Official Luthiers Forum!

The urge to write about politics is overwhelming...I think I need a hug. Not from any of you furry bearded luthiers though. I was hoping more along the lines of Scarlett Johansson.

Right, it's the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules... Why pay 20-30$/hour when you can get the same work done at 1-2$/hour?

Cheap labor is what makes the world go round and what helps build empires. From the pyramids to the Nike factories of today, it's nothing new, really.

But Martin is right, eventually the proles wake up and start demanding more for their efforts...

_________________
I'd like to be able to prove, just for once, that money wouldn't make me happy...

Not to argue Martin, but I`ve played a couple of these knock offs at the local music store.The guys there were pretty keen on them until they heard a guitar that I had made.I`m not braggin ,just saying there is no substitute for quality and 30 years of woodworking experience .
James W B

_________________
James W Bolan
Nashville Tennessee

I know one other guy on this forum who shares the same desire as you....and there's probably dozens more!

_________________
"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

Yep China is much like a post WWII Japan only times 100........

Rich bro I remember well when Japan started shipping little, fuel efficient cars to the US and one of the beefs, perceived or otherwise, was that you would not be able to get parts...... No one told us that they wouldn't break down very often so parts were not that important anyway........

Mike thanks for posting this. Don I agree with you completely however I see something else here.

Companies like Fender, Gibson, and even Martin have realized that nothing promotes the sales of high end guitars better then a glut of decent quality, good-enough-to-learn-on inexpensive guitars. We all had to learn on some lesser quality guitar right?

Besides - what are ya going to do......

Interesting video - the place was clean, well lit and besides reminding me of a Hemingway short it looked pretty productive to me. Very interesting.

Let's get this thread back under control though... ok?

_________________
Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Exactly, Brock...back to the subject at hand... These factories exist because the demand is there. I'll bet since the advent of games like 'Guitar Hero' and 'Rock Band', guitars are becoming even more popular than before, because, you have to admit, playing guitar has always been cool...

These make good starter guitars for sure, if they hold their tune, which is usually the problem with a sub 100$ guitar. If the playability is fair and the tuners are half decent, then a beginner can get started without having to break the bank.

Let's see them for what they are, and not 'Taylor' or 'Martin' competitors...

Hesh has a good point about the lay out of the factory. I wonder what the RH is like???

_________________
I'd like to be able to prove, just for once, that money wouldn't make me happy...

Speaking of those cheap Walmart guitars, anybody ever found anything in Walmart that wasn't branded "Made in China"? I mean if we bought "Made in USA" only we wouldn't have anything to buy.

With labor at less than $.50/hour they can pump them out cheap. Question is, will they ever delve into the high end market enough to drown Martin, Taylor, etc? Right now they're making some pretty good guitars for real cheap and our people are buyin' em, buyin' em, buyin'em. Go to a bluegrass festival and see how many Blueridge, Johnson, Morgan Monroe and Stonebridge guitars are out there. Its a bunch.

Forgive me for saying so but if that were to happen it would be our fault mostly...me included.

_________________
"We might not be big but we sure are slow"

True statements about Japan and China. But I have to wonder if they could have had such successful rises to manufacturing powers (though Japan has since priced itself out of the world mfging market as will China) if it hadn't been for cheap oil to transport their goods across oceans to western markets.

Another point to ponder, why has Japan never gotten into passenger jet design and mfgin? Lack of a military weaponry?

I am amazed by my daughter's $400 Chinese violin. A mid-range violin dealer who recommended it ($10-20k) here in town says mainland Chinese are turning up in German violin building schools. I wonder if we'll see them at Ervin's, Charles Fox's, or other guitarbuilding schools?

Pat

P.S. None of the above was meant to have any political implications.

_________________
formerly known around here as burbank
_________________

http://www.patfosterguitars.com

Marx said will all end in tears!

Karl or Groucho?

_________________
Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

My heroes - Larry, Curly, and Moe said "pick two"........

I agree, the way to look at it for me is to think about all those extra people that can now afford to buy a cheapo guitar and have a crack at learning to play....a few years down the line maybe they'll buy a more expensive import, and then a US made or two, then eventually start to collect hand built.

As a Brit, what happened to Rolls Royce sums it up. Sit still and you will be overtaken and a competitor will then buy you out once you can't compete....which is a gyp!

It could have happened to Fender and Gibson, but they got their act together, took the initiative and it's looking better for the future now, or so it seems from here.

_________________
www.theguitarrepairworkshop.com

The Chinese can be so varied and extreme in quality...

Some of those $40 guitars are just so badly made, they make you weep..

Some of their products are so awful in quality, they become pieces of conceptual art, with no functional purpose whatsoever.

I have in my hand, an excellent quality digital recorder priced around $200. Astounding quality. Look at the inscription on the back ...made in China??

Is it something to do with the controlling interests of the companies that outsource manufacturing?

Ironically, I played a chinese guitar today and haven't been able to stop talking about it. On monday after the drive home and some more time to think about it, I might call the store to pull the trigger.

It was an Eastman. Schaller tuners, stiff neck (I tuned the E down to C and didn't have to touch anything else), ivroid bindings, ebony headstock overlay and fretboard, solid mahogany back/sides, and a mildly figured carved maple top. It played effortlessly and had a sound to die for.

I was thrilled when I found out the price was a little less than half of one of the Gibson satin finish 335's that always play hard and out of tune when I grab them in the local store.

I'm happy that there are even less expensive foreign guitars: when I was thirteen and had a bit of inheritance, my mom gave me a $300 budget. I'd been asking for a guitar since I was 4, so she thought it was only fair to give it a chance.

My friend Ashley recently bought her own $200 guitar. It's really not that bad.

Sam my friend China is like the world's biggest contract manufacturer. They will in essence produce anything that other companies want produced and presumably, since they are successful, do it for less and with an acceptable level of quality. When I say "acceptable" this is from the view point of the "brand" that contracts a Chinese company to manufacture for them.

In 2000 and 2001 American companies raced to purchase Chinese factories because the dollar was still strong and the Chinese factories represented real value in terms of their price to acquire and their potential to produce goods for less.

So depending on the brand and their good name the quality of products that China is capable of producing is in my view the entire gambit including some of the worst junk available to some of the finest made goods one would ever want. It all has to do with what the customer, the company contracting the contract manufacturing, specs out AND the quality control and acceptance criteria and monitoring that they put in place.

I think that most people would be very surprised to learn just how much of what is in their homes already came from China and had been produced there for years.

Just like any new industrial power China is going through growing pains and gets some negative press for things like lead paint in children toys. But I can think of examples of unsafe products that have been produced domestically as well.

Then there are the Chinese companies that are offering their own products and competing openly for market share. This is where we get into some of the Chinese guitars and I agree with the others that some of these are very good products indeed.

Chinese Internet companies such as BIDU have been top producers in terms of producing a return for investors even in today's economy.

Several years ago it was in the news that one of the top 3 banks in China had some of the top executives embezzle funds. This at a time when China was growing in leaps and bounds and needed to earn the trust of the global financial markets. Two weeks later I heard on the news that the offending executives were executed....... Although I am not going to comment on the method that China used to deal with the problem I do want to point out that they did indeed deal with the problem very quickly and with a finality that we don't see here in the US.

Remember Enron.........? Over 100,000 people lost nearly everything that they had to the greed of a few executives who broke laws at will and pocketed the life savings of others...... I can't help but wonder what it would have looked like if Enron had happened in China......

Lastly even China's national anthem, The March of The Volunteers, illustrates very clearly that culturally China does not place the same level of value on the individual as other nations do. Chinese culture has for all of time produced team players or people who are contributors to a collective good. Where other nations have encouraged musicians, artists, scientists, craftspeople to march to a different drummer if they wish to do so.

China may have the edge today when it comes to manufacturing but I don't think that China is at a par with western nations when it comes to individual creativity and imagination. I am not speaking of the potential of the Chinese people here but moreover the government imposed climate in China. With this said I believe that those who produce high-end, hand-made guitars may actually find China to be a new market someday and not a competitor for what we do. I doubt that this will happen soon either but I can see it in several decades which is within the life time of some of our members here.

Brilliant post, Hesh, thanks!

It seems impossible that Far Eastern culture will ever "adapt" to become more individualistic.

Anybody see the opening Olympics Ceremony? Talk about creativity! The 2008 Drummers especially as well as the 15,000 other performers put on a machine-like performance that was designed by a creative genius IMO! For me, this was one of the most powerful live performances I ever witnessed!

The Chinese are certainly showcasing a very strong and formidable culture and economic powerhouse! Interesting times in which we live indeed.

_________________
JJ
Napa, CA
http://www.DonohueGuitars.com

Missed the opening ceremony, but the pics were stunning.
Indeed, a declaration of power....

Don't think London 2012 is going to match up, somehow...

Before starting to build guitars, I was building cabinets as a sideline. I have been a software architect all my life. I have seen many industries fall to the replication model that Japan, India, and China have as their cultural background. We have become a nation of "creators", and they, nations of "Implementors". The problem here is that it puts a tremendous strain on our middle class, the folks that go to work everyday as our implementors. My folks are trying to sell a beautiful house in Michigan - been on the market for months without a sniff. But I digress...

As for the quality issue, you cannot discount the ability of other nations to learn....

It used to be that we couldn't get good quality by off-shoring software development...they studied that problem and fixed it.

Even wonder by Bob's Discount Furniture in New England can sell so cheap? He is importing directly from China himself. And our furniture and cabinet manufacturers and doing the same, building over there and putting their brand on it over here. they ectually sent people over ther to run the factories and teach the labor force. Same as in Mexico

And now our Big 3 Auto Makers are all facing backruptcy. Japan has obviously fixed their problem...

So, here's how I tie it all back to the OLF...I build custom, one of a kind guitars. Occasionally I will do a one off piece of furniture. (can't build cars yet, but don't want to either!). I never wanted to be a factory. I do good work, on a custom basis, that will always be in demand should I start selling them. I can learn techniques from factories, ours or theirs, to make my production more efficient, and hence put more dollars in my pocket, but in the long run, you won't ever see 50 guitars lined up in my shop waiting for a neck fit. My job is to find 10 people every year in the world that want what I do.

_________________
Mitch

It was by far the best opening ceremonies I've ever seen. It was really brilliant, and will probably never be topped.
I sure hope they manage to show some of the sailing competition, being that I work I do accounting work for the US Sailing Team as well as the US Disabled Sailing Team. We're pretty excited about our chances of getting a medal or two.

_________________
"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

That definitely stood out to me. I'll have to send them a thank you

On another note, the Turkish flag solute ends, My existence is a gift to my country's existence.

I think Hesh's post, for the most part, expresses most of the feelings I have on Chinese manufacturing. The main one is that they're capable of producing the whole gamut including products in a price range below what anyone in the West can.

I spoke recently to a man with a lot of world experience, as well as being a well-respected professor with a Ph.D. in economics, who had spent a couple weeks in China. He said there were two very notable things about China: work ethic and construction. In Shanghai he counted hundreds of buildings going up (he counted the giant cranes, actually) between the airport and his hotel, all very large. The other thing he noticed was that the Chinese work harder, much much much harder, than we do. Nearly everyone works 12+ hours a day and the idea of days off is quite foreign to them. When the average person is working over twice the hours every week as someone here, with no complaints or slacking off (different cultural perspective of work), it's easy to see a discrepancy in competitiveness. The Chinese want to 'win' globally, and the whole country's willing to break their backs to do it...and it looks like they will.

Comparing China and India with production to Japan is a false comparison, I think. The Japanese have much higher wages than Western workers. Where China and India are competing based on harder work and lower wages, Japan is competing based on superior process design. The American auto industry isn't losing to Japan because the Japanese are working for nothing, they're losing because the Japanese are making a much better product. The tolerances on -every- Toyota automobile are tighter than those of nearly all aircraft manufactured in the Western world, and it's a result of better process design (lean manufacturing, the current 'ideal' of manufacturing, is a derivative of the Toyota Production System). Conversely, Cadillac was still making stuff fit with a hammer 10-15 years ago.

_________________
Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

Ah, Veneman's, where I bought my first...

Not to digress too badly, but has anyone compared an Eastman archtop to an Eastwood? I've heard great things about Eastman from a pro player. All their guitars over $500 are made in Korea. Below $500, in China.

just saw this and its funny you ask but here in india within a few months theyre launching this car which should cost about 2500$ on road.LOL

check it out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano

considering though that a major portion of the population of the country which is really large will now be able to afford cars couldnt be so good for the trees wed need to build guitars . was just thinking of a way to connect it to guitars so its not completely off topic couldnt help myself.

Peace