When I turned 40, I had 25 years of playing under my belt, had been working a good paying job for a decade, and decided to have a custom made guitar (hollowbody archtop) built for me. It was a long very expensive process and when it was over I had an incredible one-of-a kind instrument. But I don't play it....It's too expensive and rare to take out to jams or gigs. I can't leave it out on a stand for fear of my animals messing with it. And now it is worth a fraction of what I paid for it. Lesson learned.

My "go to" instrument for taking out and gigging is a Squier Jazzmaster. Even though my custom guitar costs close to 20 times what I paid for the jazzmaster, I can take this thing out in a gig bag and really don't care if it gets scratched or knocked around. It stays in tune, is easy to play, and sounds good. It did have a wiring problem at one point, so it hasn't been all sunshine, but for the most part it has performed well. As the article stated, these over-seas guitars have come a long way as far as quality goes.