HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?
Whether you’re adding to your guitar collection or starting one from scratch, Dave Burrluck reminds us how important it is to be honest about our playing needs
“These instruments might appear to be simple in concept. But it’s the way you react to them that is of prime importance”
Ican honestly say it’s been some years since I’ve picked up a guitar and thought it’s so terrible that it should be shown a bandsaw. Today’s low-end guitars, certainly from the major brands, are considerably better than they were. Considerably. If you’re able to do a little fine-tuning, you might really be surprised at the apparent quality versus cost. Obviously, if you’re a beginner, or perhaps you’re buying an instrument for a youngster, then you really don’t want to risk wasting your money. The same rule applies if you fancy a guitar in order to experiment with a different tuning or string gauge, or maybe to use to get your head and fingers around playing slide. You might simply need a spare for live shows, not to mention a chassis for your modding projects. All are very sensible reasons for keeping your spend under control: go low.
But as we’ve discussed elsewhere in this feature, the lower the price, in most cases the lower the cost and quality of the parts. As you become more experienced – if you’re not already – you might well see, hear and feel the effect that has. You might not. The problem is that, while a Telecaster, for example, is a devilishly simple design it’s a hugely complicated thing in terms of the way it actually works. Plenty of players will be happy with a low-cost chassis and a decent set of pickups. For some it’s a badge of honour. Tone is all in your fingers after all, right? Well…
Imagine the same affordable guitar, plugged directly into the same amp and played by three different players at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. Will it sound the same? Imagine the same-quality guitar kit being turned into an instrument by an enthusiastic amateur doing their first build or a master builder at the Fender Custom Shop. Will they sound, look and feel the same? The player has a profound effect on the sound of the guitar, just as the way an instrument is made is certainly as important as the parts that are employed.
But perhaps too many of us are influenced by our peers. If your peer group believes boutique is best and you turn up with a Chinese ‘beater’, perhaps you’re never going to be accepted
– and vice versa. It’s the same with fashion. You and your mates (virtual or otherwise) might deem Brand A on-trend and Brand B off-trend. Snobbery, then, plays a huge part in our perception of quality, as Jamie mentioned earlier, when it should really be honesty.
I’ve played and tested under a microscope plenty of high-end guitars that are impeccably made, beautiful things that didn’t ‘speak’ to me. That doesn’t make them bad – they’re just not my personal taste. I’ve played plenty of low-end guitars that have made me wonder how it’s possible to produce such a good instrument at such a low price. But do they really compare with a custom shop or boutique-level instrument? Very rarely, if ever.
I remember being told some years ago that it’s easy to make a good guitar that will cost $3,000 but much harder to make a good one that will retail at $300. But the truth is today that the quality of the low-end guitar has never been higher, and although established brands’ lower-end instruments seem to annually creep up in price, there seems no end to new brands appearing at unfeasibly low prices. In many cases, too, they are far
from the Made in Hurry guitar-shaped objects of yesteryear.
Being honest with your evaluation of an instrument at any price, then, is hugely important. It’s not just great because you’ve paid money for it. It’s certainly not always great because it’s ‘vintage’. And it’s certainly not great because “at that price you can’t go wrong!” Oh, yes, you can – but that’s part of this journey.
Of course, the look of an instrument is still a major draw for even the most hardened and experienced of guitar buyers among us. It might be a headstock shape that’s ‘wrong’, an inlay style, a colour, not to mention the name on the headstock. These visual references – right or wrong to you – can really lead us up the garden path. Even the most well-researched purchase, at any price, can sometimes not work out how you’d hoped. Sometimes, something you buy on a whim turns out to be something special. These instruments might appear to be simple in concept. But it’s not just the way the neck, body, bridge, tuners, nut, pickups and electronics interact; it’s the way you react to the instrument that is of prime importance.
Limiting yourself to a budget is certainly understandable, but if you plan to spend £500 and then play something that is on sale for £1,000 that you believe is significantly better, wouldn’t you wait a while and save up, or sell something? But if a low-end guitar works for you and gets the job done, great. That doesn’t mean it’s the ‘best’. And it doesn’t mean all expensive guitars are overpriced and owned by players who can’t.
The true value of an instrument is where it takes you as a player, a musician. Does it inspire you? Does it get the job done? You don’t need a posh guitar to write a hit song or to produce a library album or be a rock god in your local boozer. You don’t need a nitro flash-coat finished beauty from Fender’s Custom Shop to play your righteous blues on. But then if you’ve never owned one, you’ll never know how much fun it is, will you? Keep an open mind, listen and learn.
“A few budget brands are really pushing the envelope in terms of the features they pack into guitars under £400”
As we’ve said many times before, we’re living in a golden age of quality, affordable guitars. So much so that it’s hard to see how you’d outdo the value-for-money on offer from the likes of Epiphone, Gretsch and Fender – to name but three – at the moment. But now a few budget brands are really pushing the envelope in terms of the features they pack into guitars under £400. One such instrument caught our eye while browsing online recently. The Harley Benton Fusion-T HH Roasted FNT (£355) certainly has some eyebrowraising specs for the money: roasted Canadian flame maple neck, stainless steel frets, Wilkinson vibrato, locking tuners, sculpted heel with recessed neck bolts, similarly sculpted cutaway plus Charvel Guthrie model-apeing looks.
Harley Benton is an in-house brand of huge music gear retailer Thomann, so you can probably factor in the company’s buying power in loading up the feature set of this guitar. Previously the brand offered good-value, low-end copies of 335s, Strats and the like – so it’s really interesting to see it flex its muscles with slick original designs like the Fusion-T HH, which is destined for the tone lab of gear reviews editor Dave Burrluck’s Mod Squad in coming issues.
Similarly impressively spec’d and ambitiously designed – albeit in a slightly more derivative fashion – is Harley Benton’s Dullahan-FT 24 (£449). This headless electric with a sculpted alder body and roasted maple neck seems aimed at neo-shred/fusion players who are drawn to the headless, progressive designs of Swedish brand Strandberg but can’t afford the latter’s upmarket priceticket. The Dullahan lacks the fan frets and unique helical neck profile of the Strandbergs, and arguably its aesthetics are less svelte. But take note that much of Strandberg’s line is made by PT Cort in Indonesia, where Strandberg runs its own line, so there’s no special cachet to the bulk of Strandberg’s manufacturing origins, however tightly QC’d they may be. The output is high quality, but at £1,999 for the broadly comparable Strandberg Boden Original 6 Natural, the price difference represents a yawning gulf that some players can’t or won’t want to bridge, making the Dullahan at least worth investigating.
Over at another big Euro retailer DV247 Music Store Professional, we find some similarly head-turning budget models, albeit more traditional in character, from the J&D brand, which mostly focuses on generic but decently spec’d – and cheap – Chinese-made takes on classic Fender and Gibson designs. Again, we haven’t tried these first-hand so can make no special claims for them, but the retailer says it has been working with J&D for more than 20 years, giving the brand more legs than some in terms of track record, and offerings such as its L-5-meets-6120esque SA 70 Bigsby DGR (£279) look a lot of guitar for the money, including a rosewood fingerboard. It’s worth remembering, however, that Gretsch’s own Streamliner range offers very decent semis of a broadly similar spec, such as the G2420T Streamliner Hollowbody (£449), for not too much more loot but with greater kerb appeal and the ‘right’ name on the headstock.
Much more expensive but more intriguing perhaps is the output of another Chinese-built, German-designed make Stanford, who has actually been around a while and seems to be vying with Eastman, with compelling looking offerings such as its vintage 330-apeing CR Thinline 30 (£954), which comes with nitro finish, ebony ’board, bone nut and other vintage accoutrements, albeit at more of a mainstream price point.
Is there such a thing as a ‘premium affordable’ guitar? It seems there is now.