Keira WitherKay wrote:
yeah but i went to the site and read the article about the guy who has all the washburns and mostly acoustic mind........
and reading it i found some interesting info ...............
i was unaware that washburn had so many acoustics made in USA and even some made by well known luthiers........ i thought of them as being a cheap 'made in cheaper factories in east" type of company.... and therefore never even looked at them in stores ever ..........
Lots of good brands build only certain models in house and get the rest made elsewhere. Breedlove, for example, have several models that are made in Korea then shipped to the Breedlove plant in the USA for setup and QC.
Why don't we hear more about them? I had a Washburn acoustic 25 odd years ago. Quite a nice guitar, though I think QC wasn't good in those days because it was a dog at first and then I had the nut cut down (classical guitarist John Silver told me to play it with a capo on the first fret and if things got better then to take it back to the shop and ask them to lower the nut). I got this from TOMS. They were pushing them quite hard at the time. The one that I got had a florentine cutaway, built in electronics and an oval soundhole. Similar in shape to this
.
Either side of that Washburn I had Yamahas. These were quite the thing in those days. The story was that Yamaha had a lot of good wood left over from piano sound boards that they used for their budget acoustics. It has hard to get more bang for your buck than a Yamaha gave you if you were looking at reasonably priced steel string acoustics. Before my first Yamaha I had an Ibanez, a copy of a Gibson jumbo. No competition, the Yamaha was better in every way.
There are a lot of brands available now, especially at the budget end of the market. I think any brand has to fight harder for it's place in the market now. I think that the consumer who is buying a budget guitar tends to buy purely on price. They don't know a lot about guitars so a guitar is a guitar is a guitar with some maybe being a little more pretty so they buy on price. So I think Yamaha, better quality but also cost a little more, might lose out in such a market.
I think there are many brands that are not pushed that well in SA. Larrivee, I hear, are hard to come by in the Cape Town area and scarcer than coelacanths down PE way. Do Breedloves find their way to the coast? I think in some cases the guys who bring these makes in want them for their store only because it differentiates their store from the rest.
