Random thoughts on Gibson v. other manufacturers

AlanRatcliffe · 2009-12-04T14:37:22+00:00

Just to introduce some balance to the whole Tokai lovefest (or should that be Love Rock fest?) we've been having lately... A Gibson model guitar retains far more of the value of its original purchase price than any copy ever could. Regardless of the quality difference (real or perceived), the real thing holds its price better and will likely always be worth more (and eventually start going up in price too). You'll always get a higher percentage of the money you spent back when selling a Gibson than you will a copy. And what if eventually Gibson do get their house in order and starts producing better guitars for less money? What will happen to the value of the clones then? As it stands, the copies are arguably better instruments when compared to the equivalent Gibson model, and certainly offer more "bang for the buck", but they remain Asian copies of someone else's design. Is that morally right and do we want to support it? Should we be buying Epiphone guitars instead? Then again, is the Gibson company as it exists the same one that created the designs in the first place? Probably not, but they do own the trademarks/patents, etc. Up to you to decide... Also if you look at the top-of-the range models, the Japanese instruments are pretty pricey too. Just because the original manufacturer doesn't make 'em like they used to, does that mean someone else does? They may get closer (arguably), but I don't think anyone can make anything like a real late '50s model guitar anymore (to quote Henry Crun - "You can't get the wood, you know."). Now, I think everyone knows where I stand on Gibson and their products. I also like the Tokai brand and other Japanese manufacturers, and they deserve kudos for seeing a gap and taking it (just like they did in the '80s Norlin years). But does this change anything stated above? I think these are things that need considering.

singemonkey

This shocking development needs to be brought into this debate:

We were talking about the morality of buying an off brand version of a guitar vs. the original brand name, weren't we. Look long and hard at the picture above and tell me you didn't die a little inside. ?

To sooth your trauma, here's Matt Schofield showing us that:

1) The debate isn't all about Les Pauls

2) Tokais really are as good as they were in the '80s

This is probably a Tokai ES-185 - their top-of the line flamed 335 clone. Vintage spec. If musicmadness offered these at its current special prices, I'd guess that this beauty would go for a little over R20K when they become available here. Compared to the price in the store for a VOS Gibson 335, well... it's a bit cheaper. Quite a bit. Brings it within reach of a recently graduated jazzer. And, of course, they offer less flamey versions for far less than that. I could consider getting one. But unless my fortunes radically improve, it's unlikely I could ever afford a VOS 335.

Specs here: http://www1.odn.ne.jp/tokaigakki/products/premium/es185.html

zohn

dee wrote O look. A "new" Gibson... The main Gibson website appears to be having issues, so a few links to some other sites instead...

http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/gibson-dusk-tiger/

It appears to be an updated and improved Dark Fire for those that are interested...

I picked up on the Gibson Dusk Tiger - it tunes itself....

http://www.wired.com/reviews/product/pr_gibson_tiger

singemonkey

I've got no problem with Gibson innovating like this (except maybe they shouldn't get the owner of a Texas strip club to design the look of their guitars. I'm just sayin'.) if they're paying attention to their core business at the same time: producing great electric guitars.

Let's face it, Moog will do a better job in this department. Why? Because they're an innovative electronic music company first. Technology is their reason for being. And it can't be coincidence that their innovative guitar is a lot better looking than the "Dusk Tiger" (named by the same strip-club owner apparently).

Gibson's reason for being is making elegant American instruments - starting with their arch-top mandolins in the 19th century. That aesthetic touch kept them going until the mid-sixties, after which they pretty much haven't designed a single new instrument that more than 500 people really want. Before that they had a European violin-maker's aesthetic and craftsmanship (even the 1960s Mcarty guitars were a rock 'n roll manifestation of that same aesthetic).

Subsequently, they lost both the aesthetic, and the craftsmanship - leaving people only interested in their classic instruments. They tried this innovation route with the Gibson RD. Haven't heard of it? That should tell you something.

They should drop the truck-driver looks of their new models, get some designers who are more interested in style than in bling (Les Paul Supreme anyone? - based on the well known style philosophy expressed by Yngwie Malmsteen when he said, "I had a motto on this album: More is more. I disagree that less is more. Less is less and more is more."), and push the production quality of their factory back up, and they'll have new classics on their hands. But this won't happen with the current owner.

The guitar player review of the "Dusk Tiger" complained about how the pick-guard rout on their review guitar was cut too big for the pick-guard and expressed disappointment at this lack of quality control on such an expensive guitar. No one's surprised any more.

Banditman

I'll still stick by my comparison with Harley.

With the exception of Gretsch's electrics made for Bo Diddley, Gibson were definitely pushing the boat out for odd shapes in the '50s with the Firebird, Explorer, Flying V & Moderne - with varying degrees of success depending upon the eye of the beholder. They gave us great shapes like the SG. The truth was that the first four models were just too ahead of their time with their innovative aesthetics. After the RD they pretty gave up, because by then Giobson customers "knew" what a Gibson was "supposed" to look like - just like Harley's customers know how their bikes should look and sound.

In those early days of the electric there were no stereotyped customers to the degree we have today. Nothing had been carved in stone yet, although there are very good reasons why the Tele, Les Paul & Strat are still benchmarks in tone & style today.

Fast forward to the present where companies like Gibson are run by investors with a vague knowledge of the past & what the product should look like, adding big dollops of phrases like "legendary sound / quality / icon status" etc. Include a mass of buyers who understandably want the guitar their heroes play(ed) or at east the tone. There's your problem straight away.

Every business is run with an eye on profit. It has to be. If you're making something your customers won't buy then you're going out of business. Most guitarists are, like bikers, innately conservative when it comes to the appearance of their instruments which must look "just so". That alone need not be the end of it all, as a manufacturer can still seek other markets while satisfying the core customers.

Where it all goes pear shaped is when the corporate types we so dislike push high prices while resting on the company's past laurels, all the time giving ever declining quality standards. The fact that other manufacturers can give us consistant quality on what is basically the same item nullifies the entire US (or wherever) is Best argument in one fell swoop. It should wake the industry up, if not the buyers.

As singemonkey says - no-one's surprised anymore. And that's a shame on the makers.

singemonkey

I dunno so much about the conservatism. I think that a great designer could make a modern Gibson, one that takes advantage of improvements in hardware and what-not, and create a seriously GAS - inducing guitar. The LP double-cut was almost that. Just not quite. It doesn't quite have the perfection of visual balance that even the Flying V and the Explorer had under Mcarty - not symmetry, but balance.

Instead they re-invent the wheel in weird ways with the mini-ES335, the techno guitars, or piling on the bling like the supreme.

PRS prove this by beating Gibson at their own game. Lots of "conservative" players lust after those guitars - including the various new models.

vic

Banditman wrote
In those early days of the electric there were no stereotyped customers to the degree we have today. Nothing had been carved in stone yet, although there are very good reasons why the Tele, Les Paul & Strat are still benchmarks in tone & style today.
Fast forward to the present where companies like Gibson are run by investors with a vague knowledge of the past & what the product should look like, adding big dollops of phrases like "legendary sound / quality / icon status" etc. Include a mass of buyers who understandably want the guitar their heroes play(ed) or at east the tone. There's your problem straight away.

Every business is run with an eye on profit. It has to be. If you're making something your customers won't buy then you're going out of business. Most guitarists are, like bikers, innately conservative when it comes to the appearance of their instruments which must look "just so". That alone need not be the end of it all, as a manufacturer can still seek other markets while satisfying the core customers.

Agree 100%. IMHO Gibson should stick to their traditional designs/models and make the best possible of that, knowing that there are copy-makers which MUST prove that their products are at least on par with those at a fraction of the price. Same goes for Harley....think of Honda for example copying (to a large degree) some of the coolest Harley models....
Re. price of the popular Gibson models...as with Harley, I do not see these coming down (not even in the pre-owned market). This is perhaps best illustrated in the huge Japanese and some other eastern and middle eastern markets where these brands are extremely popular and expensive.

-jeff

I'm an American expat living in Durban, and for me, Gibsons have always been hard to figure out.

Fenders aren't hard - they tend to be honest guitars made at every pricepoint, and they almost always seem to be good value at whatever pricepoint they're made at. Well, that's until you get into the Masterbuilt Custom Shop stuff, and that gets pretty stupid in a hurry, especially if you're buying new.

I'm old enough to remember the really dark days for Gibson in the early '70s when they were making 12lb (5kg's) Les Pauls out of sandwich bodies and such, and while most of those sucked some were absolute gems. And I've played lots of new high-end Gibson stuff that was pretty horrible -- I remember one Custom Shop Historic RI 335 that also must have weighed 5kg's and it was absolutely dead sounding -- it was pretty and all, but if their QC was up to snuff they'd have cut that one up at the factory and made firewood out of it. Instead it was on a dealer's wall at an asking price of $4,500 . . . it hung there for a couple of years, actually, and I left town before it ever sold.

At the same time I've played some really cool new Gibsons that don't cost an arm and a leg that were great -- I've played two ES-137's that were magic right outta the box, and I played one example what could have been an absolute disaster of a guitar, the Gibson BFG, and it was amazing. It was sloppy as could be in terms of the way it was built and finished, but for a rock/blues/swamp/punk guitar it would have been really hard to beat at most any price.

I've got one Gibson now, a ES-335 Dot RI made in '97, and to me it's sort of a typical Gibson. The wood is really nice, it was screwed together well, but the pickups were lousy and the electronics were horrible. What's worse, the nut was a cheap plastic thing that was badly cut, and the so-called Grover tuners were mediocre at best. I ended up replacing the pickups with Sheptone Tribute PAFs, installing a Mojotone wiring harness and cutting a new bone nut and installing a set of TonePros Kluson replicas. It transformed the guitar, and it's about as nice as a stock mid '70s Greco SA-700 "Super Real" ES-335 style guitar I once owned. :-[

Actually, it's a great guitar, now, but like a lot of Gibsons I think you have to first look at them as guitar chassis and if that is OK then you have to think about what kind of parts are hung on the chassis and decide if they're helping or hurting in terms of getting what you want from the guitar. It shouldn't be that way at the prices most Gibsons sell for, but sadly, it is. If you've got the money, time and patience to do so it can be really rewarding -- my 335 has a great chassis and with the right bits hung on it it's a joy to play and it's by far the best sounding 335 I've owned.

What's frustrating about 'em is that they can make a great guitar and do occasionally, but they can't seem to do it all the time. And what's worse, when they're not good they're horrid -- I've seen so many 335's with the tun-o-matic sitting almost at the top of the posts cause they set the neck angle wrong -- after 50 years you'd think they could at least get that right 99.9% of the time.

So count me in the "Gibsons can be really great but there are a lot of great guitars being made all around the world" camp -- if you get a good one they can be pretty special, but good ones aren't the rule, in my experience, and there are a lot of guitars out there that are just as good -- and certainly most Asian factory guitars are much, much more consistent than anything that comes out of Gibson Nashville or Gibson Memphis.

Cool board, great discussion . . .

~j

Banditman

singemonkey wrote I dunno so much about the conservatism.... PRS prove this by beating Gibson at their own game. Lots of "conservative" players lust after those guitars - including the various new models.

I agree, and PRS make some real beauts. But they're still conservative when set against instruments like the Parker Fly. That's my point. We're reluctant to move far from the single cut or double cut shapes which are, in all honesty, variations on the Tele, Les Paul & Strat in one way or another. I'd personally place the Custom 22 & 24, Singlecut, McCarty, Mira & Modern Eagles in the same box: evolutions - lovely, lovely evolutions, but not revolutions.

In all fairness to the designers some things just look "right". They have a balance and a beauty which is hard to improve upon and that's fine by me. Perhaps we need to really define what we're expecting in a revolutionary design which we'd accept aesthetically as well.

singemonkey

Banditman wrote
singemonkey wrote I dunno so much about the conservatism.... PRS prove this by beating Gibson at their own game. Lots of "conservative" players lust after those guitars - including the various new models.
I agree, and PRS make some real beauts. But they're still conservative when set against instruments like the Parker Fly. That's my point. We're reluctant to move far from the single cut or double cut shapes which are, in all honesty, variations on the Tele, Les Paul & Strat in one way or another. I'd personally place the Custom 22 & 24, Singlecut, McCarty, Mira & Modern Eagles in the same box: evolutions - lovely, lovely evolutions, but not revolutions.

Yeah. But they all were. Bigsby made his guitar. Fender made a slightly fuglier, but much more mass-producible version (the Tele), Gibson made a version with a more deeply carved top and some different hardware, Fender made a new version with the Bigsby headstock but with a double cutaway for more fret access... etc., etc.,... Ibanez Gem adds a carry handle, Parker has a carry handle, adds a piezo pickup and some new materials...

It's not features that are the issue. It's style. The early Gibsons had style. The later ones didn't. QED ?

~jeff wrote So count me in the "Gibsons can be really great but there are a lot of great guitars being made all around the world" camp -- if you get a good one they can be pretty special, but good ones aren't the rule, in my experience, and there are a lot of guitars out there that are just as good -- and certainly most Asian factory guitars are much, much more consistent than anything that comes out of Gibson Nashville or Gibson Memphis.

Cool board, great discussion . . .

~j

Welcome to the forum ~jeff. I think your post sums up exactly how I feel. It's just mad that they charge so much when a lot of their guitars aren't finished. They're not ready to play. I'd never say you can't get a great Gibson. Just that a lot of them are awful. As it happens, I own one of those boat anchor Norlin-era Les Pauls. Love it to bits. ? My Tokai certainly beats it for quality, but the Gibson is still a fantastic guitar. I just wouldn't want to play it standing for hours on end.

Rob-dos

well said sir

zohn

So who watched American Idol last night? On this discussion I merely want to mention the cool Gibson acoustics they played - let's see there was a terrific blonde J-185 with Maple b&s, a great looking J-100 in a Cherry burst, and a (one of my favourites) Song-writer deluxe. I'll be the first to acknowledge they're not all what they used to be, but they sure still look goooood on stage. ?

vic

zohn wrote So who watched American Idol last night? On this discussion I merely want to mention the cool Gibson acoustics they played - let's see there was a terrific blonde J-185 with Maple b&s, a great looking J-100 in a Cherry burst, and a (one of my favourites) Song-writer deluxe. I'll be the first to acknowledge they're not all what they used to be, ....

Zohn, what do you base this statement on ?

zohn

vic wrote
zohn wrote So who watched American Idol last night? On this discussion I merely want to mention the cool Gibson acoustics they played - let's see there was a terrific blonde J-185 with Maple b&s, a great looking J-100 in a Cherry burst, and a (one of my favourites) Song-writer deluxe. I'll be the first to acknowledge they're not all what they used to be, ....
Zohn, what do you base this statement on ?

Mostly "Gibson SA" which I believe no longer exists and their neglect - lets see off the top of my head:
go look at the models on display in Gauteng that they can't get sold - they still have the original vrot strings they were shipped with, and the workmanship is nowhere what it should be - over-spray, under-spray issues, body bindings that are not perfectly mitred... some of them with "dry-damage" (especially a consignment of Masterbilt Epiphones) had cracked bodies and humps in the fretboard of the neck joints, sharp edged frets....

Bob-Dubery

zohn wrote So who watched American Idol last night? On this discussion I merely want to mention the cool Gibson acoustics they played - let's see there was a terrific blonde J-185 with Maple b&s, a great looking J-100 in a Cherry burst, and a (one of my favourites) Song-writer deluxe. I'll be the first to acknowledge they're not all what they used to be, but they sure still look goooood on stage. ?

THere was probably a small army of technicians sent along with those guitars too. They would have been polished and set up, tweaked etc etc.

Any manufacturer who had that gig would want their guitars to look good and to be well received.

Mind you, I don't imagine the contracts the contestants have to sign would allow them to even mildy criticise any sponsor or partner.

Squonk

X-rated Bob wrote
THere was probably a small army of technicians sent along with those guitars too. They would have been polished and set up, tweaked etc etc.
Any manufacturer who had that gig would want their guitars to look good and to be well received.

Mind you, I don't imagine the contracts the contestants have to sign would allow them to even mildy criticise any sponsor or partner.

But it does seem like Gibson and other big name manufacturers are a bit arrogant and rely on the Name on the Headstock.

'Guitarist' (UK Magazine) do quite extensive reviews and quite often they remark on Gibson among others whose guitars are not quite setup properly or have dodgy strings etc.

Quite strange when 'Guitarist' reaches quite a huge audience

Bob-Dubery

Squonk wrote But it does seem like Gibson and other big name manufacturers are a bit arrogant and rely on the Name on the Headstock.

'Guitarist' (UK Magazine) do quite extensive reviews and quite often they remark on Gibson among others whose guitars are not quite setup properly or have dodgy strings etc.

Quite strange when 'Guitarist' reaches quite a huge audience

Maybe. It reaches an audience amongst people who are playing guitar and could be bothered to read a magazine. And some of them will just look at the pictures and the adverts.

It reaches a smaller audience than Idols does.

We all know that guitars are not guitars are not guitars, and we all read "Guitarist" or something similar or check out guitaring web sites. But people keep on going into Cash Convertors and buying their in-house brand of guitars.

zohn

Obviously the ones on the show were "perfect" and no doubt Custom shop models too. They all had the deluxe custom fingerboard inlays and spectacular scratch plates Gibson are so famous for - not to mention the signature moustage bridge on the J-100. Also it was fitting that they used Gibsons with the "Elvis" episode.
I have to add though that there are breathtaking beautiful Gibby's around - a mate of mine has a 1973 J-200 and another has a late 80's Songwriter deluxe that are most desirable. Nothing wrong with Arno Carstens' SJ-150 either.
I personally wouldn't mind an SJ-200 Montana Gold.

It is also known that pro's like Pete Huttlinger and Al Pettaway have their "Gibson acoustics" made by John Walker, Kevin Kopp, Chris Bozung or Richard Hoover. (even Bill Collings)

vic

zohn wrote
vic wrote
zohn wrote So who watched American Idol last night? On this discussion I merely want to mention the cool Gibson acoustics they played - let's see there was a terrific blonde J-185 with Maple b&s, a great looking J-100 in a Cherry burst, and a (one of my favourites) Song-writer deluxe. I'll be the first to acknowledge they're not all what they used to be, ....
Zohn, what do you base this statement on ?
Mostly "Gibson SA" which I believe no longer exists and their neglect - lets see off the top of my head:
go look at the models on display in Gauteng that they can't get sold - they still have the original vrot strings they were shipped with, and the workmanship is nowhere what it should be - over-spray, under-spray issues, body bindings that are not perfectly mitred... some of them with "dry-damage" (especially a consignment of Masterbilt Epiphones) had cracked bodies and humps in the fretboard of the neck joints, sharp edged frets....

Well I would change the strings anyway.....I would also set it up as I like it.....action, intonation, etc...no problem as long as the sound and feel of the guitar is to my liking....
Sevens and action cricket are not rugby and cricket respectively.....Squires are not Fenders....Epiphones are not Gibsons. :?

But more importantly IMHO, perfectly finished guitars are not necessarily great guitars.

zohn

So you're a fan, good for you - there are quite a few up here for you to choose from.

vic

zohn wrote So you're a fan, good for you - there are quite a few up here for you to choose from.

No, not a fan...a player. Some of the modern Gibsons (archtops and solids) may have their quirks but to make out (as some do) that it's the rule, is uninformed. Just last week I played a friend's 2007 ES-175 and it sounded as good as his vintage '62 ES-175. No problem with the built quality either.
A few months ago I played a '56 Goldtop....the real thing......sorry to say, it was nothing special, compared to today's Customshop Goldtop (which I am very familiar with).....it's just a few years older. ?
The only way to really get to know the Gibson brand is to own one....to go on hearsay is futile.

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