Saddle and Nut wrote
The main aspect however is it really does not matter what guitar you play, just keep on playing and the fact that a good guitar no matter what the brand is, is just that a good guitar.
Yeah. But there's paying for brand names as well.
See a company like Tokai poses an awkward question. If they can do it for that price, then why can't Gibson or Fender? If Tokais were retailing for the same price as the "genuine" items nobody would be paying a blind bit of notice. But when you can pick up a beautifully made, great sounding, great playing "Tele" for 8k THEN you pay attention - and then maybe those awkward questions come.
So there are interesting questions about WHAT we pay for. These are partly subjective, of course. If we look at the more objective aspects - like the quality of construction, the materials used, what tangible bang you get per buck then it's no contest at all.
So what's the name on the headstock worth? No easy answer to that. Does the name on the headstock guarantee superior quality or better value for money. Errrmmm....
What's in a name? Those of you who follow F1 racing will have noticed the return of a name this year. Lotus. I used to be a big Lotus fan. I liked the attitude, the history, the audacity and design skills of Colin Chapman. However the team on the grid now, whilst being the legal owners of the Lotus name, have very little to do with the team that Chapman founded and it's heritage and successes. They can trace back a trail of ownership that eventually gets to Chapman, but are they Lotus in any sense other than the legal one? If you decide to support that team are you making some kind of investment of faith or whatever in the same team that propelled Jim Clark to greatness?
OK... so you argue that there was a substantial period (1995 to 2009 to be precise) during which there was no Lotus team in F1. QED. But what about 1991 to 1994 when Team Lotus continued to enter cars in F1 as they had since the 60s but, in fact, no longer had anything to do with the Chapman family. Where does the heritage stop?
For me it's hard to see some of the classic guitar companies as the same company that became classic in the first place. If we take Martin then that has remained a family owned business rather than just being a brand name that was bought by some bigger corporation. I don't see that same continuity in Fender and Gibson. There's not much really to link the present day Gibson Guitar Corporation to the company that Ted McCarty ran. How we perceive value in a brand name, and where we draw lines around this is a subtle and interesting matter. We accept Tokais. Would we accept a Korean car that looked and performed like a BMW but had a different badge on the bonnet? OTOH we protest that Tokai make copies, but do we label just about anybody else who makes a dreadnought guitar as a Martin copy cat? Where do the lines get drawn?
I've got three guitars. One is a Smoothtalker. No argument there - Mervyn Davis makes guitars that are unmistakable and unique and clearly not a copy of anything. I have an L shape Larrivee. Again this is Jean Larrivee's signature and "own" shape that he devised himself. Sure it's a flat top, steel string acoustic guitar but it does reflect Larrivee's own ideas and aims. What about my Morgan OM though? That's getting into Martin territory now, though there IS a difference (not visible to anybody looking at the guitar) in the bracing. If I bought a Morgan concert model then we're getting into Larrivee L territory again (David Iannone who builds Morgans was an apprentice at Larrivee). Brent and I have had this argument before - always in a good natured way - and he would, I think, come down on the side of Morgans having a very large proportion of Larrivee DNA. One could presumably argue the same about Linda Manzers guitars (though those are in a pretty different price league from Larrivee or Morgan).
A friend of mine recently bought a Larrivee in their "vintage" series. A very fine guitar indeed, and excellent value for money, but this really starts pushing the boundaries that I allude to above as it's very clearly getting into Martin territory (down to the headstock shape, the herringbone purfling and the open-back tuners). It doesn't even SOUND like a Larrivee - it has that dry, woody sound that vintage Martins have (he bought it brand new). Is this guitar a bargain or a copy or a bit of both?
Yep. Maybe we should just take a guitar on it's own merits. But then rewind to the top of my post - we need to decide what it is that we're actually laying out our cash for.
