It's only a bit of wood FFS...

rlw

Is the price of a guitar sized piece of wood, not even enough to make a whole guitar,  such that some firms can charge an extra £1500 to very silly indeed just for a fancy top? 

Or is it bollocks?

LaCathedrale_UK

but... muh tones

Jez6345789

Only £1500 where are you finding such bargains.

i like cheap guitars I like expensive guitars, when I can afford the up charge if I like the guitar I buy it I never pontificate over what the upcharge is destroys the pleasure of buying something.

I am currently amazed at Tanglewood Crossroads 99.00 well setup ooo cheap beater acoustic all laminate but I marvel that something that is a laminate and built for so little money can sound and play so good.

These days there are good guitars for every budget £1500 for fancy top yes please 99.00 for a mahogany laminated blues guitar yes please. 

I will personally spend more time worrying about what is heppening to people in the Tanglewood factory than the upcharge on a fancy PRS.

your mileage may vary

Keefy

If I find a guitar that makes me want to play, and I can afford it, I'll buy it. The 'afford' part means said guitar will probably not feature a £1,500 extra-fancy top - someone else will buy that one.

fandango

rlw said:

Is the price of a guitar sized piece of wood, not even enough to make a whole guitar,  such that some firms can charge an extra £1500 to very silly indeed just for a fancy top? 

Or is it bollocks?

Ah, I see where you're going wrong....

Bollocks are them things that live in fields and charge around at walkers and hikers.

A Wood is is where you take your girlfriend for a pleasant walk looking at bluebells on a summer afternoon. That's the posh girlfriend with the fancy top. (Not your skank on the side wearing a halter).

And £1,500 is what you need to spend to keep her - the posh one - happy.

Now what's that nonsense you talking about a 'guitar'?

  

darthed1981

I think this is one of those threads you will never get a good answer to, and we have about one a week.

You can, in our modern, Far East, CNC, mass-production age, get a decent, giggable guitar for £200, or less.  This will make a perfectly decent musical instrument.

You can also spend literally as much as you like, and many posters here have purchased "custom shop" hand made guitars costing many thousands of pounds.

Whether any, and at anything over £1000 you are talking, tiny, tiny, incremental difference in quality or "tone" is worth it is very much in the eye of the beholder.

The argument could be made (I'm not making it, just throwing it out there) that at the higher end guitars are valued precisely for their cost and indication of high wealth, at least by a certain type of collector.

But perhaps, its better just to get on with it.

There are fundamentally two types of musician on here, hobbyists and professionals.  Their gear needs to give them pleasure, and do the job, respectively.

So if a £200-£500 guitar ticks that box for you, as it probably would for me, great.  If you feel you "need" a £3000 or £30000 guitar to be happy, and you have the spare money, well you cant take it with you...

WezV

A piece of highly quilted, consistently pale, and flaw free maple can cost a hell of a lot of money.   It’s also trickier to work with an increased risk of chip out

Whitecat

Once you learn that the price of things in the world has almost no relation to what it costs to make them, you shall attain nirvana. 

grungebob

Whitecat said:

Once you learn that the price of things in the world has almost no relation to what it costs to make them, you shall attain nirvana. 

So come as you are?

Schnozz

I'd want the whole guitar for £1500 and I'll not spend any more. Some of the fancy tops look great in photos and naff in the flesh, same as many of those that have been artificially aged.

Basschat go by quality spec and price to find alternatives to big brands, but I don't think this has caught on for guitarists - many are still happy to get pumped for thousands, whereas you only get the odd sheep falling for the music man 'old smoothie' stingray bass...literally two extra pole pieces and a 2 piece pickup cover stuck together lol.

randella

WezV said:

A piece of highly quilted, consistently pale, and flaw free maple can cost a hell of a lot of money.   It’s also trickier to work with an increased risk of chip out

Haha yeah, damn right.  Get some of that lovely maple and bang it through the planer.  You'll soon find out why you need to pay extra for someone who knows what they're doing to prepare it.

Sync

Seems an insignificant price compared to cost varants in orchestral string instruments. 

Guitarists have it easy really. 

But yes, forgetting any tonal quality, your guitar's looks define your overall image. 

Whether you are a pro musician or dentist noodler, image for most people is everything.

There is a great disparity on affordability and perception of costs with guitarists and guitars though. For the majority of people actually buying and target market for this type of guitar price isn't really an issue, it's loose change. 

It's the same with all the main brands like Gibson, Fender USA and PRS. It's more normalised with the custom builders as enhanced finishes seem less expensive where the base instrument is typically more expensive anyway.

This philosophy and ethos is the same for tech, fashion, home furnishings, art and auto industries etc. 

aord43

As in so many cases, you are not paying for just the cost of the materials, but also the skills, knowledge and expertise that went into sourcing and working with it, not to mention the time.
Not saying any specific example is worth it but it's not as simple as "the price of a piece of wood".

hobbio

grungebob said:

Whitecat said:

Once you learn that the price of things in the world has almost no relation to what it costs to make them, you shall attain nirvana. 

So come as you are?

No, he means get on the Lithium.

BluesyDave

Depends on the species.  You could easily spend that kind of scratch for a lump of Claro Walnut.

Kalimna

Claro walnut? Pah! Quilty maple? Been there done that.
I remember a back/sides acoustic set I saw for sale (from a luthier in America) a few years back of a wood that makes the above seem a little pedestrian. It was figured snakewood, and I've not seen a piece like it since... Incredibly dense stuff, and beautiful finish on a fretboard, but no idea how it would work on an acoustic. I can only imagine the sweaty palms when bending those sides!

Adam

rlw

So how much would a very nice top be in quilted maple for instance?  Seriously, I have no ides of the cost.

I had a look around and could find quilted maple caps for up to £300 but not a lot more.  Happy to double that for working on it but it's still less than £1000.  I'm not knocking it but interested.

olafgarten

rlw said:

So how much would a very nice top be in quilted maple for instance?  Seriously, I have no ides of the cost.

I had a look around and could find quilted maple caps for up to £300 but not a lot more.  Happy to double that for working on it but it's still less than £1000.  I'm not knocking it but interested.

A very good quilt top thick enough for a Les Paul can go for up to 600-700.

Kalimna

A figured maple top might start around £150 for nice, but irregular grain that wasnt uniformly over the whole top. I reckon most PRS tops would be at least £3-400 and double that for the wood library/private stock. I might be out by a hundred or so, but that would be the ballpark for a 3/4"-1" thick top, wood only. Of course, there will be variation in price depending on location/source.

Adam

octatonic

rlw said:

So how much would a very nice top be in quilted maple for instance?  Seriously, I have no ides of the cost.

I had a look around and could find quilted maple caps for up to £300 but not a lot more.  Happy to double that for working on it but it's still less than £1000.  I'm not knocking it but interested.

The thing is, and I mean this with respect, you don't really understand the economics of guitar building.

There is something called the 'rule of four'.
If something costs a manufacturer £100 to buy then it has to be charged to the customer at 4 times that to make it economical.

There are a lot of reasons for this but you have to factor rejection (some bits of wood look fine when you buy them but as you start cutting away you find flaws that you cannot see otherwise), machining errors (these happen) as well as the cost of marketing the products, shipping them to suppliers, allowing for dealer margin and a bit of profit to justify doing it at all, as well as paying staff and for the buying and replacing machinery.
Oh and rent, tax, electricity and all that.

The big boys can buy in volume and cut wood down, they can use leverage on suppliers to get things cheaper.

WezV

octatonic said:

rlw said:

So how much would a very nice top be in quilted maple for instance?  Seriously, I have no ides of the cost.

I had a look around and could find quilted maple caps for up to £300 but not a lot more.  Happy to double that for working on it but it's still less than £1000.  I'm not knocking it but interested.

The thing is, and I mean this with respect, you don't really understand the economics of guitar building.

There is something called the 'rule of four'.
If something costs a manufacturer £100 to buy then it has to be charged to the customer at 4 times that to make it economical.

There are a lot of reasons for this but you have to factor rejection (some bits of wood look fine when you buy them but as you start cutting away you find flaws that you cannot see otherwise), machining errors (these happen) as well as the cost of marketing the products, shipping them to suppliers, allowing for dealer margin and a bit of profit to justify doing it at all, as well as paying staff and for the buying and replacing machinery.
Oh and rent, tax, electricity and all that.

The big boys can buy in volume and cut wood down, they can use leverage on suppliers to get things cheaper.

Exactly that 


its worth noting with wood choice, like many other things in life, you pay a lot more for very little extra.... and with electrics it’s price is purely decided by aesthetics.  You are not paying extra for a higher grade of tone wood with increased graincount/stiffness etc.  

You can get decent quilted maple for about £100-150 for a les Paul.  It won’t be perfect at that price.  It won’t be consistently light in colour, it may even have some small flaws.  It will make a perfectly fine guitar that sounds as good as any with higher priced wood.    I would rather build with this kind of wood most of the time.  If you want perfection, you pay more