In the UK we’ve had it lucky until now, with most shops waiting to sell on their old stocks of guitars. Back in 2007 you could buy an American Standard Stratocaster in a solid colour for about £730.00 on the street. Nowadays it’d be £975.00 and probably just over a grand if it was a sunburst on Ash body model. Im looking at big dealers here with the ability to pass discounts onto the consumer. I imagine if you get it from where Aunt May rented you a Cello when you were 15 it’d be considerably more.

Its an interesting question. Imagine if your a global player like Fender or Gibson, you’d be able to buy your woodstocks/hardware etc based on an economies of scale model and pass that on to the consumer. However there are 3 other factors to consider.

1: Currency Markets – The Euro is in crisis but still way up against the £GBP as anyone whos retired to continental Europe on a British Pension will tell you, back in 2005 it was 68 pence to 1 Euro, now at the time of writing its 87 pence, but it was as high as 94 pence in 2009. A British retirees income in the Eurozone has virtually halved in the last 4 years. The Dollar too has risen which means importing a guitar from the US has gone up. Don’t mention the Yen…. its almost doubled in value in the last six years which means the once cheap grey import (but still constructionally superior) Fender J-Craft guitars (built for the Japanese domestic market) have become pretty much as expensive as a new American instrument in recent years. Back in 2005, you could get a used quality vintage reissue of a 62 Strat for about £275, aside from a 3 piece body instead of 2, they were pretty much the same quality of instrument and after import customs duty and delivery still have change from £500. Nowadays the same guitar costs £560+ according to Ishibashi guitars on Ebay, so delivery, VAT & duty will take that baby to well over £850.00 now.

2: Rising Prices – Oil is the big bastard here, so the cost of shipping around the world has increased considerably sine 2007. I don’t have any figures, but anyone who feels stung at the Petrol pumps will know what I mean.

3: Timber Sourcing – Again nothing official, but it does appear that the world is running out of wood. Theres a documentary coming out this year called Music Wood about the preservation of a forest of Spruce and the ongoing debate about the world running out of wood and the coming ecological crisis for guitarists. Gibsons Henry Juszkiewicz has been making noises in the press saying we are 10 years away from the wood running out. Gibson were raided in late 2010 by the FBI over unfounded accusations over purchases of illegal timber. CF Martin have been experimenting with using popular Gunstock laminate Stratabond as an alternative material to Mahogany for making necks (its warp resistant and far stronger and denser than mahogany). If you buy a £1500 Martin Guitar nowadays you simply will not get a Mahogany neck. Martin have been at the forefront of using alternative materials on acoustic guitars for a while now. Its likely that one of the big two electric makers will follow soon.

However!

In the middle of all this there is a theory that prices are actually being rigged by the guitar companies, US retailer Guitar Centre & the National Association of Music Merchants, there have been a couple of lawsuits filed in the US with such charges already.

This is an interesting theory because certain guitars are….well…. underpriced right now. In particular the Fender owned Charvel brand. A Charvel So Cal is basically a hotrodded to fuck Fender Stratocaster built in Japan, has Dimarzio Pickups, monster 6505 Dunlop Frets, a basic Floyd trem on an Alder body with a compound radius neck (the same kinda neck as the one on a £1200 American Deluxe Strat or Tele because Fender have decided to offer that tech on all new American Deluxe guitars as of 2010) it sells for £612.00 on the street in the UK. This is amazing bacause it has the same spec, pickups and hardware as the £1000+ US made Charvel So Cal, it even comes in an SKB case as opposed to the American guitars gigbag, the only difference is the country of origin and as you know I prefer Yuko’s standards of workmanship and fit and finish to Hank & Earl’s anyday.

Given my earlier comments on the Yen, I do not understand how Fender UK can price them so low. The Japanese made 62 reissue Telecaster, is also another steal at around the £685.00 mark. Given that pre recession they sold for £599.00, there doesn’t seem to be much of an increase there. If you wanted to import a Fender J Craft Richie Kotzen Telecaster now you’d barely get change from £1600, yet that guitar was about £980 pre recession and thats if you can find one. Could it simply be that technicalities and currencies aside, that we are paying simply the price the market will bear?

Ibanez introduced the RG Premier range this year a series of Prestige like guitars built in Korea instead of Japan. The J-Craft Prestige guitars have risen sharply with many models coming in at the £ 2 grand mark. So how come Fender can build a Charvel in Japan and price it lower than a Mexican made Strat?

Its not all doom and gloom for all of us. As anyone whos read the popular get rich word of mouth book “Rich Dad Poor Dad” knows, what we are seeing behind the scenes in this recession is the transference of income from the lower middle classes to the wealthy. Guitarist Magazine are sponsoring a Fender Custom Shop event in Bath in October, it’ll be a £65 a ticket canapes and wine affair with a talk by some Fender bigwigs and a chance to play some Custom Shop guitars including the relic (specially pre beaten up for the investment banker) Fenders ( sorry I don’t buy into all this pre aged relic stuff) but with an average price tag of £2.5K, talk of fiddling while Rome burns I wonder if Tony Blair will attend or does he (like his holidays) get his guitars for free?

With the recession firmly biting in the United Kingdom. The used market for guitar equipment has taken quite a pounding. If you’ve had a spare grand lying around recently, you’ve had your pic of some sweet secondhand private sale deals.

As commodities and fuel prices have risen. The price of new guitars however has leapt up to a point where I cannot see how some dealers will be able to continue.

A good example of this is Fenders new Mexican made Roadworn player series priced with an RRP of around a grand new (although most big dealers sell em for just shy of £800), but when a mid range instrument is selling for nearly £1K, you know the worlds in trouble.

Meanwhile as redundancy and casualisation looms and people try to control their household budgets, a plethora of high dollar guitars are hitting the used market at very very reasonable prices. So the near grand you’d spank on a brand new Mexican…ahem… “relic”… Fender would buy you a lot more used guitar for your money… Im talking American Deluxe Stratocasters, Yamaha SG1000′s, Gibson Les Paul Classics, PRS Standard 24′s etc etc. If you spend another £150 or so then your talking PRS McCartys ( A boxfresh Mk2 McCarty Std went for £1100 on Ebay recently) and even the odd Les Paul Standard as well.

Its a buyers market for sure. However thats not good. Most of us will want to upgrade and make changes to our equipment from time to time. So the idea that everything we own is devalued considerably is not great, especially if you have a larger collection of instruments.

A good alternative however is the Swap Meet. Lots of musicians are now advertising their equipment with not only a price, but the line “Will exchange for XXXXXXXXXXX” sometimes advertisers are even asking ” Will exchange for WHY – What Have You” as a way of seeing how far their unwanted item will take them.

I recently tried out this process. When I went to see Rush recently at Birmingham NEC. My brother started telling me he wanted to offload his rarely played Gibson Les Paul Standard and buy a PRS McCarty, he was thinking of swapping guitars rather than selling one and buying the other.

As I had bought a very nice used PRS McCarty some 4 months ago, I guess I was number one for his first refusal. As much as I liked my PRS, I was missing a Les Paul since I sold my LP Classic 1960 in 2007. Id bought the McCarty on a whim thinking it was a bargain, and much as I liked it. I was missing owning something with more low end prescence and grunt.

The following week we spent a day at his house trying out both guitars and seeing how we felt. My brother has a dislike for neck binding which means his Gibson Les Paul Studio is played far more than his Standard.

From my point of view, I knew the complete History of his LP Standard, my brother had bought it from new in 2001 it was the best of 4 we had tried that week and I knew he had played it minimally compared to his main guitars (a hideous flip flop teal LP Studio and his 62 Jap Strat-another guitar I’d once owned), so condition wise it was much cleaner than my already gigged and slightly dinged PRS McCarty. However my brother had fallen in love with the PRS’ playability and construction. He wanted it, more so than I to be honest.

For me the decision was harder. I loved both guitars, while I thought perhaps the Gibson had the edge on tone for hard rock, the PRS was far more articulate on cleaner tones and the coil taps actually worked. Something dawned on me…

As Gibsons Quality Control has always, and will always be….patchy (Charles Sharr Murrays recent column in Guitarist mag about his mates Gibson J 200′s faulty pickup system and Gibsons incompetent aftercare seems to bear this out). I suspect it’ll take me a while to find another Les Paul this well made. Meanwhile as PRS have the consistency of build other makers would kill for. I know that at some point I could always buy another used McCarty and not spend decades looking for one that was put together properly.

So as both instruments were of similar value we just swapped guitars. We put in a gentlemans agreement of 28 days that if one of us wanted to cancel the deal, they could do so without question. But in the end 1 month on both of us are happy.

So far this experience has been a positive one and Im wondering if I’ll be looking to swap rather than sell stuff in the future. I would suggest sometimes these things can be difficult. Most of us have fallen in love with an instrument only to fall out of love sometime later. Plus theres always fakes and charlatans around every corner of both Ebay and the classified ads.

However if you stick to relatives or just your Muso mates or their mates, this is probably a foolproof way of getting new kit without all the stresses of dealing with haggling and accurate descriptions.

I’d reccomend it.

If your a British guitar player of a certain age. PRS guitars conjur up a rather negative association with a certain type of well heeled player. Mainly middle aged professional “baby boomers” men who cashed in on the rising equity in their homes in the early noughties and bought into the brand big style. While over in America younger players such as Dave Navarro, Wes Borland, Chad Kroger and Linkin Parks Brad Delson made PRS the most populated guitar brand on MTV and VH1 (and before you ask yes the big 3 guitar companies actually do market research into this sort of stuff). In the UK despite the arrival of the affordable SE (student Edition) imports, the image of the PRS player in the United Kingdom is the stereotypical weekend warrior, the doctor, the lawyer,the accountant, the dentist. The guy who turns up at a blues jam to sing songs of pain and hardship (without any irony whatsoever) in a BMW Z5 or an Audi S4 estate (well…the golf clubs have to fit in the back too).

Guitar shops loved the baby boomer, before the recent arrival of his replacement (in Denmark St anyway) of the privately educated Stage School musician in his architypal Indie Landfill band (usually on Warners via BIMM or the BRIT school). These people kept Denmark Street turning over in the early to mid noughties. I used to see them ogling over the latest Mesa Boogie multi mode Combo or reliced Fender 52 whateverwecancashin…. nextocaster. You could always spot them as they were the only people in the shop who were not a sales rep wearing a suit. Future Publishing even started its own magazine for these people the woefully titled “Guitar Officianado”.

But back in 2000 Guitarist magazine named the PRS McCarty the number 7 guitar in its ’10 Greatest Electric Guitars in the World’ cover story, considering it was launched only 6 years earlier, thats pretty high praise. The McCarty is in raw terms is PRS’ homage to Ted McCartys presidency of the Gibson guitar company from 1950-1966. The guitar is essentially a thicker bodied Custom 22 with a thinner headstock, vintage style machines, 1 piece stop tailpeice and simpler controls (one volume and tone with a pull coil tap).

The vintage Gibson vibe came over very well at its launch in the mid 90′s and at the time (pre Singlecut) was seen as the biggest challenger to the hegemony of the Les Paul and found favour with many American musicians of the time. There were later hollowbody and semi acoustic variants too.

But 16 years on I get the impression that since the mid 2000′s lawsuit over the PRS Singlecut and the recently launched Dave Grissom signature guitar(basically a McCarty with a tremelo and revised pickups and electronics) have perhaps overshadowed the original McCarty model itself. The McCarty has somewhat fallen by the wayside. The McCarty II launched in 2008 featured a strange active circuit and barely lasted a year. The new McCarty is now the McCarty 58 which is essentially the same guitar with revised neck shape, tuners, pickups and finish. But neck shapes & the usual high end guitar marketing guff aside, its essentially the same guitar it was in 1994.

I stumbled upon the idea of buying a PRS recently. I’d set my sights on a CE22 or CE24 as in terms of my playing style I think I gravitate to a bolt on necked instrument, however the basic moon inlay McCarty is appearing in the classifieds for around £1000-1200. Thats a lot of guitar for the cash. Also the baby boomers don’t usually gig much, so these instruments are usually very very very well maintained.

I had a look around a few and didn’t buy mine from a stockbroker in the end Im glad to say, but a female blues guitarist in Gloucestershire. Aside from 2 dings on the lower bout (she gigged quite a lot I think) the guitar was pretty clean. Fretware was minimal for a 9 year old instrument.

The wide fat neck carve is a joy, reminiscent of a 1950′s Les Paul neck. But the whole feel of this guitar is upmarket. Its been put together from high quality woods with love and care, even when its not plugged in it sounds inherently toneful. Plugged in, its a fat big clear sound, more articulated than a Les Paul. I dare say It’d cut through live a bit more in a 2 guitar band than a Gibson.

The biggest suprise is the coil tap, usually this means we get some extra tones that are weedy and unusable, but with the neck pickup tapped, it sounds almost strat like, warm, fat and tubey. Perhaps this is the best coil tap I’ve ever heard.

All in all this is lighter and more comfortable to play than a Les Paul. As a guitar its very expressive and a joy to play. I am dissapointed that PRS fit all guitars with 009-042 strings though. Having ‘Jeztoned’ up the guitar with a set up of slightly heavier strings (009-046) and a medium to high action. Everything sounds even better than before.

The only niggle I have with PRS is considering the thought gone into both the guitars design and manafacture. The PRS hardshell case is a crock of shit. Its too big, too heavy and way too narrow. When placed as an upright rectangle on the floor it just falls over as its simply too thin. This is a terrible oversight and something you’d never find on an instrument costing even a third of the price. Whats the point of all that fancy guitar if its housed so badly.

As grim as it is to say, once the recession bites proper,combined with the brands seeming unfashionability in the current UK music scene. I expect to see more US made PRS guitars at very affordable prices. These are THE guitars purchased in the early-mid noughties credit orgy, many on hire purchase or plastic. As unfortunate and horrible as it is for anyone to have to sell their gear in hard times (and believe me I’ve been there). Im pretty sure we will see a large amount of these up for sale at very reasonable prices in the coming month. Cast aside the Yuppie guitar tag and these instruments richley deserve their reputation for build quality, tone and playability. With that in mind as a secondhand purchase I cannot see how one could go wrong.

I will always have a warm place in my heart for the Gibson SG. In 2000 after a long break I made a conscious decision to play more guitar and perhaps join a band again. In 2001 I had relocated back to my home town in the Midlands and had heard some great demos by a friend. Musically it was like stoner rock, but with an uptempo fast rifftastic vibe Anphetamine rock anyone?…. or Sabbath meets Marylin Manson. My friend thought my rig at the time was pointless and wishy washy…..and he was right. The best phrase I can offer any guitarist looking to buy equipment and what he told me was “to just get stuff that does what it says on the tin”.

I bought a Marshall JCM2000 TSL60 & 4 x 12 , at that time non of my guitars suited the vibe we were going for, as my friend had let me use his Gibson SG Standard for recording more demos. I had grown to love it. A lightweight, simple guitar that could rock out hard. When funds allowed in 2001 I decided to buy one. As my local guitar shop was suffering from unrealistic pricing syndrome I decided to look further afield.

I’d never bought a guitar mail order before and with a Gibson I soon learnt the lesson that that Nashvilles finest were all prey to poor quality control. Hank and Earl were so absobed by the heritage at Gibson they kinda forgot to check for basic finish flaws, I found that my SG had subtle annoyances in fit and finish that you’d never find on even the cheapest chinese made Squier or indonesian (child soldier) made Yamaha Pacifica. The neck binding at the body end had cherry stain on it and the inlays were full of filler, the original spring on the ABR-1 was falling off, so I had to get my brother to mod it back to a workable shape.

In short this was not a great example of the breed.

BUT!!!!

I bonded with it, that guitar re-invigourated both myself and my playing. The Stoner band did 6 moths of rehearsals and nothing else, but my guitar playing self was re-energised. I found myself in another band and finally gigging again, the other band led to a better band and….a better me!

Along the way I had bought a Gibson Les Paul Classic and then in 2005 I bought my Fender Richie Kotzen Telecaster. That was a landmark guitar, able to both play strident rock riffs and delicate licks it pretty much became my main instrument. The fender bolt on twang was perfect for cutting through the guitar heavy Heroes of Switzerland mix, especially live.

In light of my allegance switch, I started to play the SG less and less and in 2006 I decided to offload some guitars to keep my bank manager happy. Along with 2 Yamaha SG’s The Gibbo went on Ebay.

After I sold it, I missed it almost immediately and in 2009 when funds allowed I bought another one. This time I hunted around the classifieds and bought a mint 2005 example (off a bassist who’d gotten pissed one night watching a Who live DVD and decided he wanted to be Pete Townsend, after an orgy with his credit card, he’d bought it strummed it at home and realised he wanted rid). I turned up with a wad of cash and he was happy to let me have it.

My new SG was an altogether tastier proposition in terms of both build quality and finish, it was a far better made example with less of a Scarlet finish and more of a proper Heritage Cherry colour. The body was far tidier, the newer SG’s have a Nashville Style bridge which is much more heavy duty and it played like a dream.

However….

I never really played it that much beyond the first 2 weeks, if I wanted to play guitar I still went to my Telecaster or if I wanted to widdle out, my floyd equipped Ibanez Roadstar did the job admirably. So the SG sits there in the case looking at me. Im tempted to sell it from time to time, but if Im honest I restrung it yesterday and it sounded and played great. But this morning I played my Charvel and this afternoon my Tele.

I think the problem is that Ive failed to bond with it, when I bought my original SG it was used in both rehearsals and recordings, both it and myself had a musical sense of purpose. That situation made us grow together. Ive no pressure to bond with my new SG, I realise now that I bought it out of a sense of nostalgia, it represents a time when I was finding my feet again as both a player and a person.