dust - somewhat more expensive than I feel they're worth now - but they started me playing guitar again, and they taught me what guitars I actually want, so I'm quite grateful to them.

I dunno, what is "cheap" really?

We pay for what we get, and our enjoyment and satisfaction is, to some extent, based on our expectations, and on our perceptions of how others might judge us...

The expectations are shaped by what we intend to do with it - use it, resell it, etc...
The perceptions bit, well, it's really weird - I claim it doesn't affect me, but it does... eg I felt a bit of a knob admitting above that I paid £175 for a Dano when I know I could possibly have found one for £150. I felt really embarrassed a few months back when everyone was raving about their Bajas, and I thought mine was not much to write home about (but now she's the guitar I play most, and I'm about to put her in for a fret dress or whatever it takes to realise her full potential).

I'd love to play an expensive guitar that feels "worth" it's price to me personally, but I've yet to meet one... I suppose, given the Explorer, that "expensive" to me is over a grand, but "cheap"? Like someone else said earlier - it means I can afford it (and want to pay for it)! :lol:

EDIT: mikeluke posted while I was writing - "value is in the eye of the beholder" - yeah... :D

[MrBump]

Excellent views and opinions, chaps.  Andy, I think that I agree with pretty much everything you said.

Poor old Indy got a bit of a pasting for his post, but there are elements that I think resonate.  I don't think that guitars are necessarily over priced, but I DO think that there's a disparity between manufactures that are better or worse at marketing, and those with more kudos than others.

I mean, if you take a factory built guitar, materials should only account for a percentage of the costs, right?  Once the process and plant are in place, you're paying for labour and parts.  Higher end guitars aren't going to cost massively more than mid range guitars in terms of wood.  Someone mentioned R&D cost.  Come on!  Seriously?  The same old designs for the last 50 years, give or take some tweaking...

I'm not talking about handmade stuff.  I would pay good money for a decent bespoke Les Paul.  I've seen some of Jonathans work up close, and it's truely superb.  What I'm talking about is chunks of wood and metal, sourced in the same way, processed in the same way, with the end results being vastly different.  That makes me think that I'm being ripped off in some way.

But something only has value if you ascribe value to it.  I think that £1500 is steep for factory made Les Paul.  But if someone takes it down from the wall and instantly falls in love with it, what does 1500 quid matter?  It's made an impact on them, so it's as valuable as they want it to be.

I think.

 :D

[MDV]

To put it another way

Westfield strat knockoff, second hand - 50 quid

Ubersinner - 70 quid

Watching peoples eyes widen when you hit a few palm mutes - priceless.












I guess what I'm trying to say is, fuck the cost of a guitar. Fuck it right in the ear.

[Kilby]

I mentioned R&D

That also covers not bust the basic design,  it also all the processes involved in having an affordable, consistant & reliable product ? It's not simple

However I do find it difficult to accept the price of some of the Mass produced (via CNC machines) guitars. Especially with the repued prices the likes of Gibson pay for wood compared to what the likes of Jonathon has to pay for the same quality piece.

It's not the price that defines value for money it's what you get out of it that counts

[MDV]

I also find it extremely hard to believe that R&D has to be done on 1930s technology.

[Kilby]

I also find it extremely hard to believe that R&D has to be done on 1930s technology.

Now that I'm not using a touch screen device (that has a fetich for deleting the majority of whats been typed)

Originally I mentioned R&D in relation to Fx pedals (another item where people complain that the materials cost next to nothing) and are not cheap items.

Assuming you had built a few guitars yourself, would that knowledge be relevant to fairly large scale production. How much would it cost to make it relevant.

Let me ask this question, how much time has Mr Feline or Wez put into learning to build, improving and refining a 1930s designs.

Me I'd say a hell of a fecking lot of time and time costs money

Now think if Jonathan (pardon me using you as an example) wanted to go into mass production. That would mean new production methods CNC kit, in house paint shop, more cost and time efficient methods of chambering or adding nice maple tops to Lions and the like.

How much would that lovely all access neck joint change when it's not cost effective to have somebody make sure it's perfect and to make those adjustments by hand ? It has to be repeatable by CNC (and the machines minder) with varying wood quality.

Lets add finding enough quality wood (my mates dad is an exotic timbers importer and he has a hard time sourcing quality wood at anything like a decent and consistant price)

By the time you get standard production kit to do what it's supposed to do (the never work as the sales people claim), you are into huge amounts of expense. Thats before staff (& their training), stock and premesis are figured in.

You may not be carrying out R&D on the basic design, but it is R&D for production.

Thats one of the reasons Patrick Eggle left his (original) company.

Of course you could just get everything built on the far East and not give a sh1t what it's made from (in this case no matter what the price is it's expensive).

I'm justsaying it's a bigger picture than buying the production equipment and a few templates, and it all costs a lot of money that you have to earn back before you can feed your family.

[mikeluke]

On the other hand you would be spreading those costs across a large number of instruments, rather than the very small numbers turned out by bespoke manufacturers (e.g. Jonathan) - I'd argue that the small, independents are operating in almost a completely different market segment. Players who really understand what they want from a guitar and are prepared/able to pay to get that precise detail. 

The more mass market companies have to try to appeal across the board or get back their investment by marketing 'high-end' instruments made by effectively mass market techniques. Take PRS - is this a cheap brand? No way! Do they use essentially mass-market production techniques to keep costs down and get economies of scale? Absolutely! 

[Kilby]

Heh I know a custom build v standard production is like comparing real food against Findus crispy pancakes.

Indeed it would be spread across more instruments, though in reality that would only happen after you had some amount of sales success. The inital runs have a very high production cost, and that needs to be recouped ASAP if you want to stay in business.

I was just trying to say that theres a lot of costs involved that folks don't on the whole think about.

Back to the original topic:

TBH I don't understand the pricing of many (in particular US based) manufacturers especially when you look at the numbers they sell these days. To me Fender prices are more realistic than certain companys.

My Ric 12 string cost me a lot of money (well a lot to me) but value for money stakes it was a far far better purchase than the £350 Mexican strat I had for 3 years (and played that one a lot too).

[Sifu Ben]

 There's some good points here. It's true, exactly how much R+D do guitar companies REALLY do? surely the R+D departments for even the biggest brands are less than 20 guys, and for most it must be 2 or 3. Spread over the number of instruments that they produce this cost is negligible. Then if you look at gibson's R+D, their big changes this year are largely a load of fairly common aftermarket mods. How much time and money did that take them to come up with? And that's the best R+D decision they've made in years!!
Also, much of the R+D carried out by the big names takes place in the their Custom and artist departments, which pay for themselves, and it then filters down to mainstream production.
  Interestingly, the operators of well regarded budget brands such as Agile and Dillion spend half their R+D time on forums such as this asking people what they actually want, which has got to be a sound strategy (don't mention the Homer car).
 Perhaps the big problem here is that you can buy great guitars for £200 and complete dogs for £800. There's no real rhyme or reason to it.

[_tom_]

Under £300 is cheap, £300-600 is about right for me, maybe add another £100ish for a good fret dress/setup. Anything more seems like a bit of a waste to me.

[Twinfan]

R&D is a massive cost.  Imagine how many different necks Gibson would have gone through to get to the new spec Standard?  How many hours of labour?  How many different types of fret wire?  It soon escalates to big bucks.