So, how do your Partscasters actually compare?

jaymenon

impmann said:

dazzajl said:

maltingsaudio said:

Hmm can bitsa’s built to your spec by the likes of @GSPBASSES and @GoldenEraGuitars ,judging by the fabulous work shown here, really be classed as bitsas and partscaster?

No. I think the better term for those is a custom build. That level of craftsmanship and work absolutely deserves a matching level of respect. 

Interesting.

So when a business makes a bitsa, it’s a custom build but when an individual does the same it’s a partcaster?

Without taking away from either Scott or Graham here, that seems to imply that their work is somehow better than say, me, in screwing bits of wood together and soldering using the same parts? 

No... they are still bitsas. Nice ones, but bitsas all the same. 

With the deepest respect to the fabulous guitar makers here, I would agree with @ ;

A bitsa / partscaster is a bitsa / partscaster, whoever makes it. 

usedtobe

Doesn’t gspbasses make the parts from blanks.?
he does way more than screw necks to bodies, from what I’ve seen. All the difference in the world..

dazzajl

I’m not suggesting that a guitar bolted together with an invoice attached is any different to guitar bolted together at home. And some of the finest guitars I’ve played have been built non professionally by members here. The dividing line for me between a partscaster and a custom
build is when you’ve fabricated a part of the guitar yourself. 

The white one in my earlier post here has a one off custom made body and was bolted together and wired by someone who is a truly skilled luthier. It’s still just a bitsa to me. While it was put together with great skill and then set up and finished with supreme finesse, nothing was created there from scratch 

jaymenon

usedtobe said:

Doesn’t gspbasses make the parts from blanks.?
he does way more than screw necks to bodies, from what I’ve seen. All the difference in the world..

I don't think Graham (GSP) puts partscasters together.

He makes high quality parts - so he would be more logically comparable to Warmoth or Musikraft, rather that a person / company who screws parts together.

Fuengi

jaymenon said:

usedtobe said:

Doesn’t gspbasses make the parts from blanks.?
he does way more than screw necks to bodies, from what I’ve seen. All the difference in the world..

I don't think Graham (GSP) puts partscasters together.

He makes high quality parts - so he would be more logically comparable to Warmoth or Musikraft, rather that a person / company who screws parts together.

I think he makes bodies and necks ready to go as one guitar ready for finishing and parts?

I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong here... 

mudslide73

I received a lovely Guitar Build body yesterday (my first). I'd definitely use them again. I wanted a Floyd recess as a custom option and they went as far as requesting the trem unit and posts for fitting. The result is absolutely stunning - I couldn't resist doing a test fit and everything looks bang on.

jaymenon

Excellent quality indeed.

The only problem is they charge extra for pretty much everything - including what should be basic things like deepening the pickup routs (to take modern pickups) or doing a HSH or universal pickup rout - or routing for a different bridge.

All these are basic (no extra cost) at Warmoth.

impmann

Fuengi said:

jaymenon said:

usedtobe said:

Doesn’t gspbasses make the parts from blanks.?
he does way more than screw necks to bodies, from what I’ve seen. All the difference in the world..

I don't think Graham (GSP) puts partscasters together.

He makes high quality parts - so he would be more logically comparable to Warmoth or Musikraft, rather that a person / company who screws parts together.

I think he makes bodies and necks ready to go as one guitar ready for finishing and parts?

I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong here... 

Yup. But if he put one together, its a bitsa. Likewise Scott or any of the other builders on here.

I'm not taking away the quality - its just they aren't any different to me building one. I've been a guitar tech for years - professionally set up literally tens of thousands of instruments - but I don't call it anything other than a bitsa. 

tabano

jaymenon said:

Excellent quality indeed.

The only problem is they charge extra for pretty much everything - including what should be basic things like deepening the pickup routs (to take modern pickups) or doing a HSH or universal pickup rout - or routing for a different bridge.

All these are basic (no extra cost) at Warmoth.

I have to agree with this,
they seem like a great place to get your parts but having to go the custom build route for a single / Humbucker for instance is a bit strange specially when they rout both pickups as standard on other offerings..

mudslide73

tabano said:

jaymenon said:

Excellent quality indeed.

The only problem is they charge extra for pretty much everything - including what should be basic things like deepening the pickup routs (to take modern pickups) or doing a HSH or universal pickup rout - or routing for a different bridge.

All these are basic (no extra cost) at Warmoth.

I have to agree with this,
they seem like a great place to get your parts but having to go the custom build route for a single / Humbucker for instance is a bit strange specially when they rout both pickups as standard on other offerings..

I think this comes from them wanting to make sure you definitely get something that works. Judging by the quality of what I received I'm happy with how much dialogue there was. I think there's probably room for more standard options though. 

Creed_Clicks

Had a tele baritone partscaster, and like a fool broke it down for parts and sold it. I should have kept the body and hardware etc. Main difference between stock was the body, a natural finish, and made in Ireland. I also put in a 4 way switch and Porter pickups, so it sounded pretty good. Might go down the road for a standard tele partscaster again for no other reason than another one of those natural finish bodies.

mikem8634

In my humble opinion @GSPBASSES makes extremely high quality parts, some of them custom built to customers' specs and some just as he fancies, and the guitars that they subsequently become are high quality partscasters. Which is a damn fine thing to be.

But ultimately the classification is unimportant. If you take the logic back far enough every guitar, in fact every thing, is the sum of its constituent parts, and definitions are notoriously subjective.

Fuengi

That's true.

The OP was really generated from a comment I remember somebody making about Partscasters mainly being successful due to a good setup, and that lots get parted back out before being given half a chance.

Having just gone through that process myself I wondered how common it was. 

The other thing I have found it that having had an idea of what the finished guitar would be - a bluesy, chimey, jazzy type of Tele - it turned out to be something completely different - a powerful, cutting rock machine. Getting my head around that has taken some time but now I'm there I really like it. 

TTony

I've probably got (or had) more than I can remember or count.

For me, it's become more about the relaxation, challenge and satisfaction of *creating* something as much as it is about creating a shape or configuration that I really - really - want and wouldn't be able to buy off the shelf. 

And I'm certainly long past the stage of needing any more guitars.

I started out building a few, just to check that I could actually build them (and still have a couple kicking around from those days).  Then got tempted by GSP's stuff, and concentrated on assembly & finishing for a while, but have gone back to starting with raw timber more  recently.

This lot were done in Q1 this year ...


This one finished a few months ago


This one too



(I'm quite chuffed with the back view for some reason   )


This was a fun thing to put together


Its twin  came with an unexpected challenge, but was sorted quite nicely ...



I had a nice piece of walnut that needed a guitar making for it ...


(And loads more).

How do they play?  I've got some branded guitars that play better, and some that don't play so well. 

With my own builds, I'm far happier tweaking them to get them to play more nicely, than I would be with one of the PRSs or some other branded guitar, where one little slip of the screwdriver, and there's £500 of value gone!  If I can't get something to play nicely, then it generally just gets recycled into another build.  So I'm never stuck with something that I can't get rid of!

Grangousier

So the distinction is between guitars that legitimately have a known brand on the headstock and all the rest? 

The quality of a partscaster will be a combination of the quality of the components and the skill of the people assembling the guitar - when I get Feline to do it, I end up with something quite lovely, but if I break out the soldering iron myself... I end up with a sad pile of charred wood. Most of my favourite recent acquisitions have been made from @GSPBASSES parts, and I love the way they feel in the hand. But it's something quite distinct, and I can imagine someone hating it and preferring a "proper" Fender* - that's where the taste comes into it. 

My strat is actually various components from different sources - high end Fender Mexico body, standard Mex neck, Wilkinson bridge, Joseph Kaye / Sonic Monkey pickups - originally put together by me but then worked on by Tom at Feline, which brought it up to a much higher level. On the other hand my first partscaster is an unattributable body (ironically called the blingcaster for its rough gold spray-job) currently with a Fernandes neck and Alegree pickups, and I enjoy playing that one too, even though the fact that I put it together means it's nowhere near the same quality (it was also handy for dissassembling and putting in the suitcase back when we could travel places). I also have the sparkly green GSP strat from here a year ago, which just feels like a different kind of guitar. The one I enjoy least is a Classic Player 50s strat, which is obviously much higher quality than the others, but just doesn't suit me. 

The thing is that the latter has a value in itself that the others don't have, it's clear that they only have value as parts, which seems unfair to me, but that's the market for you. "Quality" might be an ambiguous concept, but resale value is quite clear. 

I believe a Marxist would refer to it as the distinction between use value and exchange value. 

Something slightly aligned is that I wonder whether an advantage that vintage guitars have is that they've fifty or sixty years of tweaking behind them, and that a lot of the quality of an early fifties tele, for example, is partly the Fender factory and partly love and care from the same hands that might be assembling a partscaster, with much the same results.  

*I'm not saying I have any respect for their opinion, I can just imagine them having it. 

mikem8634

Good points there @Grangousier.

Part of the value of a brand is obviously the cool factor, but also the trust it engenders in the buyer. We are led to believe that certain brands equal certain strata of quality, even though hands on experience often tells a different and counter-intuitive story - like Fender vs. the lawsuit guitars in the 70s/80s.

Partscasters don't have that. There is no stamp of authority (misleading or not) as to how they have been made or put together, therefore the buyer has no trust and the retail value plummets.

However, when you start mentioning Warmoth, Musikraft, GSP,  with parts from Mojo, Oil City, Six String Supplies and Alegree, and finishing work from SCrelics and Rexter, and all put together by Corvus or Feline or Ivison, then, for those in the know, you are talking about quality that often surpasses many of those trusted brands.

Surely, partscasters like that should hold their value, albeit in a more niche marketplace. If only partscaster people weren't so damn finicky.

Grangousier

Well, yes, they should, but a Fender stratocaster is a commodity in the way an unbranded one isn't, no matter what they provenance of the individual parts, and the specific sources of the parts means that they have a certain amount of commodity value but to a much smaller market. 

Also, if you're keen to play a partscaster, you'll probably want to select the parts. 

ToneControl

I got a partscaster made from ESP and seymour duncan parts in 1984
it's lovely, and is one of my best guitars

mikem8634

Grangousier said:

Well, yes, they should, but a Fender stratocaster is a commodity in the way an unbranded one isn't, no matter what they provenance of the individual parts, and the specific sources of the parts means that they have a certain amount of commodity value but to a much smaller market. 

Also, if you're keen to play a partscaster, you'll probably want to select the parts. 

Yep, spot on.

rossi

i always split Fenders into parts before selling .I get more money for them and the same with a partscaster .