Why Gibson prices are so high?

[Lordathestrings]

I was idly surfing about, when I dropped in at Ampage (http://ampage.org/) and noticed a posting on the Guitar Forum (http://www.firebottle.com/fireforum/fireBB.cgi?enter=go) Related Sites, comparing old equipment prices (http://www.benboom.com/ampprices.htm) to new gear, corrected for inflation over the years. Most stuff now is actually much cheaper. With one famous exception (http://www.xprt.net/~benboom/gibson.htm).

That led me to some stuff revealing what kind of 'leader' (http://www.tennessean.com/sii/00/05/28/gibson28.shtml) is currently in charge of Gibson. I'm apalled! I'm amazed! I'm aghast! I'm an upset guitar player! :eek:

Reading through this stuff is much less exciting than learning a new riff, but it may be a lot more important to our lives.

Comments?

[Edited by Lordathestrings on 05-04-2002 at 04:09 PM]

[^Chacron^]

"The first obligation of a company is to be profitable."

True, but there are better ways of making money than suing the hell out of rival companies. Unfair competition? My ass. He fires people and expects them to do what? Promise never to try and succeed here he couldn't?

The most satisfying way to better your opositon in retail is to make a better product and market it in a more successful way. From reading that article, my impression of that guy who's name i cant pronounce let alone type is that he's a failed businessman who has to retaliate in thoughtless ways because he's frustrated that he cant make enough money (when he already makes a lot more than the average person anyway.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not gonna stop buying Gibson's guitars and stuff because the guy at the top is a freak of the business world, but the people he was incharge of deserved better. Nevermind them being 'taken care of' when they were fired, the principle of it sucks. The 'pay them off and they wont feel so bad' wouldnt have worked on me if i had been in that position. I would have taken a stand.

lol.....i guess i'm more political than i thought :)

[yukonc5]

Kind of reminds me of Harley Davidson ( the AMF years)

[pstring]

REVOLT!, Down with the King!, I say everybody take a Gibson break, try a PRS, Baker or a Heritage, truth be told you can buy some "VINTAGE" Les Pauls cheaper than most of the new one's, when Gibson stop's making money, Mr. "J" will sell it off and hopefully a human being will buy it, or better yet an employee buyout of the company.

[James]

I'm glad to hear about all this Gibson stuff... I'm joining a GNR cover band and soon I'll probably need to get a Les Paul. I think I'll go Epiphone.

[Led Zeppelin]

Yeah! GnR are cool.

[Lordathestrings]

Originally posted by James
I'm glad to hear about all this Gibson stuff... I'm joining a GNR cover band and soon I'll probably need to get a Les Paul. I think I'll go Epiphone. Guess who owns Epiphone?

[James]

Yeah I know the own it, I was mainly referring to the other thread that discussed Gibson vs. Epiphone. Sounded like the general consensus was that you can get a quality epiphone for half the price of a Gibson one.

I'm not sold on the whole Les Paul thing at all. I mean, the full tone is nice, but I find the raised bridge to be a lot harder to play.

[Lordathestrings]

At first glance, this stuff (http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/technohick01.html) looks like a long-winded ode to a fancy synthesizer that might have been. Look closely at what is at stake, and who the players are.

Unless you never, ever, intend to use any computer-based composition or recording systems, or work with anyone who does, you have a very real intersest in these issues, and their outcome. As is shown in this summary (http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/summary.html), any company that deals with Gibson, is putting itself at risk. And buying Gibson guitars and other products adds money to that "technohick's" warchest.

I know that The Biz is populated, and run by, unsavoury individuals at a lot of levels. Everybody has their own choices to make about how they balance commerce, creativity, and ethos. I think I made my own choice on the day, back in 1986, that I bought a Yamaha SBG 1000 instead of a Gibson Les Paul Custom for twice the price.

[Bardsley]

OK, this is slightly scary. Although I own one, I've been a little suspicious of Fender, thinking that they were perhaps sacrificing quality for marketing, etc. But nothing like this. Of course, Gibson continue to make quality instruments, but they are SO expensive. I think that if I want an LP style guitar I'll have to look into Yamaha.

[Bardsley]

By the wy, what is happening with Opcode now? I use OMS, and it is still a mac standard (I don't know about PCs) for managing MIDI. Umm, I think I will need to do some research.

[Led Zeppelin]

Originally posted by James
Sounded like the general consensus was that you can get a quality epiphone for half the price of a Gibson one.

Try a quarter and you might b closer to the mark

[PonyOne]

Although Gibson owns Epi (and Kramer, Steinberger, Tobias, and some others), buying an Epi LP is better than buying a Gib LP, because it costs about $9 to make an Epi standard LP, and they sell for about $275, whereas it costs about $15 to make a Gibson standard LP and they sell for what, like $1500 now? That's one helluva markup...

I'm telling you, some of the newer Epiphone high-end guitars really sound almost identical to an LP, and if you just buy some better hardware and a pair of Seymour Duncan Antiquities, you've got yourself a $400 guitar that sounds one triple the cost.

Yamaha makes some good offerings, so does ESP; their top-of-the-line LP knockoff is better than the real thing, IMHO; also, the Aria LP's are very very good... the top ESP LP knockoff lists at $800, so you can get em for like $600 probably, and they're neck-through to boot.

Also you could always go to http://www.warmoth.com and just get osmething custom made for your tastes.

[James8831]

Given the electrical problems my Gibson has
:mad: I have to agree with Pony One and say my choices for twin bucker "LP" guitars are now in the Yamaha AES/X range,ESP EC300 and Gordon Smith..most guitar magazines rate the Heritage as different but as good as an LP..If I ever see one in the UK I'll let you know..

Some reasons prices are so high seem to be 1.) We'll put up with/expect it 2.) The increasing cost and use of hard drugs in Nashville. 3.) The cost of making those unusual custom shop guitars- beautiful,but how do they defer the cost?- and those wierd experiments they come up with once on the crack pipe "artistic visions",indeed..
4.)Those guitars they give away have to be accounted for you know :) 5.) not least The old profit margin.

I've played a Nashville Gibsons [90s] and Kalamazoo Gibsons [70s/80s] it seems that the price has gone up and the quality down.

Watch Korea the guitars are getting much better.

I'd guess that the "Lawsuit" guitar makers (Tokai,Ibanez,etc) really showed us what Gibson's attitude was to the whole deal.."Your guitar looks better..it probably is better and cheaper..we can't make a big profit competing against those" so Gibson takes out the lawsuit instead of shoring up their production
and QUALITY CONTROL issues and streamlining production to ensure that their product was the real deal and bought because of it's sound,playabilty and quality..rather than the name on the headstock.

I'll keep my Gibson because it's very playable and quite solid - I can just about put up with some QC probs at £400, but I believe that they also occur on £1400 guitars.

[James8831]

oops..

James ..if you do look at Epi Studios look carefully at the build quality I tried amps with one, pups were ok ish, tuners were junk,fretboard had dents in it and there was paint over the side dots and a couple of other places..(this was priced at around $500 equivalent!) I was more impressed by cheap Korean Deans.

[educatedfilm]

That stuff about gibson is pretty nasty stuff... but i must admit, it does seem like some nasty snap shots rather than the whole picture...
Personally i hate Les pauls, infact genral gibson guitars, cos they're so not welcoming to lefies, there was talk of a lefty lp studio comming out under 1g, but i've not seen anything else about this... secondly thier short scale lengths, which are about 58 to 59 cm, and i'm comfortable with 64 cm....
I dont like Ibanez'z sound... their tone never pleases me before the price tag insults me..
ESP is just stupid to lefties...
Fender is acceptable, their prices are acceptablish, but to be honest, there's nothing that I REALLY like... teles are nice, but i find them not too versatile..
Rickenbacker, where do i begin? I've given up on finding one in the first place, I'm acutally going to biuld my self one... but i've kinda gone for completly differnt hardware....
Some of the cheaper korain guitars arent actually that bad, I've got an Encore which i bought for £80... at the time i had no idea about anything guitar related, and i thought i was some crappy cheapo guitar.. I've got a little wiser, and realised, it's got some really silly mistakes, like the pick up selector is wired the wrong way round, the volume knobs read 0 at full volume, and 10 at silence (i've moved the nob it self, and it is on right), but i've also found it's got lovely natual tone (which some £600 ibanezs dont have)... so it's probably getting it's pick ups upgraded, and i'm not so ashamed of it as i used to be...

[PonyOne]

The reason the knobs read backwards is probably because left handed switches go th eoppostie direction, but the company didn't feel like making or ran out of the right knobs... but the switch issue is just a mistake.

I've seen some pretty nasty looking Epi's on the shelves as well as nice ones, but the nice ones are quite nice. That's why when you buy a guitar at a superstore or something of that nature you must play the ACTUAL guitar you're buying; otherwise, you may end up sadly surprised... they often will sell you the crap one in back.

And as far as the lefty issue goes... i wish guitar companies would quit being so discriminitory.

[educatedfilm]

yeah, the volume nob confused me for a long while... untill i realised that hardware on a lefty guitar should be a mirror image, so the volume nob should turn the opposite direction...
but lefty volume nobs are just plain non existant... kinda like lefty whammy bar ARMS... and alot of tremlo units are non exsistant...

[PonyOne]

tell me about it...

i'm all pissed because i can't find a lefty wilkinson trem for my uberguitar. i don't want a floyd rose because they're huge and obtrusive, and the vintage trems don't have the tuning stability of a locking trem, so the wilkinson would be perfect.

BUT...

[^Chacron^]

Okay, to slightly go of the subject this thread seems to b on now i see nobody' mentioned Jackson when discussing alternatives, and they are nice guitars. The one's i've played are in the DK series and they handle nicely....although after playing my les paul i felt the strings on the jackson were slightly wider apart but I got used to that after about half an hour. Plus I play metal which Jackson's were supposedly designed for....or so i was told, but they responded well when i put some blues through them.

[GeeScott]

I started thinking about buying a guitar in the mid-sixties and finally did in '98. A new Fender US Tele for $500 (list about $900). Remembered I could have bought one in the '60's for less than half that. Then I remembered that my take home pay in '69 was less than $100 per week. So it's all relative. In that case, mid to high end Gibson's and Fenders (discounted) don't seem too bad. Same thing with gasoline--today's $1.29 per gallon is probably a lot cheaper than the $.25 per gallon stuff 40 years ago.

[chris mood]

Gibson Guitars too expensive, who's to blame?

In the 80's ( I believe ) Gibson slashed there prices too compete with their competitors. Do you know what happened? When they cut their prices their sales dropped. Nobody wanted an $800 LesPaul, everybody wanted an $1500 lesPaul, even though they where identical people thought they must not have been the same quality cuase of the cheaper price tag. Gibson raised there prices and there sales went back up. Go figure.

[PonyOne]

Regardless, it's a ripoff. I want a lefty Gibson SG; that'd be sweet, they're nice guitars. But i don't want to pay $1500 for it, so I'll look elsewhere.

Jackson's are nice guitars; I don't play chords as much as I shred, so they are perfect for my style. I've flipped between getting and not getting one for awhile.

[Incidents Happen]

Im going to be buying a new guitar pretty soon, my old squire beginner one is not that good, what do you think i should get?

the tone i want is...

really clean
grateful dead-esque sort of

the neck i want...

doesnt really matter, as long as its not fatter than my squire's.

the body i want...

nothing heavy metal. im not into that. that leaves out ESP, i already checked that out, same with Jackson and Ibanez.

I could get a Fender American Strat, but im not sure if i wanna spend the money ( i have the money though). I could get an Epiphone Les Paul Custom Flametop, put some different pickups in....

your opinions, please.

[Raskolnikov]

Get what feels more comfortable.

Either guitar will do what you want; go with what feels best.

[FretBoardFiend]

I just bought one of the Korean PRS Santana models and dropped in a Duncan Pearly Gates in the bridge position and a 59 Classic in the neck position. This guitar SINGS! I also own a 1971 Les Paul Custom, and this cheap PRS knockoff sounds WAY better...

[^Chacron^]

Why rule out Jackon, Ibanez and ESP? Like I said in my last post on this thread, I liked playing blues on a Jackon. The Guitar world is full of cliches about who buys what kind of guitar......i do my best to ignore them when choosing gear.

Fender have always been a traditional kinda guitar and now look at people like Dave Murry who play metal on them!

Look at the range of sound Vai gets from an ibanez....okay so theres more to the sound than just the guitar but the guitars designed for that sort of playing and if its got the potential to be played like that then sky's the limit whatever style your into.