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Comment by the__alchemist | Hacker News Reader

I think this captures the most important points.

I was just thinking about this: Would it kill guitar makers to stop copying the Strat and [P|J] bass? It is wild that the earliest guitar designs are still ubiquitous / the most popular types. For anyone not familiar: The matter is not about iterating on these original designs; there's lots of that too, including by the same companies! It's about instruments that are effectively clones, and look (at a glance) identical other than the name on the headstock. Sometimes they are fancy ones built to a higher quality than the original, but superficially look like clones.

It is also interesting that MusicMan (Another Fender company!) has gone differently; still some of the most recognizable designs, but they have been selling officially licensed versions instead to capture the lower end. (SUB, OLP, Sterling etc), and don't have the copycats of the Fender models.

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Maybe someone new to music and guitar would mistake them for the real thing, but these copies have different hand styles and they have neither the Stratocaster nor the fender logo. This is a non-issue.

The actual problem lies within fender itself. Not only it's aggressively protecting a old design, fender itself is guilty of being misleading when it splits its product line into multiple brands that's often confusing for the consumer: fender squire, squire by fender, the regular one, fender custom shop, American vintage etc... which is only discernible by the price.

The problem is some PE has read up on the FujiGen Gakki guitars of the 70s and thought they could strike rich with a test case in a soft German court - and they were right.

I just finished restoring the Univox Coily that was sitting in my parents' basement for the past 25 years. Every time I step into the room and see it I do a double take because it looks so cool. (It sounds pretty great, too, especially through my Kay 703, aka the widowmaker.)

it's yet to be proven that they are right, the only thing they won in the german court is a default ruling because they picked a defendant who they knew wasn't going to show up so they could get a default ruling. The actual merits of the case have yet to be tried.

In terms of ergonomics, resonance and so on, there's not many terribly optimal solidbody electronic guitar shapes that deviate from the Les Paul/Strat/Tele trinity. Explorers, Flying Vs and the like are basically genre-oddities for aesthetics.

Guitars are not about aesthetics, otherwise Fender wouldn't have marques like Squier or ranges like Highway One to differentiate their low-quality tiers.

> Guitars are not about aesthetics

My wife used to work at Acoustic Guitar magazine. She said the most common sales line to sell a guitar at Guitar Center was "it looks good on you". The sound of guitars might not be aesthetics, but in regards to sales, it most certainly is. Everyone plays the same guitars because they grew up seeing their idols play those guitars.

Yeah, I'd say guitars are heavily based on aesthetics, but not entirely. One of the reasons why I switched from a Les Paul, which was the guitar shape I loved the most before I started playing, to a Stratocaster was that the Stratocaster was just that much more comfortable. The LP body is basically just a block of wood with a cutout for your hand in comparison to the contoured body of the Stratocaster. If I had to buy an LP-style guitar again, I'd want at least a belly cut on it.

Look into a "Recording" model Les Paul (or the newer "Iridium" model if you don't care about the low-impedance electronics) - they have exactly that. The main complaint is usually the weight though - of the two I have one is 11lbs and one is 15lbs (!!!).

If guitars were about ergonomics, technology, and sound they would be copying strandbergs!

These vintage designs are all about nostalgia and looks.

Anyway Bo Diddley demonstrated the most optimal body shape for holding electronics. :)

>Anyway Bo Diddley demonstrated the most optimal body shape for holding electronics. :)

This argument wins, fair and square

Guitars are very much about aesthetics, which is why they're so often strategically placed in the background on Zoom calls.

This is really not true with electric, solid-body guitars. The materials play some role, but the down-stream amplification and processing is where the biggest differences occur, combined with the guitar's electronics. Body shape has very little to do with it. Fender basically creates the same-looking guitar at many price points specifically to capitalize on letting everyone buy a "stratocaster". The quality difference is the combined materials, craftsmanship, hardware and electronics.

Ergonomics, yes, sure.

For the sound though, a block of any material strong enough to resist the string tension will be just fine.

Well there's also truss rods for when the material isn't strong enough to resist the string tension!

Because two things look the same, even identical, does not mean one copied the other. These are useful, practical, objects. A honda and a toyota me be virtually identical (same size, weight, door, number of wheels etc) but nobody would call them copies. And if they did, they are both copies of an ancient, out-of-copyright, merc rather than each other.

I am with you. I believe this is a matter of degree vs kind. Can you see how there are truly many instruments which deliberately mimic details of the Fender designs, and not the broad solid-body guitar design principles? I brought this up in the earlier post: I think the difference is most clear when looking at companies that have both their own designs, and Fender-style designs. Cosmetic and arbitrary features are mimicked, like pick guard design, precise pickup style and position, control layout etc.

When I first read this, I thought Fender was after anything S-shaped, like the superstrats that makes Ibanez. Then I went to some of the makers, like LSL, and they are making not just strato-shaped guitars but almost exact copies including the same style brigde-vibrato (when everyone is building with Evertune or Floyd), the same single coil pickups, the same knobs, the same cable socket in the front, same pickguard, same dot fret markers, same neck insertion (when everybody is using better methods for top models). They paint the guitars mimicking Fender colour schemes and even painted as aged Fenders.

Solar Guitars has a category called "S", but despite having the general shape of a Strato, the similarities end there. And they are not being threatened.

This is not "all cars have 4 wheels". This is "lets make an exact copy of a Ferrari painted in Ferrari red, that even seasoned car enthusiast would have a hard time to tell appart from a Ferrari". That said, trademarking a guitar shape that they forgot to trademark a century ago is a bad move.

I doubt they could trademark this. Just like Lego, you cannot trademark a functional thing. This is copyright.

> It is also interesting that MusicMan (Another Fender company!) has gone differently; still some of the most recognizable designs, but they have been selling officially licensed versions instead to capture the lower end. (SUB, OLP, Sterling etc), and don't have the copycats of the Fender models.

That's basically what Fender does with Squier. Arguably they invented that move back in the 80s.

I think it's more of a case of the whole market going stale. The biggest driver of guitar sales, rock music, is still relevant but not the primary driver of culture that it once was. You can only increase the playability of a guitar so much. In a lot of ways, it's a commodity now, and the owners of Fender - some investment firm - are trying to make good on their bet by either ignoring that fact or trying to make them not a commodity again.

Yeah. Fender is even manufacturing Fender-branded guitars in Indonesia, and IIRC for a while they even had a few China-made models. Plus Mexico, Korea and Japanese models have been here forever.

The Modern Player Marauder was one of the few Chinese made, Fender branded guitars.

I have one and outside of the frets, which wore out, and lower quality fake bone nut it was higher quality than the Mexican ones, when that plant was having QC issues.

Funny enough Fender got in trouble with the Marauder name which is owned by Gibson.

> they have been selling officially licensed versions instead to capture the lower end

That's a huge difference though. Copycats are not licensed versions. Licensing usually involves fees but also an agreement of what can and cannot be done. Copycats do none of that and just do what they want.

Fender does seem late to the party with this and it really does feel like not offering a license instead of trying to kill off the copy cats after taking no action for such a long time is just patent troll level nonsense.

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