Transcription
The truth about expensive guitars that no one wants to admit.
Hey everybody, Jay Allen here. Welcome back to the channel. So, I've done several videos about budget, aka cheap guitars, and how expensive guitars aren't necessarily better. I recently posted a video titled “Expensive Guitars Are a Waste of Money,” which explains that for a beginner or intermediate guitar player who only plays at home, expensive guitars are a waste of money. Then I posted a video titled “Gibson isn't selling guitars anymore,” which is about how you're paying for the name when you buy brands like Gibson, Fender, and PRS—that they are lifestyle brands. Of course, I received a wide range of comments. Many people agreed with me, and many people disagreed. And of course, I got plenty of people that simply commented on the title of the videos rather than actually watching them.
So, why do I keep posting videos about budget guitars versus expensive guitars? Well, the first reason is the videos are successful. My highest-performing videos are the ones discussing cheap versus expensive guitars. So why wouldn't I keep making videos about that very topic? It seems, according to the video analytics, that's what the people want. Secondly, I truly believe that you can have a great guitar experience without spending a ton of money. True, you do get a dud once in a while, but that can happen with expensive guitars as well.
And lastly, I think there's people out there that think, “Man, if I just had this guitar or that guitar, I'd sound so much better. They'd be so much easier to play.” There's this idea that spending more money on a name-brand guitar will result in better sound or that the guitar will be so much easier to play. I can't tell you how many comments I got saying that an expensive guitar is more inspiring.
Look, I fell for that, too. Several years ago, when I was playing in an acoustic duo, I was never happy with my tone. And so I got it in my head that I needed to keep spending more and more money to sound better and that my playing would improve if I had a professional guitar. I started out with a Seagull guitar that was around $300, then moved to an Eastman for around $600. Then I got a Taylor that was $1,200 that had some quality control issues, so I got rid of that. Then finally, I got my dream guitar, a Martin D-28. After all that time chasing the perfect tone, I never sounded any different. I always sounded like me.
You may not realize it, but you have your own sound. The trap that many of us fall into is that we don't want to sound like ourselves. We want to sound like our guitar heroes. We want to sound like the guitars do on our favorite albums. The problem, of course, is that any guitar we pick up and play, regardless of price, regardless of whose music we're playing, we will always sound like ourselves. And that's a good thing. If we all sounded the same, what would be the point of even playing guitar?
You have to understand that when you listen to your favorite songs, you are listening to lightning captured in a bottle. It is a moment in time. The recording was a culmination of the time period, the people in the studio, the guitars, the amps, the pickups, hell, even the humidity, the artists, the recording engineer, the equipment in the studio, the mics, etc. You will never be able to completely duplicate a tone that you hear on a recording. And that's okay.
Let me preface this by saying I don't have anything against expensive guitars. If you can afford one and want to buy one, go for it. And I don't have anything against Gibson, Fender, or PRS selling expensive guitars either. I'm not some anti-capitalist. If Fender and Gibson can sell a $4,000 signature guitar, have at it. I most likely won't ever buy one, but then again, those guitars aren't being made for people like me. But people should at least own up to the reality and admit that they are buying Fender and Gibson because of the name, not necessarily because they are better than all the other guitars being made.
In my last video about this subject, I said that Gibson is selling a lifestyle, a brand. Some people got pretty triggered by this, but I never said that selling a brand or a lifestyle was a bad thing. Gibson and Fender basically invented the electric guitars that we all know and love today. Every other guitar maker copies their designs. When you buy a guitar from Gibson and Fender, you feel like you're buying part of that legacy. And that's what they are selling, a legacy, a lifestyle. But the reality is when you buy a Fender or Gibson now, those guitars are pretty far removed from the origins of the brand. As I pointed out in that last video, these are pretty old companies, but so many things about these companies have changed over the decades that you aren't really getting the same guitar you were 50 years ago. In fact, when I went to buy my Les Paul style guitar, I settled on the Heritage brand because they are still being made in Kalamazoo at the old Gibson factory. To me, the Heritage guitars are closer to actual Les Pauls than modern Les Pauls.
The idea goes that Gibson and Fender are American brands, that America equals quality, that Gibson and Fender invented these guitars, and they are perfect and don't need to be changed. There's a sense of pride in owning these guitars, and the companies know this. Some people think that buying a cheap Chinese guitar is like betraying their country—that we are somehow contributing to the decline of American manufacturing when we buy a guitar made outside the U.S. They still view Gibson and Fender as these small guitar companies lovingly turning out quality American-made instruments. But when you look closer, you will see that Fender and Gibson are simply large corporations trying to make profits.
Gibson was started in 1902 by Orville Gibson, later sold to Chicago Musical Instruments, and Ted McCarty was hired as a designer. This was before the company was sold again to Ecuadorian Company Limited, a holding company based in Panama of all places. This company became what was known as Norlin. The Norlin era of Gibson was marked by mismanagement and poor quality control. Then in 2018, Gibson filed for Chapter 11 and was again bought, this time by the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Imagine that on a headstock. But when people think about Gibson, they are waxing nostalgic about the heyday of Gibson guitars, the McCarty years, the Parsons Street years, the images of Paul McCartney and Les Paul. That's the Gibson people remember. That's the Gibson people think they are buying.
The same holds true for Fender. Leo Fender sold the company to CBS in 1965. Then in 1985, a group of employees of Fender bought the company from CBS. Finally, in 2020, a private equity firm called Servco Pacific Inc. became majority owner of Fender. But when people buy a Fender guitar, they are imagining Fender pre-CBS. And this shows in the guitars made by both Fender and Gibson. They frequently release vintage models of their classic guitars. Of course, there's nothing vintage about the prices of these guitars. And yet, instead of admitting that they are paying for a name, people will argue that Gibson and Fender guitars are just built so much better than cheap foreign guitars.
Are Fender and Gibson guitars more expensive because they are made better? Not necessarily. Many of the people commenting on my videos about expensive guitars being a waste of money and Gibson being a lifestyle brand point out that expensive guitars use better materials, better woods, thicker necks, better frets, better electronics, etc. But what does that even mean? Many cheap guitars are made out of basswood. Basswood can cost around $5 a board foot. Ash and alder around $6 a board foot. Mahogany around $9 a board foot. So, there really isn't a ton of cost difference between the various woods that a guitar is made from. Rosewood is more expensive because it's in shorter supply. The same goes for types of mahogany. Maple is a fairly abundant wood. Curly maple used for flame tops is less abundant, making it more expensive.
So, if most woods are priced about the same, what makes one guitar more expensive than another? Well, people will say it's the quality of the wood. They say that wood used in cheap guitars is too wet. It warps. It isn't stable, and on and on and on. I've been buying cheap guitars for years for this channel, and in all that time, I have never had a guitar warp. Sure, they expand and contract, and sometimes the fret ends sprout out, but I've never seen a neck twist. I've never seen a body split. Then they will go on to say that cheap guitars use cheap metal, the cheap pop metal, whatever that is. But if pressed to explain what cheap metal is and whether that's a bad thing or not, they just say, "Well, it's just not as good."
And then finally, some people will point to labor and claim that cheap guitars made in China use slave labor or child labor or child slave labor. Depending on your job title at Fender or Gibson, factory workers make between $15 and $20 an hour. The median hourly wage in the U.S. is around $23. And it is estimated that a living wage in the U.S. is now $20 an hour. In China, a factory worker can make between $1.50 and nearly $4 an hour or $480 a month. A living wage is estimated to be around $500 to $700 a month in China, depending on the area of the country a person lives in. Now, it's very difficult to find actual data out about guitar workers in both the U.S. and China, but it appears that your run-of-the-mill factory worker building guitars in either country are not making a living wage. Of course, other factors are involved, such as how long you've been with the company, what job title you have, are you in a two-income family, etc. So, it's very difficult to get an accurate picture of wages for guitar builders. But the point is, large corporations are going to pay hourly workers as little as they can get away with, regardless of what country or company those people work for.
The images of workers at the Parsons Street factory standing in front of a giant window, a haze of sawdust in the air, carefully carving a guitar neck are over. Factories now look like automobile plants with CNC machines and assembly lines.
But Gibson and Fender guitars just give you more for your money, right? That's why they are expensive. Quality costs more money. When you pay more for something, you expect to get more for your money. If a product costs $100 and the same product from another company costs $200, there should be some measurable improvement in that product to make the increase in cost worth it. I used wine and cars as examples in my last two videos, and many people said those were terrible examples. So, let's look at refrigerators. A plain white enameled 18 cubic foot refrigerator with a freezer on top like your grandma used to have in her kitchen is about $600. Now, the higher you go in price, you can see the improvements. You go from white enamel panels to stainless steel. You go from 18 cubic feet to 31 cubic feet. You get ice and water in the door. Nowadays, you can get an LCD display and built-in Wi-Fi. The point is, as a refrigerator price goes up, you get more for your money. You can see the added value. Now, whether you need any of that crap in your refrigerator and want to pay more for it is entirely up to you. Refrigerator manufacturers want to sell products to as many people as they can. So, they make refrigerators in a wide range of prices.
But guitars are different. Imagine if all refrigerators look pretty much the same. All stainless steel, side-by-side, ice and water. They were all built by machine and all pretty much close to the same quality. Yet, this company is charging $500 and this company is charging $1,500. And some companies are charging $6,000. And about the only difference between them is capacity or the efficiency of the cooling system, but other than that, they are all basically the same. To me, that's the guitar industry. You'd expect to get a better guitar when you spend more money.
Tell me if this guitar would appeal to you: Solid ash or alder body, roasted one-piece, flame maple neck with rosewood fretboard, stainless steel frets, locking tuners, contoured body for comfortable playing. El Nico 5 pickups, bone nut, compound fretboard radius. That sounds like a great guitar, doesn't it? How much would you expect to pay? $500, $1,000? Well, those are the specs for a Firefly Telecaster, which retails for around $230. A similar American Professional 2 Telecaster will set you back almost $1,600. And it won't have locking tuners or stainless steel frets or a contoured body or roasted flame maple neck or a compound radius. But some people will swear up and down that the Fender is a far superior guitar and that the Firefly guitar is flawed somehow. And when pressed to explain why, they'll just complain about Chinese slave labor in the Communist Party. But yet, the Firefly guitar actually has better specs than the American-made Fender guitar. But yet, it's considerably cheaper.
Here's the thing. If you're going to buy an American-made guitar, you're going to pay more. It's that simple. Things in the U.S. cost more by default. But really, the cheapest USA-made Telecaster, the American Performer, that sells for just under $1,200 is a budget American guitar. It can barely compete with a budget Asian guitar because you just can't make a guitar for much less than $1,000 here in the U.S. And Fender knows this. If you look at their line of Telecasters, they have one in basically every price category: $200 for a Bullet, $300 for an Affinity, $400 to $500 for the Classic Vibe, just over $600 for a Standard, just over $800 for the Player Plus, $1,200 for the American Performer, just under $1,600 for the American Professional 2, and almost $2,500 for the American Vintage 2. They have every price category covered. So, how much different can a Bullet be from an Affinity? How much different can the Classic Vibe be from the Standard? The truth is, most guitars are pretty close to the same. The improvements in tone and quality are often very incremental and minute, but the perception of increased value is overwhelming. If you think you are getting more for your money, then you will believe it whether you are or not.
If a basswood body is good, then an ash body is even better. Mahogany even better yet. Convince people that ash is a superior wood to build a guitar from than basswood, and they will avoid basswood. Even though time and time again experiments have proven that wood type has very little impact on the tone of a guitar and basswood guitars sound incredible. But because ash is a wood that some guitars were historically made from, the perception is that it is of higher quality than basswood. Same with metal hardware. If you look at the specs of an American-made Telecaster, it doesn't even say what material the bridge is made from. Some digging online reveals that it is probably made from steel and then chrome-plated. The Firefly bridge is probably made of steel. Also, where does Fender get their steel from? They stamp their own Telecaster bridges, but who knows where the material comes from. So, how is the metal in a Firefly inferior to that in a Fender? Maybe the same steel that goes into a Fender bridge is in the Firefly bridge.
In the end, of course, we should all buy the guitars we want. There's no shame in either buying an expensive guitar or buying 20 cheap guitars. If it makes you happy and you play them or even just like to look at them hanging on the wall, no one should criticize you for that. I think the problem comes in when people believe that their guitar, whether it was expensive or not, is somehow superior to others. And that spending a ton of money on a name-brand guitar somehow means you got a better guitar.
If people were being honest with themselves and others, they'd simply say, "Yeah, I bought the Fender or the Gibson because of the brand name, because it's prestigious, because I like their guitars." If you don't want to buy a Chinese-made guitar because you'd rather keep your money here in the U.S., that's great. Do it. I think it's healthy to keep your money where you live and support local businesses. But don't try to kid yourself by claiming that guitars made in China are cheap firewood, because it has been proven time and again that Asian countries can make some pretty amazing instruments. No one is telling you you can't buy whatever you want, but at least accept the truth about expensive guitars. Sometimes they're just more expensive because they can be.
That's all I've got for this one. Thanks everyone for tuning in. The support for my channel has been overwhelming. And if you enjoy this type of content, please consider subscribing. I have more guitar reviews coming up, a giveaway, and check out my Patreon. Links for everything will be in the description. We'll see you next time.