lol Fender

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91ksIfJwD8L._SL1500_.jpg

$3900 for a strat some dipshit took a sander to in the factory and fucked up the paint

http://www.sweetwater.com/images/guitars/Strat63Relic/R72898/R72898-body-large.jpg

stupid Fender "Road Worn" gimmick

Has it really been nearly five years since Fender started to really push this shit? That strat looks like it's been thrown out of the back of a moving van.

longer than that! the road worn was the mexican equivalent of the custom shop relic stuff which has probably been going on for 20 years. 20 years of solid suck.

in related lol fender news, they were bought by a different investment group about 9 months ago when their public offering went totally off the rails, and the dummy that runs the company just casually mentioned in an interview that they are going to implement direct to consumer sales in the next 6 months. unsurprisingly, their dealers are howling for blood right now.

one of said dudes main bonafides is steering the rise of J Crew

"I Accidentally Lit This On Fire While Freebasing Cocaine in a Bar Bathroom" edition

"Who Needs A Case?" edition

"Covered it in Steak Juice and Threw It Into a Steel Cage With Five Pitbulls Cause Fuck It" edition

The link to the 'road worn' section of the Fender website in that other thread still works, and interestingly the 'wear' on the guitars has been toned down compared to five years ago. Still a stupid idea though.
Anyway, back to railing on that strat upthread... How many times would you have to drop a guitar on the floor to get the kind of damage near the socket? Has anyone every worn off the paint on the point of the lower horn like that? Why does the scratchplate have the colour of steamrollered shit? Why am I reminded of a guitar I saw whose owner painted regular household wall paint straight onto a tobacco sunburst finish?

...and the Rolling Stones tele is just fucking stupid, although kind of appropriate that it has a toilet on it.

I look at these things and I think about the fact that my wife went in blind to buy me a guitar and I thank my lucky stars every day that she is not ridiculous or stupid

weve honestly reached the point now where fender is ruled by its marketing department, and none of them appear to be people who actually know anything about guitars

http://guitar-contest.com/wp-content/uploads/let-it-bleed-guitar.png

They also did this one.

i've been getting a real sweet tone out of this air conditioning vent

http://onlineautonews.com/wp-content/plugins/rss-poster/cache/534ca_1122559_article_img_large2.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41pj0K9fcGL.jpg

^^this is really embarassing, even if you were that First Act company that sells $70 guitars in boxes at Wal Mart

http://retrothing.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/marshallradio.jpg
(it's a DAB radio)

JJ - Peavy still makes their stuff in America right?

yaaaaaaahh
http://assets.fender.com/frl/9a6e6e49feddb91f12bbd032507b4e24/generated/efe678a48efb40c59c5c5e3a5160296c.png

16 months of ugly-ass guitars

ok, I want that pink pearloid pickguard, but nothing else in that pic.

oh, I missed that that was a calendar. here, look at this!

Fender Road Worn... for people who really really want to have a guitar that looks like it's been stored in a shed for years...
http://www.guitarguitar.co.uk/large/120/13032015054116.jpg
...only £2649!

I would seriously consider a guitar with the artwork from The Cure on it if only because it would be amazingly terrible looking to the point of convulsive hilarity

How about 'The Scream' on a guitar?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f4/The_Scream.jpg/220px-The_Scream.jpg

there are so many shitty album covers I'd get airbrushed on a guitar if I had the dough. A few good ones too. None of them by the Rolling Stones.

seriously though, I still can't believe this is a real album cover and the album's 9 years old:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FCh6bq3X6Tg/SJAppGSDPDI/AAAAAAAAAGY/grAnSJxgccg/s400/TheCure_thecure_cover_album.jpg

this would look amazingly stupid on a guitar, I would not be able to stop laughing, the degree to which this idea delights me is frightening

peavey makes some of their stuff in the us, but a lot less than they used to. xposts

the problem for fender/gibson/frankly all the big players is that they are huge companies obsessed with growing their market share. obv doing that is a goal for all functional companies, but the huge dudes have kind of run out of room to expand in their comfort zone, and their target customers tend to be of the never change anything variety. fender has proven time and time again that straying out of the iconic models is hopeless, no matter how good the result might be. so they have to go into things like this crazy comittment to relicing instruments, or car audio, or shitty affliction style shirts and so on because they are getting squeezed on all sides by alternate companies that can push the envelope of their brand while the old guard is stuck in stagnation. having outside industries with no experience with guitar culture (ugh) control your direction just makes that whole thing infinitely worse.

i had a customer who had an interesting take wrt all of this in recently - hes sort of a gear head, and he equated the difference between 20-30 years ago when if you were into performance cars, you were into ford or chevy, and that was it. now the same mindset is down with nissans and hondas and so on, and nobody bats an eye. so ford makes mustangs to hold onto the older dedicated (shrinking) crowd for the same reasons that fender makes strats and teles and hangs road worn aesthetics on them to enhance the legacy/authenticity deal. and when they do target a different demographic, the overshoot by a mile - that gibson explorer x thing and robot guitar, fender 7 strings and punk acoustics.

i could go on forever, i think a lot about this stuff but i dont want to get boring.

other problem i suppose is essentially competing with the 8 zillion vintage teles, strats, les pauls etc that are still out there, which are like cars that (as long as treated w/reasonable care) don't break down and in fact appreciate, not decline, in value as they get older

i could go on forever, i think a lot about this stuff but i dont want to get boring.

― ACA: not bad, needs more death panels (jjjusten), Thursday, October 24, 2013 2:20 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

please, go on! i love your take on this stuff.

The G&L facebook page is a great place to look at guitars.

The Scorpions - Virgin Killer on a guitar, with actually cracks

*actual

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/10355111/Texas+Flood+StevieRayVaughanTexasFlood.jpg

but infinite recursion style, so the strat on the cover is a SRV Texas Flood strat

lol

i could go on forever, i think a lot about this stuff but i dont want to get boring.

― ACA: not bad, needs more death panels (jjjusten), Thursday, October 24, 2013 2:20 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

please, go on! i love your take on this stuff.

― call all destroyer, Thursday, 24 October 2013 18:34 (27 minutes ago) Permalink

seconded

thirded

well ok then!

also the internet has been a huge leveler for these smaller guitar manufacturers and murderous as a result for the big players. 20 years ago if i handed someone a reverend or eastwood or G&L all they had to go on was some sort of trust that i wasn't going to sell them garbage (and wow did lots of guitar shops push high margin garbage back in those days). now dudes can look the shit up on their phone while they're standing in my store, and with a half decent web designer some 8 person builder can have the same gravitas as a mongo corporation. so fender gets squeezed on the low end by the jay tersers of the world, in the midrange by G&L import and reverend and so on, in the base level usa stuff by G&L american, and from the top by the bucketloads of high end boutique stuff like suhr and collins, many of whom are openly known to have been former fender custom shop builders. if i didnt think that the company was run by a bunch of incompetent profit maximizing dicks, i would feel bad for them. to top it off, fender/gibson/etc are all deeply leveraged and indebted, so i imagine the recession has put them in a tailspin of panic.

oh yeah and wrt the vintage price inflation etc, thats why we are seeing all this instant collectible stupidity (runs of 100, $35000 blackie clones and so on). The bloom is off the vine there too for people that know how the market works - the reason the old stuff is worth so much is because people modded it or dropped it or had it float away in a flood or burn in a fire. Most of the collectible shit now is never going to get played or leave the case, so 10 years down the road, the rarity hasn't changed, so in most cases the stuff doesn't even keep pace with inflation or declines in value. intentionally rare guitars are the last thing a collector will seek out, what they want it stuff that is old enough to have been depleted, or stuff that was an unintentional failure (hence the high value of odd custom colors etc). but even then, rarity has to work hand in hand with desirability. no one is paying top dollar for that awful fender Katana or Performer, which makes that new Starcaster reissue the laughing stock of the industry right now - they are rare because they were universally hated back in the 70's, and nobody was clamoring to get them back.

there's a starcaster reissue? omg i am v. glad i now share my bank accounts with another person.

Ok I take it back, "nobody" was apparently overstating the lack of demand

that last post is pretty much what I assumed, and reminds me VERY much of the mid-90s baseball card bubble

Thanks for those posts, jjjusten. Very interesting and informative. It brought to mind Rickenbacker, and how they've been able to flourish by avoiding all traps Fender and Gibson fell into. This is a pretty interesting interview with the owner: http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/interviews/interviews/rickenbackers_john_hall_the_only_way_to_compete_against_that_is_using_various_forms_of_automation_and_working_smart.html

We don't have a bunch of people to satisfy but still we make a nice living. But we don't have all these people to satisfy and we have zero debt. There are no banks that are in line there. We're not publicly owned and we don't have outside share holders and counting organizations looking over our shoulders to squeeze another nickel out of something. Unfortunately those other big companies are looking at the pennies and the nickels and where can we get an extra little bit out of it? That's where the decision to go overseas was made.

someone told me that Martin Guitars is the oldest family run company in the U.S. (still apparently run by a Martin)

Avedis Zildjian Co., Norwell, Mass. Founded in 1623 in what was known then as Constantinople. Moved to the USA in 1929.

The heir apparent of the 58 year old CEO of 182 year old Martin is only 9 years old.

That came out weird: Martin is 182 years old. CEO is 58 years old. Heir is 9 years old.

If they don't get moving soon on an OM-42 reissue with a USB input and built-in multi-tap delay, they're fucked.

suggested caption: What are we doing? What are we doing?

https://static.bax-shop.nl/image/product/222087/487580/744bbf9b/1447933825Fender_David_Lozeau_Bar_Stool_barkruk_Fender_Logo_zwart_24_inch_kunstleer.jpg

Really missed an opportunity to not give this thing a built-in bottle opener.

lol @ jazzcaster

I guess people have been doing jazzcaster builds for a while(this one looks nice), but coming from Fender it's just like "we have no new, good, or original ideas."

There is also no rhyme or reason to their policy towards the 22nd fret on guitars or basses.

I don't mind the offset Tele but I think it's because it reminds me of the Ibanez Talman I coveted as a teenager.

Good news NA, the Talman is back in production.

they don't have the lipstick pickups anymore though :(

Well not yet. I'm pushing them hard on that.

I won't be buying one unless they get Noodles from The Offspring to promote them again.

lol his signature Talman had a "wrapped duct tape finish which is unique for each guitar"

http://ibanez.wikia.com/wiki/NDM1

I sold several of those!

So, its the regular model but with sticktape stuck on?

How are the Mustang 90s? I've seen some pretty good reviews.

http://shop.fender.com/en-US/st-dupont-collection/

http://www.fmicassets.com/Damroot/ZoomJpg/10001/9107000300_merch_frt_001_nr.jpg

Combining classic Fender Stratocaster-inspired style with the simple, timeless elegance of S.T. Dupont's Old-World craftsmanship, the limited-edition Line D rollerball pen is sure to delight and inspire. The curved harmonious form of the cap, combined with the smooth lines of the barrel, echo the sleek Stratocaster design where form follows function. It features a 3-Color Sunburst natural lacquer and gold finish, along with a guitar neck clip sporting the iconic Strat® headstock shape.

$1,072.00

Those cuff links, though!

That stuff is just stupid.

Thought this thread revival might have to do with this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/the-slow-secret-death-of-the-electric-guitar/

And really I feel like it kind of does, or at least has something to do with it.

I spend a lot of time in high-end custom builder online world, and they're giggling about that article. "It's cos they suck! We're paying our rent these days. Try making good guitars, corporate weenies!"

You know, there was recently an article on Pitchfork on how to set up your own on-the-cheap home recording studio and the bare essentials of what you will need to create and record your own music. There was maybe a single, very brief, passing mention of a guitar in the whole article and it kind of bummed me out. But, you know what? I eventually arrived at the thought that, anymore, (good quality) guitars are not in the price range of the DIY-minded. I would love to see a lot more beginning musicians gravitate naturally towards picking up a guitar instead of a synthesizer, but most guitar builders at this point have dug their own graves.

That, and the elitism that seems to run rampant in the whole scene anymore. Somebody linked an article over on ILM a while back where a guitar magazine had was lamenting the decline in popularity of the guitar with young musicians, but on the same cover of the same magazine was an article titled "Hack Pentatonic Shapes." So, I mean, yeah. Nobody wants to hang out with assholes that act like that.

Huh. You can still get a good Mexican Fender for not that much, I thought.

My Mexican Telecaster was $800.

Hell, I recently got a Made in Indonesia Squier Jaguar and it was $400.

Wow. My Mexican Tele was $400, and I spent the saved cash on new pick-ups.

that WaPo piece is sad but I can't really bring myself to GAF about guys like Gruhn, or the industry in general. pretty much the same as I'll feel whenever people stop being all into collectable sneakers imho. NB: I do not own a guitar.

That WaPo article is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

Three terrible companies are failing, must mean no one is buying electric guitars. Kind of like how no one goes on hikes as proven by REI failing.

There were always be good guitars available under $500, and the best of them won't be new.

Very true - these days the best deals are the Japanese solidbodies from the 70s and 80s. Greco, Tokai, Ibanez, Yamaha, JooDee, Orville, Burny et al. - all made killer instruments to immaculate standards and eventually ended up manufacturing for Fender and Gibson anyway. I bought my 1977 Greco Strat (sorry, Super Sounds) for $250 and it kills any other I have tried - and was only their midrange model.
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7291/16450649541_c44d6e4f28_o.jpg
L-R Greco 1976; Greco 1977; Squier Japan 1983; Ibanez 1984; Fender Japan 1985 - these all came from the same Fuji-gen Gakki factory.

jjj do you still have that red early 80s Yamaha I took a shine to last time I was in town? I'm gonna be back in August and if you still have it I wanna buy it (we're riding the train back to NYC this time so it's a chance for me to bring unwieldy stuff home muhaha)

I don't, but as always, I've got plenty of fun. Stop in when you're in town!

fender is one those brands where you just know it's quality, every time!

Xpost I will!!!

https://reverb.com/news/fender-builds-telecasters-with-original-bench-boards-from-the-hollywood-bowl

https://reverb-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/v1500320167/Fender-1_emnjjx.jpg

perfect if you want a guitar that you can be sure thousands of asses have sat upon

think I spilled some orzo salad on that seat

massively corroded bridge vs pristine neck is partic upsetting to me

just imagining someone leaving it out in a rain storm

Yep, that's dumb.

Fender get in on the 'slap your logo on a Bluetooth speaker' business that Marshall have been doing lately.
https://www.fender.com/pages/audio-bluetooth-speakers/
£300 and £190 respectively.

They screwed up, if it had looked like a Princeton Reverb I would have loved it. Instead it looks like a cheap intercom with the wrong era logo on the wrong era cloth.
(oh shit did I just out myself as a Fender nerd?)

http://www.guitarworld.com/gear-news/fender-announces-supreme-white-strat/31582

http://www.guitarworld.com/sites/default/files/public/2017/08/supreme-instory.jpg

do not want

what the hell is that fretboard made from

ewww

I don't know, I kind of dig it other than the label. Reminds me of Prince's cloud:

https://www.premierguitar.com/ext/resources/images/content/2016_06/FEAT/Cloud-Guitar/PRINCE--MARCH-18-1985-PHOTO--DEBRA-TREBITZ--FRANK-WHITE-PHOTO-AGENCY--NASSAU-VETERANS-MEMORIAL-COLISEUM-UNIONDALE-NEW-YORK_WEB.jpg

Uhhhhh, "white" and "supreme" together?

https://i.imgflip.com/18ikl3.jpg

hitlercaster

at taco bell, supreme = sour cream. so this suits the taco bell of guitar luthiers.