Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Hand built American guitar for $1000?

Posted by Jon in • Cool Guitars

Gadow American Deluxe
We all know that in order to produce cheap instruments many guitar companies choose to outsource part or all of the construction of their instruments to Asian powerhouses who happily churn out guitars cheaply and efficiently albeit at the cost of quality but that is the price you have to pay for mass consumption. Meanwhile custom guitar shops happily charge upwards of $3-4000 for their standard instrument model due to the high level of build quality and materials used. However Gadow guitars are trying to change the trend of only offering high end models by introducing the Gadow Guitars American Series, hand built guitars from North Carolina for under a grand, pay an extra $300 and you could be the lucky owner of the American Deluxe pictured above. So what do you get for your money? Well with the standard model you get a Poplar body, Maple neck, Indian Rosewood fingerboard, dual action truss rod, Tone Pros bridge, Sperzel Tuners and a pair of GFS ‘59 pickups or P90’s. But add a few hundred dollars onto your budget and you get a Mahogany body with a Figured Maple top and Gadow custom wound pickups, gadow hand wound pickups which has more information about their pickups. Personally I think it is worth the extra for the Maple top and sunburst finish.

Of course if you are looking for something a little bit special and you have cash to burn you can always check out their Custom Set Neck with its Mother of pearl crown inlays and Ebony veneer applied to the front of headstock and Carbon fiber reinforced African mahogany set neck which will set you back $3500.

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on 08/20 at 05:20 PM

A very nice guitar, at a very nice price. But I have problems with the term ‘hand built’. Almost no fretted musical instrument is completly machine built. And almost no individual luthier goes completly without power tools (machines, like a planer, a bandsaw or a drill). Shure, there is a quality difference between a one-(wo-)man built guitar, one that’s from a workshop with five or fifteen luthiers and a factory say with more than 50 employees. But there is no way of saying one is more hand built than the other.

Ben on 08/21 at 09:03 AM

Hey.
Nice blog.
Would you like to exchange links?
I have a blog (http://srv1.blogspot.com/) and a website (http://guitars.110mb.com/)
Tnx
Ben.G.

Jon on 08/21 at 04:55 PM

Hi Karl, yes I see what you are saying. Maybe we need to use new terminology in the guitar industry because really all we want to know is whether the company built the guitar in-house regardless of their technology or whether it was outsourced to Asia which they have less control over the final quality?

fairings on 08/27 at 12:46 AM

The price is a little stiff, but if it is worth the buy and you have the money, then go for it.

teak furniture on 09/21 at 08:32 PM

Nice guitar. Its design is very cool.

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