Should You Buy an Expensive Electric Guitar?
I’ve been on Team Cheap Guitar for a long time.
I own a veritable mom-and-pop shop’s worth of $200-$500 guitars — enough that I’m not entirely sure of the exact count (it’s somewhere north of a dozen). In fact, to this day, I’ve never paid more than $600 for a single guitar, amp, or pedal.
And I can tell you with certainty that everything I own plays and sounds just fine.
Furthermore, in close to 30 years of playing, I’ve never had even a single person give me a hard time for playing an Epiphone instead of a Gibson or a Squier instead of a Fender.
(Side note: I do have a Fender — an acoustic guitar, their budget parlor model, which comes in at under $200 and is great to take camping. But I digress…)
The truth is, there are so many great affordable guitars now that there seems to be no reason to spend thousands of dollars on a top-of-the-line instrument.
But then last year, I bought an Epiphone SG that really amazed me. And I began thinking, how different would a Gibson SG be? The Epiphone is amazing — would a Gibson be better than amazing?
I also started to realize that there were realistic scenarios whereby I could, for the first time in my life, afford an American-made guitar if I so chose.
