fronobulax
Bassist, GAD and the Hot Mess Mods
- Joined
- May 3, 2007
- Messages
- 25,076
- Reaction score
- 9,205
- Location
- Central Virginia, USA
- Guild Total
- 5
What is also strange is we're told there's a scarcity of woods, yet on $160 Yahama you can now get a spruce top and a rosewood board and dovetail joint. Meanwhile, on many 1k+ US guitars you now get a Richlite board (not all of course, but many) and now bolt on necks. To me this brings into question the wood scarcity debate. It seems this is more about economics: inflation and labor. In the US there is high inflation and high living standards, so to combat that the guitar companies are using Richlite and M/T joints, etc. Then they tell us wood is scares. In China, labor is dirt cheap, and while inflation is high, it's mostly in bubble assets that don't hit the common man. So there, we see improvements to cheap guitars. The Yahama 700 series had laminate tops. The 800 series now has spruce top and scalloped bracing. All this says to me the big US companies want to sell us on this idea of scarcity and that "guitar players need to adapt to new materials" because it allows them to use these cheaper materials to maintain profits without raising costs too much. Is that conspiracy thinking? I don't know. They have Bob Taylor out there doing promos saying we all need to accept new materials, Martin doing the same, and meanwhile Yahama is actually giving customers more wood for less money.
My girlfriend has a composite Martin, btw, and it actually has a Richlite board. It plays well, I can't deny that. It's a bit boxy sounding but warm and the fretboard is nice. I didn't know they were expected to break down. I'll have to tell her that. I will tell you this: it smells awful. It's only a few weeks old, but I can smell the chemicals (I assume it's from pressing the wood/glues they used). I actually had to put it down and stop practicing last week because I was feeling ill from the scent. If that's what Martin and Bob Taylor expect guitar players to accept, I'll just go all Bob Dylan blasphemy and go pure electric.
English is a funny language. If I say something is "scarce" I just mean that I can't get as much as I want or need. But I am not trying to say whether the quantity I need does not exist, or that I cannot afford the quantity I need, or that the supply chain cannot deliver what I need. When I listen to Bob Taylor's comments about wood and hear what the folks in New Hartford said, the message is I take away is not that wood is scarce but that the supply of the quality of wood desired is dwindling and thus rising in price. In some cases the supply is dwindling because the "correct" trees were not planted 20 years ago and anything planted today won't be good enough for guitars for 30 years. In some cases the wood is there but using it would price the resulting instrument to non-competitive levels.
I have not looked at Yamaha guitars - I forget they make anything besides motorcycles - but it would not surprise me if the wood was lower in quality than what would be used in an over $1000 MSRP Made In USA guitar. When they talked about wood in New Hartford they mentioned about how grading standards were not universal and every batch of AAA grade wood that came in was still inspected by Guild and not everything in the batch was accepted. Since the rejected by Guild wood was almost certainly sold to someone else there were jokes about buying guitars made from wood rejected by Guild and who would want to do that? Somebody's using the AA and A grades but not for high end instruments.
So while I am well aware of the tendency of companies and corporations to find a way to slant anything so that it sounds like they are doing something good or necessary when the only reason is profit, in this case I am inclined to accept the general idea that if "we" don't address the wood supply now, in 50 years there won't be enough to make guitars.
It is true that labor costs are cheaper in China, but about 5 years ago one of the people at Guild who was responsible for overseeing the MIC production noted that labor costs in China were rising and it was quite possible that it would be economically feasible to bring production back to the US. I think we need another five years before we know his prediction was wrong.