Re another guitar post earlier. Apparently you can order guitars custom made from factories in China, with your own specs and logos. Here is a guy who does that, unboxing a PRS style guitar. Paul Reed Smith guitars are super pricey axes. This one cost the guy $340 shipped in a hard-case. A lot of moral ambiguity here. Plenty to go around. Is it wrong to replicate a Paul Reed Smith guitar if you change the logo? PRS has been charging a big-ass premium for their elite branding for decades. Is THAT somewhat wrong? Is it wrong to pay so little to the workers who do this stunning work? Or more wrong to deny them the ability to learn these skills and make at least some money? I think that if you were to design a guitar as beautiful as this one. And have it manufactured with good attention to quality control, you could get your price per unit down to a couple hundred a piece shipped. And then sell them for three times that if it really was a good design, and you had distribution. Is that any different from any other type of manufactured product? Would you be doing well by doing good? Or not? Do we - as musicians - have a special obligation to make guitars here in the states? Or is it somehow better to locate jobs where the people are much poorer than we are? And how far clear of another guys design do we have to steer? How far really, is Paul Reed Smiths design from Les Pauls original work with the design crew at Gibson? Guitar makers have been imitating each other for centuries, and violin makers before that. So, I guess its wide open. Still when you see a beautiful guitar like this one (in another video, he showed progress pics proving that real woods are used throughout), and you know what he paid for it. When you know it was an amount of money that three couples might well spend on a dinner and wine at a good restaurant, it really drives home just how relative worth is. If somebody gave you ten thousand dollars, and told you to spend it on musical instruments - plural or singular - of your own choosing, to keep or share, what would you do? Would you buy that pre-war Martin that you lust after? That 57 L.P. Gold-Top you wanted so bad as a kid? The Strat tricked out just like Jeff Becks? Or would you buy a whole orchestras worth of starter instruments for the school you pass by in that sketchy part of town? Or outfit a rock band with cheap but playable knock-offs in the Juvenile hall where you once went to visit a relative? The questions surrounding money, acquisitiveness, and the morality of market forces are complicated enough. When it involves the art that we love, the whole thing becomes maddeningly conflicted. That applies not just to the product of our minds and hearts, but to the tools we use as well. I wonder what some of my friends might think about some of these questions. People like Garret Swayne, Duane Thorin, Lorin Hart, Tom Kell, Greg Krueger, John Zipperer, John-Michael Kaye, Ali Handal, Jimi Yamagishi, Paul Lacques, Mark Humphreys, Scott Docherty, Jime Van Booven, and too many others to list. youtu.be/o7Q-_svz1tI
Posted on: Mon, 19 May 2014 04:27:28 +0000