Guitar money versus Real money

I recently had a conversation with a friend about guitars and the cost of them, whilst trying to explain to him that the price of a guitar often reflects its playability or the quality of the hardware/wood used, I used the expression that “guitar money isn’t like real money”.

What I meant by this was this: If a guitar costs under £100 new its classed as a “cheap” guitar, usually the quality of these instruments is low grade, they use cheaper materials to build the body and neck, if it is an electric guitar they will use low end pickups.

Most cheap guitars are ideal for beginners through to intermediate players but they tend to have issues that many long term guitarists will pick up on such as the action, high frets or high nut, fret buzz or inferior sounding pickups or humbuckers.

This isn’t always the case and sometimes a good quality instrument can be bought at a reasonable price but in my experience of cheap guitars there are very few which can boast this.

There are many quality second hand instruments available if you look around for under £200 and some new ones for just a little more, it isn’t always the case that the more you spend the better the guitar as it is usually down to how the instrument sounds and plays to the player as much as the hardware.

I own a few low range guitars of various qualities; my samick LG dreadnaught acoustic is one of the few I have owned/played which I (and many others who have played her) have found to be a beautiful sounding guitar with great playability.

I also own a cheap Ibanez Gio which is probably the cheapest of the Ibanez brand of guitars, Ibanez are a very well-known brand of instrument played by some of the world’s greatest guitarists, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and more recent the fantastic Jen Majura are all champions of Ibanez guitars.

The Gio has its limits however, the body is made from Basswood which is light and is a material used in many cheap guitars, the pickups are standard and work well giving some nice tones in the bridge and neck positions, I rarely use the other positions of the selector switch myself.

It boasts a whammy bar (tremolo arm) which is about as useful as a chocolate fire guard as once you use this the guitar goes out of tune, not good in the middle of an epic solo and makes dive bombing and other techniques impossible.

The tuning of this guitar is the main issue I find, and although it has a nice fast fretboard and is easy to “Shred” on it is lacking in the abilities of its more expensive sisters.

My latest purchase was a swap for one of my old guitars (a De-Armond M65) and is a Cheetah electric acoustic bass, this is a very nice looking instrument which were produced for a short time around 10 or 20 years ago, I’m not sure of the specs but it plays nice both acoustically and through an amplifier, there is a slight fret buzz on the higher frets but this could be due to the age of the instrument and possibly requiring a restring.

All in all though the Cheetah, which I believe retailed around £65 new back in its day, is quite a nice bass for the price but not being a bass player as such there are probably issues with it that only a seasoned bassist would notice.

Over the 25 years I have been playing guitar I have been lucky enough to play some very beautiful (and expensive) guitars, believe me, you can tell the difference immediately.

The first was a 1967 Fender Telecaster, this relic belonged to a gentleman who had passed away and left his guitars to the pub where myself and a small group of fellow musicians played together. 

I hadn’t taken my own guitar with me (at the time a very cheap 80’s single pickup Encore)and so was offered the use of one of the instruments in the pub, the Telecaster was a dream to play, whether it’s because it was a seasoned loved and used instrument or something more I could not play a bum note that night and have nothing bad what so ever to say about this particular guitar.

Next was a Gibson ES 345 (I think it was a 1978 model), again this instrument had belonged to the same gentleman, and again I could not play a bum note on it, I didn’t feel as comfortable playing this guitar as I had the Telecaster but there was no denying it was a piece of history which screamed with beautiful tones as my fingers caressed the frets.

I could not hazard a guess at the cost of these two guitars but I would put it well into the thousands, seeing a similar ES 345 on EBay as I write this for $3,200 which shows that the more expensive an instrument is and in these cases the older too, the better quality it seems.

Personally I could not justify spending that amount of money on any guitar and those are the ones I call the “expensive” range, the mid-range instruments however are those that average between £300-£800, these are usually made for the more serious regular player, your bands who tour and gig regular, a recording artist or songwriter would justify spending this amount on a guitar quite easily.

I have seen some stunning instruments in this price range from some of the world’s most renowned manufacturers, Gibson, Fender, Ibanez, Epiphone and other companies such as Dean, Schecter and ESP.

It all boils down to what’s in your wallet and your own personal preferences, I tend to go for what I can afford and compensate for any issues whereas if I had the money I would go for a mid-range instrument which can fulfill my requirements without holding my playing back like the Gio does.

However to return to the comment at the beginning of this blog post “guitar money isn’t like real money” it is easy (from a guitarists point of view) to see that cheap isn’t the same as cheap when referring to other commodities and items we would buy such as shoes or electrical goods.