Hacker News Reader

Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

But I think people who want to buy a strat, would prefer to buy a Fender strat and not a cheaper copy that has the same shape but might sound worse?

I personally do not like the price though.

View on HN

OTH people who want to buy strat would prefer to buy "strat with all inherited problems already fixed", be it PRS silver sky, or any boutique brand like LSL / Sandberg / Suhr / Tom Anderson.

I don't play electric guitar (fretted, anyway) at the moment, and I think John Mayer is very beige, but the Silver Sky SE is a really good guitar. They fixed a lot of stuff, and the lower cutaway is really nicely done.

> would prefer to buy a Fender strat

I don't think that's true at all. A strat ("strat style" or "s-style") is a shape and configuration. Many of the non-Fender strats are perfectly fine guitars (I have one) from major manufacturers like Ibanez, ESR, Jackson, and others. See forex: https://www.sweetwater.com/c589--S_style--Electric_Guitars

Those mostly do not look like copies; they have slightly different shape, the jack is located in a different place, Ibanez has shaper horns, the pickups are different, many do not have a pickguard. However, PRS Silver Sky looks somewhat close to the original to me, although it has a different headstock.

What I meant by "copy" is when it looks exactly the same.

The Silver Sky also has a scalloped lower cutaway.

Fender will have a difficult time claiming much in the way of the design of the pickups or pickguard, or the tremelo bridge, because some of that was in the original design patent anyway, and that is long expired.

Plus, for example, the two-pivot trem bridge design they use now that has been copied is not the same as in the patent; they actually copied this innovation themselves. And they use different tuners I think.

Much of this stuff has been litigated already in 2009. And again, a really important point is that back in 2009 they could not prove they had chain of title to even make any claim of copyright, even if such a claim were possible.

FMIC could not or would not demonstrate that they had ownership (and there is really good, very obvious evidence in the market that CBS could not prove that in 1969 either)

So if the Thomann case goes to court in Europe they will have to prove they do, and if it gets into a discovery process the court might hear that Fender have been advised that they definitely do not, and that would be devastating, because that would cast the letters they have been sending in a very different light.

I'm looking at buying one now and as far as I can tell Fender seems to make shoddy quality instruments these days. I see a lot of recommendations for PRS and others.

I wish there was some kind of audio comparison.

It would just end up a comparison of the pickups, because to a first approximation that's the only thing that matters.

Fender makes a whole series of Strats at different price points. The challenge is even at the high end Fender has inconsistent QA, so the 'knockoffs' are sometimes way better quality/consistency. See this video for more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU7RUpkXsV0

I think I watched that video but sadly there is no sound comparison to demonstrate the quality issues.

A lot of guitar quality signals will not show through easily in the sound. Like how easy or difficult it is to fret the strings, how well it stays in tune in a controlled environment over time, fit and finish work, etc. That kind of stuff makes the difference between a guitar that can be played, and a guitar which is fun to play.

Right.

Almost all of the variation between sufficiently similar electric guitars, barring the quality of the pickups and maybe some of the electronics, can be eliminated in the setup.

And a lot of the expensive luxury stuff people are convinced has an impact on the sound has approximately zero impact on the sound.

sound doesn't really tell you about quality issues, quality issue are more does it have any fret ends that cut into your fingers as you move up and down the neck, are any of the frets too high and causing buzzing, does it maintain its pitch or do you frequently need to re-tune it, is it well setup from the factory, are the strings too high, things like that.

Making two guitars sound similar, especially if the goal was that these guitars should sound similar, isn't all that hard. But also just because they're both the same style of guitar, doesn't mean the goal was for them to sound the same. Even just looking at Fender's line up, different strats have different pickups which are designed to sound different

Can't compete on quality, so compete by attempting to use the courts to bludgeon your competitors. A tale as old as capitalism

A lot of it is also the history associated with all the strat cats from the 1950s onwards and really good marketing by fender, you're buying a real strat because you want to be in that company (Buddy Holly to Gilmour etc). I recall only wanting a strat when i was in my wannabe-yngwie phase. nothing else would fit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com