Are good guitars getting harder to find?

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Briefly stopped at the chain music store.

Man... everything I tried just felt dead. I'm sure some of it is the plastic finishes they seem to pour on most of the sub-$1000 instruments. Still, I own a couple of poly-finished partscasters that have way more life than anything I picked up today.

It's not just old strings and bad setups. It's guitars that feel like plastic and vibrate like styrofoam.

Some acoustics, too. I picked up a jumbo maple-bodied Takamine I thought would be a cannon. More like a capgun.

Has anyone else noticed this or do I just need to go yell at kids to get off my lawn?
 
I agree with Doug. And further I will declare that guitar manufacturing is in a golden age. But players don’t appreciate it because marketing has convinced people that a guitar only has soul if it comes with a pricey nitro finish or a relic paint job.
 
dougk said:
Just you.

I think there are more guitars for 1k or less that are fantastic than ever before (when adjusted for inflation- don't tell me about 200 dollar telecasters in the 50s lol)
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I agree too. I'm amazed at what I see students bring in to lessons. But I'm also amazed at how shitty or even just average so many of the high dollar fender and Gibson instruments I et to try are.
 
I haven't received a bad cheapo yet buying over the internet strangely enough.

Yeah they needed fret filing or the tuners were cheap, but acoustically they were sound. Much better than any cheap guitars I tried in the 80's, then, if you didn't spend at least $450.00 you were sucking. And even then it would be a crap shoot.
 
There are tons of great guitars available for much lower prices than ever before.


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Yeah, put me on the list of those who think we are in the golden age of cheap guitars. I've bought several cheap guitars over the last few years and they have all been really impressive instruments. I got them all via the web, so I didn't get to cherry pick a 'good one', but each of them turned out to be keepers. I think the guitars coming out of China from the big companies are pretty darn nice in most cases.

That said, a trip to my local GC usually results in me trying a bunch of guitars and deciding they are all 'meh'. I think it is a mix of poor setup, old grungy strings, and general floor wear (sticky necks from hand goo, small dents, etc.).
 
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I think it's the big stores more than anything. I went to my local GC during Memorial Day weekend intending to come home with a tele and all the ones I played there were so poorly maintained I left with nothing. I couldn't find one that spoke to me, probably because they were all set up for shit.
 
In the early 70's there was Martin and Guild that I would consider looking at in the acoustic line. There was Ovation making a name for itself and Yamaha but the former was a POS then and remained that way thru it's lifetime. Gibson never did measure up to my estimation of a decent guitar just out of aesthetics alone. I simply would not be seen with one, end of story there. Shallow, but that's the measure of the classiness I hold onto. Fender's acoustics were an abomination and until these last couple years they remained that way. Now, they're better but the reputation for crap is a hard stumbling block for the brand to resurrect itself from. Yamaha never did "get it" early on regarding neck shapes and sizes and put out axe handled guitars. I owned one. But, those were the brands.

Now, the so-called Pac Rim is providing some unsurpassed quality, in many brands/off shoots, in the lower price ranges for a plethora of decision making that seldom ends up with a bad choice for experienced and novice players alike. I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. While there are definitely some sonic duds out there they are not the norm (anymore).

The above is for guitars without electronics.

Electronics -

What a lot or people think about electronics isn't exactly the truth. There are certain devices that pick up the frequencies of the acoustic guitar with some fair representation of the tone of the guitars they're fitted to. These would include the sound board and under saddle transducers (both Piezo), and the microphone. It does not include the mag p'ups of any design. Magnetic devices are programmed by their makers to produce an acoustic-like tone that will be the same from your guitar as it would be from a cinder block. It's the electronics you hear and not the string qualities. I've read and continue to read many testimonials from owners of the mag type p'ups saying they sound just like their guitars and get a chuckle every time. The best representation comes from the microphone positioned out front of the guitar times 2 in an X-Y pattern right about the 12th fret. These days any decent Pac Rim guitar (cheap) will sound (and record) very nicely using this method. Just 2 cents thrown towards the acoustic stuff.
 
US... I think what you're encountering is guitar shops that give fuckall about making sure their guitars are set up properly and in tune on the rack. Low end guitars are way ahead of previous generations in quality, even fretwork... but once they've completed their trip across the ocean they usually need some TLC and setup, which sadly many stores are no longer equipped to handle.
 
Stopped by the same place yesterday.

Very different results this time. Tried one of the Fender Modern Contemporary Semi Gloss Super Deluxe Over Under Thinline Telecasters. Whatever you call it -- it was a semihollow Tele body with 2 P90-looking things, 4 knobs, and a $449 pricetag.

I was pleasantly surprised. It played nicely and, plugged into 4x10 Fender Hot Rod, had a really nice sound. I didn't like the knob layout and suspect some of the hardware may not be great but, for that price, it was really a winner.

The other nice surprise was the Epiphone Wildkat. Man, I could really get into a smaller-bodied hollowbody. Again, I had some concerns over the hardware but the thing played and sounded really, really nice. Neck was on the thick side but not unplayable.

Oddly, the only things I picked up that disappointed were Taylor acoustics. They weren't bad but they didn't jump out and grab me. Guess I'll stick to the one I've already broken in.

I'll put it this way -- blindfolded, I'm not sure I could have told you there was almost a $1000 gap between the Epiphone and the Taylor acoustics.
 
Good guitars aren't that hard to find just most of us have gotten persnickety as we mature. I know fuck all about guitars and have only managed to buy a couple shitty ones out of the 12 or so I bought in the last 2 years
 
Mark Wein said:
I agree too. I'm amazed at what I see students bring in to lessons. But I'm also amazed at how shitty or even just average so many of the high dollar fender and Gibson instruments I et to try are.
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This!!!

I have played so many high enders that are just terrible. Yet my $600 Brian May is a total work of art.
 
I can't say much about the current state of acoustic guitar quality other than I think that with the acoustics there is more art and less science involved than in the making of solid body, screw together Fender style guitars. With those guitars (other than boutique and custom instruments) when I consider whether or not they were made better in the past than they are now I have to look for an objective reason why that may or may not be true. I also have to consider that (for me at least) the critical quality concern should be with the bones of the guitars (bodies and necks) with electronics and hardware being a separate issue. In the early years bodies and necks were made to Fenders specs on mills and lathes under the control of a human operator. In recent years they have been made to Fenders specs on mills and lathes operated by a computer. It's not Rocket Science and specs being specs I don't see how one method or the other can be considered superior, other than that they are now able to make them faster, cheaper and probably more consistently. Also in the early years as is the case today (foreign or domestic) there was not and still isn't any claim by Fender to hand selecting the quality of wood used in the making of their production line guitars. Are there some examples that are better than others? Experience tells us that there are. However, given the above, I'm inclined to put that down to pure luck of the draw rather than try to explain it as being due to the "magic" of some given production era.
 
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As others have said, it's chain store bullshit. Even lots of smaller chains don't do shit in the way of maintaining instruments
 
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