even longer post coming up... sorry again. At least we seem to be back to being civil, which is one of the cool things about this forum...
I haven't tried a Legra, I was only talking the body shapes on the front page, but yea fair point, it was a daft comment.
Caparison isn't the only brand I own or enjoy fwiw ;) It makes up a small amount of my playing time, most of it is spent with a spanish acoustic at the moment ;p
no problem at all :drink:
I would assume the resale value of a custom guitar would not be as good as the original price, for example, Ailean's Tabby...
that's another good point. when going for a custom, it does help if you're the kind of person who never (or at least rarely) sells stuff on. :)
No offence Johnny, but isn't that verging on reverse snobbery? Paul Reed Smith, James Tyler and Nik Huber aren't some kind of corporate whores, they are custom builders who, one way or another, hit the (relative) big time.
PRS is the biggest of those companies, but Paul Smith isn't swanning around on a yacht, he's doing nitpicky little things like putting brass posts on his tuners because they sound better than steel ones. And at "Experience PRS" he's acting as a bloody roadie!
Huber can charge more for his guitars than the custom builders we know because he's a "bigger" name, but I don't for a second think a three-grand Huber would be any worse than a Feline or Legra for half the price (and that's NOT meant as a put-down to Jonathan, Bob, Wez or anyone else). It's just market forces.
In slightly different circumstances, Jonathan might have half a dozen employees and be selling Felines for £3,000 - and we'd be going to Nik Huber for £1,800 custom builds. They're all in the same business, just at different points on the scale.
pretty much, yeah. i didn't like the huber i tried as much as my legra, but that was pretty much solely due to the neck profile- which i could have specced had i gone custom with huber (though that'd have probably cost 0.3% of our GDP... :lol: ).
i don't really have a problem with reverse snobbery, I admit i'm a reverse snob. I get perverse pleasure out of knowing i have nicer gear than a lot of people for less cash. at least there's a (vaguely) rational reason for reverse snobbery... all my japanese copies for not much more than the price of an epiphone each... seems pretty sensible to me! (and you have roughly 6 trillion japanese copies too, don't you philly? :) )
The Private Stock guitars certainly are custom, and are built by Paul and his team if memory serves.
yeah (as far as i know, anyway), but you also have to be a russian oligarch to afford them...
(a) But I'd still contend that using CNC routers etc doesn't lead to a worse guitar - it gives precision and speed, but the final touches, done by humans, are still crucial.
(b) As for what they charge, it's a lot of money, but we pay a big premium on imported guitars in the UK. At US prices, PRS seem very reasonable compared with Gibson or Fender, their domestic competitors. It's all relative, and as I said before it's all down to market forces - ultimately they charge what people will pay for them.
(c) My point was, these people aren't "the enemy", they're not "flavour of the month" companies. They're people who love what they do and care about their products and their customers. So OK, maybe you can't go to PRS and ask for a purple-metalflake Warlock copy with 4 humbuckers and a built-in beer cooler - but that doesn't make them inferior to custom builders.
(a) but it does lead (presumably?) to a cheaper guitar... and they aren't passing on the savings (to us in the UK, anyway).
(b) agreed, but being in the UK we're obviously going to judge them by UK prices... which are way too high. In my opinion, anyway.
(c) agreed.
