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Post by Guitar on Jun 16, 2021 6:39:10 GMT -6
Someone I know owns a $400 Fender acoustic that almost 'pisses me off' because it's easily as good as my Martin D28. I've come to accept it though, and I do get to play it when I want to, so good for them.
There are freak guitars out there. I had a freak Masterbilt for a while that was stupidly good, but it ended up falling apart and I had to send it back to the factory. Sadly the defect might have made it sound good. Since the other 2 on the sales floor sounded the same, and worse than this one which was the best, and purchased.
Spending $2,500 on the D28 was the 'easy answer' for me and I'm no longer shopping. Got tired of panning for gold, ended up selling most of the cheap ones.
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Post by gwlee7 on Jun 16, 2021 6:57:50 GMT -6
Anybody notice how in every town there are this handful of what should be in theory awesome guitars that are in reality are total dogs that it seams everybody has owned at one time? There was a red USA Jazz Bass at guitar center here that "no one would buy," and it had been years. I almost felt bad for the thing, haha. I frequent Tone Shop Guitars here in Addison TX (Dallas) several times a month since I have moved to the area. They hate seeing a guitar have a “birthday”.
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Post by svart on Jun 16, 2021 7:16:46 GMT -6
I told the story here before..
A few years ago I was doing a lot of folk song stuff with artists and kept having folks show up with ratty acoustics. Sure your Gibson might be antique but two of your strings aren't intonated correctly and if you pluck too hard the string is suddenly a half step flat..
Anyway, I needed something that I could turn to in case someone showed up with a janky guitar.
My cousin, who's a great guitar player, came along as we perused every guitar store in the area. We probably played 100 guitars across 10 stores. I didn't want to spend 2K$ but if I found the right guitar, but 1K$ wasn't out of the question.
I generally stood back a few feet as my cousin played, so I could get a good picture of the tone a mic might get.
I wanted fairly generic playability, higher frets that don't buzz, fairly decent string height, and mostly I wanted it to lack the strange boominess that most "cheap" guitars tend to have.
In the end, it was either a used Alvarez that had a hole in the top or a mid-line Martin with darker strings.
So while we were travelling back to the store with the Alvarez, we decided to stop at GC of all places and check out their used section. They didn't have a lot of used guitars but they had a line of GC exclusive guitars, Mitchell.
The one they had displayed was a top line guitar with inlays and edging and everything. It actually played well and lacked the boomy bottom end. It was on closeout for 150$ too.
Best mid-level acoustic I've recorded. Articulate but not overly strident and I can get the mics right up on it without it getting flubby.
However, the one thing I noticed was that you could play 10 guitars of the same brand and the same model and they would be wildly different in tone. That's true for cheap and expensive guitars. I think the biggest takeaway I had was that you can find cheap guitars that sound good if you look around, and expensive guitars don't necessarily mean automatic success either. It pays to play a bunch and pick the one that works best for what you want rather than looking at brand name or pricetag.
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Post by mike on Jun 16, 2021 8:34:12 GMT -6
However, the one thing I noticed was that you could play 10 guitars of the same brand and the same model and they would be wildly different in tone.
I've noticed the same thing when buying mic's,... even when buying multiple mic's of the same model from the same lot, that they all sounded ballpark roughly the same but specifically noticeably different
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Post by Guitar on Jun 16, 2021 9:20:08 GMT -6
I've noticed that maybe 2 or 3 are very similar, and maybe 1 will be significantly different.
It's even the same with big muff pedals. I usually pick the one that's different.
mrholmes has said this about Oktava MK 012 mics too. Guess I got lucky with those.
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ericn
Temp
Balance Engineer
Posts: 14,810
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Post by ericn on Jun 29, 2021 12:36:09 GMT -6
The plywood Martins are great road guitars, the tone is decent and they stay in tune. Your also not as worried about the expensive vintage Martin. In the studio they do have the advantage of not taking quite as much time adjusting to the environment.
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