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Change of pups and it was my main gigging guitar for an age
There's some great ones so far - I'd particularly like the Yamaha Attitude and I'll have to search for a Knaggs Kipawa
I was thinking about that one recently, mainly because I know I would be tempted to age it if I did the work again. At the time i was dead against fake wear on real vintage guitars.
Instagram
https://imgur.com/pSZyxr0
There's no excuse for poor treatment, but in terms of cheap labour, surely you can choose not to work there...But if there's a shortage of jobs, then they're providing employment. I have to admit that I've not thoroughly looked into it.
People refer to Korean Squiers as the 'golden era', but Cort/Cor-Tek have also built a lot of Ibanez instruments.
I like Indonesian built instruments as the Cort and G&Ls I've have from there have been exceptional.
South Korea has arguably as good a living standards as the UK.
Indonesia, OK, is a hell hole, but the money from manufacturing might let them crawl out of it.
After all, it's how we did!
They weren't particularly cheap and I didn't get amazing deals on them, they were about £350 each, but they're great quality at that price.
There's also my first good guitar, my Hamer Special, which cost me £250. That seemed cheap even 35 years ago.
Oh and my 82 JV Squier strat that cost me £100 mwahaha!
Harsh for those employees though, why do some capitalists have to be so damn nasty!
G&L Tribute Asat Special -- Mine is a Korean one, before they moved production to Indonesia. Not exactly cheap cheap. I think I paid about 300-350 quid for it (new) which was a couple of hundred pounds off RRP, as the shop was shutting down. Proper US G&L pickups. But, still, a real bargain. Plays and sounds better than guitars three times the price. I haven't played a recent Mexican Fender, but when I AB'd them at the time I got this (8 - 9 years ago) there was no comparison. The G&L was a much better playing, sounding guitar. Versatile tones, everything from classic tele sounds to full on rock. I still prefer it to a lot of £800-900 guitars I've tried recently.
'Artisan' archtop guitar. I think I paid £50 or it. Cheap Chinese balsa and ply archtop acoustic. Lots of things not quite right with it. The composite fingerboard isn't completely flat so the action increases somewhere around the 17th fret although it's absolutely fine and playable below that. The resonator style cheapie tailpiece isn't quite centred, so the strings take a very slight bend as they cross the floating bridge. The floating bridge itself is some kind of cheap timber. It's definitely not anything like as dense as ebony or rosewood. There's no bottom end to speak of.
But ... it is constructed properly, with the right type of bracing. The woodwork inside, if I have a poke through the sound holes is clean. It's bright, it projects, it has the right kind of light, dry, fast sound that, with the right strings, completely nails the Selmer type Gypsy jazz tone. Way way way more than supposedly Selmer style acoustic that cost 10 times as much. Intonation, after a bit of futzing with the position of the floating bridge is very good.
I'd probably have to spend at least 500 quid to get something in the same sonic ballpark.
I'm on the left of the vid with the black t-shirt (it's a jam, and it transpired we knew the song in different keys, so its not super polished [world understatement) but you get the sense of the sound.