Hacker News Reader

Comment by HenryTheHorse | Hacker News Reader

I've owned cheap guitars and I have a "nice" Fender. I'd much rather play the Fender. But as any guitar player will tell you, you can put a cheap Strat knock-off in Jimi Hendrix's hands and it will still sound like Jimi playing his Strat.

Conversely, a Yehudi Menhuin or a Joshua Bell need a good instrument. At their level of playing, little things affect their performance.

View on HN

That's the crux I believe. A beginner player would not appreciate the difference between a $200 guitar and a $2000 guitar. Someone struggling to find the finger positions for a simple chord isn't going to notice the action, fret shape, fingerboard radius, tonewoods etc. Only a player who is trying to get that last 2% of tone out of the instrument will appreciate the subtleties.

I am guessing they didn't compare cheap student violins against the Stradivarius, otherwise I am sure any reasonably competent violinist could tell immediately.

Modern construction method, including CNC machines can certainly make instruments a lot better than they did 'back in the day'. Check out Youtube for videos of the first guitars made at the Fender factory - those workers were freehand cutting the body shapes on a jig saw. No consistency at all. As much as a '56 Strat or a '59 Les Paul is in demand today, I bet there were a lot of dogs among the ones made back then.

I am sure there are thousands of violin makers today who can make a violin as good as a Strad. However, I've heard rumours that Stradivarius made his from wood that was thousands of years old that was extracted from a glacier - perhaps that is the special 'magic' that no one else can replicate?!?

> As much as a '56 Strat or a '59 Les Paul is in demand today, I bet there were a lot of dogs among the ones made back then.

Most of them are awful - construction-wise. (But to some, that's the lure.) I would much rather own an electric guitar or a tube amp made in the last 15 years than one from 1974.

There's also the survivor bias. The garbage instruments where thrown away years ago and the ones that survived were the best.

As a counterpoint, when I was a young student learning the trumpet, my learning took a big jump forward when I switched to a professional-grade instrument.

Every small improvement in technique was matched by an immediate response from the instrument, giving me much better feedback on what to do right. I imagine the same is true when learning to race cars. You can learn a lot driving an Escort, but you'll learn a lot faster driving a Corvette.

Hmmmm. Yeah, probably with subtle differences. For example, you'd probably want a proper track-prepped car to learn on, because the feedback to your inputs is just, frankly, BETTER. You don't necessarily want a "faster" (eg, more powerful) car, because the power hides your corner speed mistakes. Hence the aphorism "it's better to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow". But overall, I think you're right, driving a tool that's better for the job probably makes you learn a lot faster.

> A beginner player would not appreciate the difference between a $200 guitar and a $2000 guitar. Someone struggling to find the finger positions for a simple chord isn't going to notice the action, fret shape, fingerboard radius, tonewoods etc.

This is a common thing to say, but it's untrue. A cheap and nasty instrument will have bad features that are noticeable even to beginners. Things like poor quality finishing, hardware that rattles, sharp edges on the edge of the fretboard where the frets haven't been smoothed off properly, etc, etc, and it's really uninspiring if your guitar isn't enjoyable to hold. Even more "advanced" things like having the right action or a comfortable neck radius are noticeable early on. Tuning heads are another big one, cheap tuning heads are awful (the difference between good and bad ones is like night and day), and if your guitar is constantly going out of tune due to that or something else, and if you're not completely tone deaf, you will notice and it will annoy you.

I do agree that a badly made guitar will certainly hamper a beginner from enjoying the experience, but I was more talking about a reasonably made 'cheap' guitar - production of Chinese and Indonesian guitars these days is remarkably good (and consistent).

One situation that highlights my argument is: I was talking to my guitar teacher the other day, who is a monster player. He had a well known maker build him a Les Paul style guitar, but when he received it, he had a hard time getting used to playing it - something seemed off. He sat down with the builder and went over the guitar with a fine tooth comb (literally - the used a set of calipers), and discovered that the 'B' string slot on the bridge was out of place about one string width. One millimetre out, and he could feel that something was wrong.

To an intermediate player like me, I probably would never have detected that - my playing style and speed is not at the level where that would even make a difference to me.

I'm a bit confused about your post. Hendrix doesn't need a good instrument but Menhuin or Bell does? Are you saying that Hendrix is not as relatively technically skilled with his instrument as a classical player? Or that there is a fundamental difference in the type of music that does not require a good instrument?

A cliche every guitar-player loves to spout is "tone is in the fingers, not gear". A good guitarist will sound 5x better playing on cheap gear than a mediocre player on expensive gear. That doesn't however mean a cheap guitar will let a great guitarist express all his ideas well. When Jimi went from playing back-up on all those R&B records to playing a new sound, his equipment changed too. So gear did matter.

Huh? He went from playing a Strat into Fender amps, to.... a Strat into Fender amps. The fuzz boxse and Marshall stacks didn't come until later.

Yes, I'm still confused as well. By the phrasing, it sounds like HenryTheHorse is saying Yehudi Menhuin and Joshua Bell are different than Jim Hendrix (Menhuin and Bell are better?), but that seems to go against the first sentences.

Hendrix's music is not even nearly as technical and perfectionist as classical music. The former was not a perfect instrumentalist, but his overall singing, composition and style made him the figure he is, whereas the latter is valued on a mostly technical basis.

Actually he got his first Strat only in 1966. But that doesn't mean much - he was playing Jaguars and Jazzmasters before, which weren't shoddy.

But to an electric guitar player, the amps and effects are as much part of the gear as the guitar itself. His "rock gear" really came together in 1966-67.

Similar with photographers. People who see a beautiful photo and say "Wow, that's amazing, you must have a fantastic camera!" - huh. "Do you see an amazing painting and say 'wow, you must have a fantastic brush'?".

I'd disagree. Exaggerated for effect, but take this clip from It Might Get Loud (where U2's Edge, Jimmy Page and Jack White get together to talk guitars), where Jack White talks specifically about making music with crappy instruments (in this scene a home-made 'guitar' with a Coke bottle, in another, a beat up player/upright piano):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ7DZ7HPXck

He also talks about the magic of "fighting" and "wrestling" the instrument into his control and what that means for the music.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com