WHAT’S WRONG WITH CHEAP GUITARS?
Are affordable guitars just a stepping stone on the way to the custom shop? Not if you value guitars for more than just their bragging potential, writes editor Jamie Dickson
“The modest guitars we do our first gigs with probably deliver the most joy of any we’ll buy in our playing lives”
In every pastime that involves buying gear there’s a narrative arc you see again and again – and guitars are no exception. When absolute beginners embark on a new hobby, they tend to go out and buy dirt-cheap kit to get them started. Most of us will remember painful early experiences learning barre chords on boxy dreadnoughts with tortuously high actions or stretching fingers to breaking point trying to play bland and flabby nylon-string acoustics. That is Phase One of the GAS Curve, as I’d like to term it.
If the beginner’s interest in playing guitar survives this trial by wire, most then move on to buying a slightly better guitar. This instrument will typically be serviceable, easy to play, decentsounding and nicely built for the money. Everything from Squier Strats to lower-tier Yamaha Pacificas match this description and, pound for pound, these modest guitars probably deliver the most joy of any we’ll buy in our playing lives. They’re the guitars we do our first gigs on, the ones we swell with pride to own. And because they don’t cost, they don’t come charged with buyer’s remorse. This is Phase Two of the GAS Curve and it’s generally a happy phase, with the guitar often serving the player well for years.
The next phase is more problematic, as it’s the first in which the player encounters the thorny concept of diminishing returns. You get more and more into your hobby and soak up info about guitars voraciously. Soon you start lusting after new and different guitars and persuade yourself you deserve an upgrade from your reliable but now humdrum first ‘proper’ guitar. Your knowledge has increased and with it the motivation to save up to get something really nice. You now stand, trembling, on the threshold of Phase Three of the GAS Curve. You visit a store to audition a few really good guitars – this time classic models by famous brands, not their budget or entry-level offerings. Doing so, you notice that the quality is better but the improvement is relatively subtle, not the giant leap experienced between Phase One and Two of the GAS Curve.
Congratulations – you’ve just entered the potentially expensive realm of connoisseurship. You’re now the kind of player who notices and sets a premium on small but significant differences in quality. Trouble is, modest improvements in tone and build quality now cost proportionally more to obtain. In other words, to get tone, feel and hardware 20 per cent better than what your last guitar offered now costs 200 per cent more in cash terms – or some such ratio.
This law of diminishing returns has several effects. On the one hand you feel a thrill of pride to be stepping up to the ‘big league’ of guitar ownership. But that pride may well be mixed with a twinge of guilt for having spent so much when the kitchen still needs tiling and the car could use a fresh set of tyres. However, this fleeting shadow of unease is swiftly banished by playing your new treasure and showing it off to your mates. Overall, you’re thrilled to own your first ‘serious’ instrument – it might be an American Professional Strat or a PRS CE 24 or a Gretsch Tennessee Rose – and sensible are the players who step off the escalator at this point and simply have fun playing a great guitar that is every bit good enough to last them their entire life.
Beyond this lies the lofty realm of premium, custom and so-called boutique guitars. This is Phase Four and, for some, it is a terminal condition. Your reasons
for shelling out upwards of £3k to buy a guitar in this tier may range from professional need to ticking something special off the bucket list, such as owning a really good Les Paul reissue. Or it might be that you’ve played guitar for a long time and those incremental refinements matter enough to you to justify the outlay. These are all perfectly respectable reasons for buying a high-end guitar.
However, if you’ve bought a really posh guitar solely to impress other trophyguitar buyers, you may also experience a gnawing feeling of not being worthy of what you’ve just bought at great cost. That can lead to a feeling of insecurity that, sadly, sometimes expresses itself as aggressive snobbery about other people’s gear choices. Don’t be that guy or girl – you’ll just be making the world of guitar less welcoming for newcomers, who deserve to be encouraged not put off for life by self-appointed gear police. Brian May’s guitar was made from an old mantlepiece, after all.
A Different Measure Of Worth
So what does all this have to do with affordable guitars? The negative side of becoming a guitar aficionado is a risk of knee-jerk snobbery setting in. It’s one thing to appreciate the quality and tone of high-end kit. But if you habitually dismiss the potential of guitars under £1k you’re missing a trick. One of the most boutique-addicted pros we know recently switched to cheaper 335-style guitars because he felt there was no big sonic advantage in going higher.
The quality in this segment of the market is better than it’s ever been. We know of more than one big brand that’s privately worried its lower-tier ranges are now so good that they’re competing directly with their more expensive stuff. And because such guitars are less expensive than their premium brethren, you may well play them more often because you’re not scared to ding ’em or gig ’em. If that happens, you’ll form a special bond with that well-gigged, affordable guitar that a £4k case-queen could only dream of.