Hello and welcome to this weeks' article!
This time we're publishing an article written by a dear friend and singer/songwriter for The Observants, Edoardo Del Principe, about his criteria / checklist to buy a good guitar for around 500$ / 500€.
Keep in mind that this is his personal opinion, and that if possible is ALWAYS better to try the instrument in your own hands before buying, because since the wood is living material, a guitar is never exactly identical to another one, even if they are built from the same person with the same materials.
What’s the dream of every
guitarist? To find an awesome cheap guitar. This article wants to
answer to the question: is it possibile? The answer is “yes” but
with several caveat.
I want to show you the general rules to “how to buy a decent guitar for less than 500$”, which is in my opinion the average budget of an high school student who is studying guitar and wants to buy a new one for his/her birthday.
I want to show you the general rules to “how to buy a decent guitar for less than 500$”, which is in my opinion the average budget of an high school student who is studying guitar and wants to buy a new one for his/her birthday.
First all of must be clear what
makes a guitar expensive and then what makes a guitar cheap.
Wood:
this a very controversial point because there’s not an objective
argumentation of which wood is the best, but it’s also true that
there are bad and good woods. Where can we find these?
Easly over 700$ guitars can have
a mahogany body and an ebony fretboards, as many Gibson have.
Mahogany seems the best for guitar but its “expensiveness” can
come also from its rarety now. Before 80’s it was more common than
now, so you can find this wood especially in guitars from before the
80’s.
Ebony and Rosewood are the two
most desired wood for fretboards. Nowdays it’s practically
impossibile to find ebony on a fretboards of guitars under 700-800$
because of its rarety and its features. Even this time its all about
tastes because there is no rules saying that Ebony it’s better than
Rosewood, today it’s even harder than before to find a good piece
of this because the high quality wood are now much harder to find
than 30 years ago. Deforestation caused a “manipulated market” of
guitar wood, and the wood used by the most prestigious brands are now
on the “apex” of the “wood chain”, which this means that the
wood used by a Gibson Les Paul Standard sets the “standard”, but
this doesn’t means it is necessarily the best.
Manufacture: This
point it’s damn critical because if you talk with a guitar maker
probably he will tell you that nowdays it’s practically impossibile
to find a good guitar for 500$. There’s no way out. This is
because for that price none of them is
handmade, not even partially. Industrialization and globalization
have transformed the way to produce guitars, so now for that price
they are all assembled in a chain production. Less care about the
manifacturing, less care about how the neck is built, less care about
how it is attached to the body, less care about almost everything,
and you must know how much this influences the final sound of the
instrument.
Expensive guitars have very few
parts or none done in the chain production, so every piece is
controlled and maybe crafted by the hands of a guitar maker to make
it sure that is the best instrument you can have on your hands.
Investing big amounts of money into a new 500$ guitar to make it
sounds like a 1500$ it’s stupid because if you have spent 1000$ in
PU, mechanics, a new bridge etc the guitar will never sound as a
guitar handmade and crafted in US or Japan by the best guitar makers.
Anyway it will sounds a
lot better, of
course.
In order to have “that”
quality of sound it requires a specific process in order to build the
parts of a guitar in the best way possible with effort put into every
detail; this makes the difference between a 1200$ guitar and one of
500$ or less that will never
be good as that, even
if you put hundreds of dollars in that.
Production:
Here we can talk with more certainties. Under 500$ guitars are made
in Indonesia, South Korea or China where factories produce tons of
guitars so they cannot control well every piece, where the people are
paid less so they care less about the final product.
During the last decades, however,
the avarage quality of a low-budget guitar has become higher because
of the know-how and
experience of certain factories that
produces for several
brands at the same time.
This assure you a sufficient quality and playability for
almost every entry level
guitar in the market now.
Highly expensive guitars are
built generally (not everyone) in the homeland of the brands and the
name of the top factories are well known by their
fans. During the decades
it has become harder to find a guitar produced in the homeland brand
because of globalization, so now only the finest pieces are handmade
in America or Mexico by Fender, for example.
Hardware and Pick Ups:
Because of chain productions these are the parts where the brand
spend less. Guitar for less than 500$ can easly sacrifice details as
mechanics, colouring and PU. On the other hand when we see a guitar
with really high prices (1200$+), what makes the price higher are
details as the handmade production of frets, a particular colour used
and limited series production (Practically you pay maybe 100 or 200$
just for a number on the back of the head of the instrument).
Hopefully these parts are the most easy to change so you
can buy a cheap guitar and change
PU (and maybe
tuners and/or bridge)
to have a decent guitar for less than 500$,
anyway, as said before investing zillions in cheap guitars doesn’t
make them sound “great”.
