RationalRocker
New Member
What does PRS’s $499 guitar mean?
TLDR
New brands are creating cheap but great entry-level/modding platform guitars are posing a direct challenge to incumbent brands and are creating a different market that other brands want a piece of. Guitar sales have been increasing steadily and exploded during the global LD. Though innovation in guitar design has stagnated over the past few decades, the current conditions create a more valuable but also more competitive market, which drives down prices. So this, the disintermediation of parts, and better knowledge distribution should increase innovation, which will be better for guitar players.
Cheap copies
When someone creates innovation, the generally accepted idea is that there should be a period of time where they are able to reap the benefits of their creation, after which the innovation can be incorporated into goods created by other players in the market, prices come down, then some other innovation creates more value. From a consumer point of view I think the way the market works from this perspective is probably okay w.r.t. guitars, though I am not a lawyer so things are probably more complex than I realise.
Advances in manufacturing techniques have allowed new market entrants to create high quality cheap alternatives that look similar to guitars that have been around for decades. This is perfectly fine as long as they don’t violate trademark etc. In fact they are essential for the market.
So brands like Harley Benton, Jet, and so on, are creating this alternative market, where they make highly playable cheap guitars that people also use as a platform for modding, upgrades, experimentation/hacking, and so on.
Stagnation of guitar innovation
After it’s creation, electric guitar innovation subsequently stagnated, particularly after the 80’s. Recently Fender did a 70th anniversary re-release of its strat including the 1954 model, its basically the same as a standard modern electric guitar, it wouldn’t be out of place in a typical modern musical performance. Think about how far a typical car has come since the 1950s, its insanely different, or even keyboards. The modern electric keyboard was created in the 1980s (yes, there were some curiosities beforehand), just think about the insanely massive innovations that has taken place for that instrument, the guitar is no where near close.
Here is one example of a kind of “backwardness” in the modern electric guitar. Integrated circuits were popular in the 1970/80, and we’re still soldering pickups, knobs and switches! The humble pin/jumper connector is a tiny minority of guitar circuits. We are constantly told that labour time is the most expensive component for making guitars, so why are pickups still being soldered? It’s literally faster (and no more expensive) to use modern connectors, and you’ll save on labour costs but its seen as a “premium” feature. That’s just a basic thing that can change overnight.
I think the stagnation is down to two things I can think of:
1. Guitarists are more conservative than any other group of modern instrumentalists I know when it comes to changes in their instrument. Guitarists turn their noses up at new tech all the time when it comes to the guitar itself, even a new small cutaway is often seen as “revolutionary” or “controversial”. It looks like in the 1980s there was a serious attempt at innovations on the guitar itself, but I think it subsequently petered out. Watching a video of the kind of things Steve Vai was playing around with in his guitar collection is pretty awesome. Design changes are sort of coming back slowly, some efforts to digitise the guitar have been a partial success like the odd success/failure of boss’s GK-5 and GM-800, the pickup is fine as is the digitization of the guitar signals, but the tracking and midification of the signal is a failure. Though there are certainly other efforts with varying success levels, none of them have as yet fundamentally captured the imagination.
2. The electric guitar has highly complex dynamics and more degrees of freedom and so is more difficult to capture accurately than something like the piano.
Disintermediate of guitar parts and distribution of knowledge
One of the guitars I own is a Harley Benton CST hardtail. I put Gotoh tuners on it, put in a Gotoh wraparound fully adjustable properly intonatable bridge, and Toneriders pickups. But that’s just “greasy kid stuff”. You can buy any part of a guitar. You can buy everything separately, down to the body, and the neck, and assemble it yourself from scratch. You can learn to do any guitar build related thing with articles and YouTube.
I think the market is ripe for innovation. There’s money to be made but for new companies it’s not good enough to put a familiar looking guitar together with nice off-the-shelf parts and charge $1000 - $2000 for it. Anyone can do that. There now has to be something different about your product. Those conditions breed innovation.
TLDR
New brands are creating cheap but great entry-level/modding platform guitars are posing a direct challenge to incumbent brands and are creating a different market that other brands want a piece of. Guitar sales have been increasing steadily and exploded during the global LD. Though innovation in guitar design has stagnated over the past few decades, the current conditions create a more valuable but also more competitive market, which drives down prices. So this, the disintermediation of parts, and better knowledge distribution should increase innovation, which will be better for guitar players.
Cheap copies
When someone creates innovation, the generally accepted idea is that there should be a period of time where they are able to reap the benefits of their creation, after which the innovation can be incorporated into goods created by other players in the market, prices come down, then some other innovation creates more value. From a consumer point of view I think the way the market works from this perspective is probably okay w.r.t. guitars, though I am not a lawyer so things are probably more complex than I realise.
Advances in manufacturing techniques have allowed new market entrants to create high quality cheap alternatives that look similar to guitars that have been around for decades. This is perfectly fine as long as they don’t violate trademark etc. In fact they are essential for the market.
So brands like Harley Benton, Jet, and so on, are creating this alternative market, where they make highly playable cheap guitars that people also use as a platform for modding, upgrades, experimentation/hacking, and so on.
Stagnation of guitar innovation
After it’s creation, electric guitar innovation subsequently stagnated, particularly after the 80’s. Recently Fender did a 70th anniversary re-release of its strat including the 1954 model, its basically the same as a standard modern electric guitar, it wouldn’t be out of place in a typical modern musical performance. Think about how far a typical car has come since the 1950s, its insanely different, or even keyboards. The modern electric keyboard was created in the 1980s (yes, there were some curiosities beforehand), just think about the insanely massive innovations that has taken place for that instrument, the guitar is no where near close.
Here is one example of a kind of “backwardness” in the modern electric guitar. Integrated circuits were popular in the 1970/80, and we’re still soldering pickups, knobs and switches! The humble pin/jumper connector is a tiny minority of guitar circuits. We are constantly told that labour time is the most expensive component for making guitars, so why are pickups still being soldered? It’s literally faster (and no more expensive) to use modern connectors, and you’ll save on labour costs but its seen as a “premium” feature. That’s just a basic thing that can change overnight.
I think the stagnation is down to two things I can think of:
1. Guitarists are more conservative than any other group of modern instrumentalists I know when it comes to changes in their instrument. Guitarists turn their noses up at new tech all the time when it comes to the guitar itself, even a new small cutaway is often seen as “revolutionary” or “controversial”. It looks like in the 1980s there was a serious attempt at innovations on the guitar itself, but I think it subsequently petered out. Watching a video of the kind of things Steve Vai was playing around with in his guitar collection is pretty awesome. Design changes are sort of coming back slowly, some efforts to digitise the guitar have been a partial success like the odd success/failure of boss’s GK-5 and GM-800, the pickup is fine as is the digitization of the guitar signals, but the tracking and midification of the signal is a failure. Though there are certainly other efforts with varying success levels, none of them have as yet fundamentally captured the imagination.
2. The electric guitar has highly complex dynamics and more degrees of freedom and so is more difficult to capture accurately than something like the piano.
Disintermediate of guitar parts and distribution of knowledge
One of the guitars I own is a Harley Benton CST hardtail. I put Gotoh tuners on it, put in a Gotoh wraparound fully adjustable properly intonatable bridge, and Toneriders pickups. But that’s just “greasy kid stuff”. You can buy any part of a guitar. You can buy everything separately, down to the body, and the neck, and assemble it yourself from scratch. You can learn to do any guitar build related thing with articles and YouTube.
I think the market is ripe for innovation. There’s money to be made but for new companies it’s not good enough to put a familiar looking guitar together with nice off-the-shelf parts and charge $1000 - $2000 for it. Anyone can do that. There now has to be something different about your product. Those conditions breed innovation.
