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Should You Buy an Expensive Electric Guitar?
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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.
But what about those great-playing-yet-easy-on-the-budget imports that I love and cherish? Wouldn’t I be wasting my money to buy one guitar worth four or five others that in all honestly played just fine? Or was I starting the transition to Team Expensive Guitar?
This got me thinking about the reasoning behind the choice to buy (or not buy) an expensive guitar. I’ve almost always stuck within a self-imposed $500-per-instrument limit, but that was more a factor of my disposable income than anything.
So are there any valid reasons to purchase a US-made guitar when a cheaper import version exists?
To that end, I’ve come up with a list of pros and cons when it comes to buying a high-end guitar, along with some commentary on each one. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject, too, so feel free to leave a comment!
