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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 10:40 am
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String basses aren't always buried in huge orchestral arrangements. Mahler's Symphony # 1 has a bass solo. And in many other orchestral arrangements there are prominent bass parts where you can clearly hear the sonority of an individual bass.

And not all classical music is orchestral. There's tons of chamber music, quartets, quintets, where each individual instrument can be clearly heard.


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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 11:09 am
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strayedstrater wrote:
String basses aren't always buried in huge orchestral arrangements. Mahler's Symphony # 1 has a bass solo. And in many other orchestral arrangements there are prominent bass parts where you can clearly hear the sonority of an individual bass.

And not all classical music is orchestral. There's tons of chamber music, quartets, quintets, where each individual instrument can be clearly heard.



No doubt. Again. Look at what he posted. "upon getting a position in an orchestra". Generally when you first win that position you aren't playing bass solos I'd imagine. However, I was commenting on NEED. No one NEEDS that instrument. Anyone who says they do isn't being honest. Even if you're doing a bass solo. You don't NEED it. If you do, you probably wouldn't be there. Most players at that level CAN work with a much cheaper instrument. From the audiences perspective even bowed, and in a room with amazing acoustics. The realities of sound travelling in those frequencies to the audience much of the subtlety is lost. That's the reality of bass frequencies.

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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 11:18 am
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arth1 wrote:
TheKingofPain wrote:
When I speak of "keeping up with the Jones" I mean in relative terms. I understand that the craftsmanship that goes into a handmade Bass is much different than that of an assembly line bass. Much akin to anything else you buy. Even electric instruments. Given the limited amount of true master luthiers in the classical disciplines the high price tag is not excessive. Supply and demand being what it is. Again, apparently you missed the point. No one is arguing that a handmade acoustic guitar sounds better than an assembly line model. See the Smokey Robinson example. If you were to take that assembly line guitar and stick it in the middle of 100 other guitars all running the same chords your audience WILL NOT be able to pick that out. Anyone who says otherwise is full of sh*t. What I'm saying is that the 50k bass is likely plenty adequate, or even more adequate than a Bass in a typical orchestral arrangement needs to be. While the 100k bass might be THAT much nicer. It's not going to come through the audience in a typical large orchestral arrangement.


It doesn't have to. The musician plays for himself as much as for the audience. And subconsciously, the main goal might be to sound as good as or better than Joe and Alice playing next to you. Even Alice with her $80,000 instrument.

Another singing example: Jussi Bjorling sang with his local church choir whenever he was home in Sweden (Swedes are nuts - I heard that something like 25% of them sing in choirs). That might not have improved that particular performance a great deal because of his voice alone, as his awesome voice would be just one out of many. But I am sure it improved how the choir felt, and how people around him did their best. And I'm sure that many of his fellow choir singers would have paid a fortune to get as spectacular a voice as his was, even if a choir performance wouldn't give it full justice.
I think the same holds true for instruments. If someone next to me was playing a Guarnieri or other awesome instrument, it would surely affect both his playing and my aspirations.



Again, my remark was about the audience. While there are plenty of classical music lovers who study basses and other master crafted instrument. There are plenty who go to enjoy the music and don't worry about such things. Same as people who love popular music. You are a musician. You understand what the guitar he is holding is worth and that generally implies one of two things. Talent, or money. Or both. The same can be said for a CS Strat. If I'm jamming with someone with a CS Strat my aspirations will be raised. However, to the audience member waiting for the solo in your cover of "Dead or Alive". He will neither understand, or likely be able to tell whether you are playing that on a CS Masterbuilt guitar or a plain old Squier. You would. I would. He doesn't know, and more importantly. Could care less. That was the point. The instrument is about the artist, and where they see themselves in their journey. No one needs that bass to play at that level. If they did. They wouldn't be there.

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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 2:02 pm
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Not to be disagreeable...but the reality of bass frequencies is..you do need the best possible wood and materials/craftsmanship...or you'll end up with an ugly tone, or you won't get the tone you could have gotten.

I think people get confused with supply and demand. Let's say your guitar has paint that's been illegalized, so it costs more to supply. The extra cash isn't necessarily toward quality. The demand for such a thing isn't always focused on quality, either. Some people get fooled in all the hype.

Now, wood imo is purely based on the supply and demand theory. Prettier and better sounding woods are getting harder to find. The better looking AND sounding wood usually has the more grain, right? There just isn't as much grain in the wood world, these days.


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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 2:12 pm
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No... KOP I'm in complete disagreement, you are inferring that the general audience is uneducated and therefore unable to distinguish between musical notes and white noise.....
I won't belabor the point in the Classical realm other than if you had ever been to a recital, or to a chamber music quartet say at Yale or perhaps Julliard or to a solo performance, at any respectable venue, then let's say for lower octave sonorities, to hear J.S. Bach's Cello Suites you would see that the audience is anything but uneducated.. 90% are intimately familiar with not only the score, but the sound of the instrument(s) they are expecting to hear....

Go and hear someone like Hillary Hahn, Rachel Podger, Joshua Bell or Anne Sophie Mutter, pay attention to see if they make a mistake... The audience will recognize it instantly even though those musicians are so adept at continuing as if nothing was out of place...

It is also in Blues and Rock and R.B. or for that matter most music. The audience at a Gilmour or Pink Floyd or Moody Blues or for the sake of the discussion any viably musical ensemble :wink: is going to be an educated audience.
They wouldn't be there without a certain accepted level of musical knowledge which translates for them a certain expected quailty of the respective performance.

In the setting for this Fender discussion, a band playing with Squier equipment ( not Classic ) will sound much better with better equipment such as MIM or MIA.
Quality professional equipment is expensive, there is no escaping that fact, for any band that arrived on the scene and succeeded in becoming profitable, their equipment choice was upgraded a soon as possible... That is not by accident but for the fact that low budget equipment just doesn't cut it when it comes to a piece of equipment ( tool ) that has to perform every time and be consistent...
That is also true in sports, my equipment costs in Cycling (racing ) is in the $10,000 range and that is a low budget which comprises just bike and sets of wheels..... 8)

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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 2:19 pm
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WildintheStreets wrote:
Not to be disagreeable...but the reality of bass frequencies is..you do need the best possible wood and materials/craftsmanship...or you'll end up with an ugly tone, or you won't get the tone you could have gotten.


When I spoke of bass frequencies I was speaking in terms of decay over distance. Not tone. The audience isn't likely to hear much of the nuance that is picked up by the player. Solo or otherwise, and certainly not what you'd hear recorded. Both the inefficiency of the instrument, the nature of low frequencies and how poorly they travel, competing sound of other instruments and distance all go into making much of what is gained by that higher quality construction negligible to the audience.

Quote:
I think people get confused with supply and demand. Let's say your guitar has paint that's been illegalized, so it costs more to supply. The extra cash isn't necessarily toward quality. The demand for such a thing isn't always focused on quality, either. Some people get fooled in all the hype.


When speaking of supply and demand I was clearly responding to the previous posters comment about craftsmanship. Unskilled labor on an assembly line is in much greater supply than skilled classical luthiers. You are paying for the scarcity of their labor. A scarce resource plus a high demand equals high price. I am not confused.

Quote:
Now, wood imo is purely based on the supply and demand theory. Prettier and better sounding woods are getting harder to find. The better looking AND sounding wood usually has the more grain, right? There just isn't as much grain in the wood world, these days.


Better looking and sounding wood is subjective. Tone woods are better at producing different frequencies. One is not better. They are simply different. What wood you use should reflect what you are trying to bring out of the instrument.

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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 2:23 pm
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53magnatone wrote:
No... KOP I'm in complete disagreement, you are inferring that the general audience is uneducated and therefore unable to distinguish between musical notes and white noise.....
I won't belabor the point in the Classical realm other than if you had ever been to a recital, or to a chamber music quartet say at Yale or perhaps Julliard or to a solo performance, at any respectable venue, then let's say for lower octave sonorities, to hear J.S. Bach's Cello Suites you would see that the audience is anything but uneducated.. 90% are intimately familiar with not only the score, but the sound of the instrument(s) they are expecting to hear....

Go and hear someone like Hillary Hahn, Rachel Podger, Joshua Bell or Anne Sophie Mutter, pay attention to see if they make a mistake... The audience will recognize it instantly even though those musicians are so adept at continuing as if nothing was out of place...

It is also in Blues and Rock and R.B. or for that matter most music. The audience at a Gilmour or Pink Floyd or Moody Blues or for the sake of the discussion any viably musical ensemble :wink: is going to be an educated audience.
They wouldn't be there without a certain accepted level of musical knowledge which translates for them a certain expected quailty of the respective performance.

In the setting for this Fender discussion, a band playing with Squier equipment ( not Classic ) will sound much better with better equipment such as MIM or MIA.
Quality professional equipment is expensive, there is no escaping that fact, for any band that arrived on the scene and succeeded in becoming profitable, their equipment choice was upgraded a soon as possible... That is not by accident but for the fact that low budget equipment just doesn't cut it when it comes to a piece of equipment ( tool ) that has to perform every time and be consistent...
That is also true in sports, my equipment costs in Cycling (racing ) is in the $10,000 range and that is a low budget which comprises just bike and sets of wheels..... 8)



Do you truly believe that David Gilmour or any of the classical players you named could not perform their work on lower quality pieces and the "Average" audience member would be oblivious? Is that what you are truly saying? You can disagree. However, I think you're wrong. Tone is in the hands. Give David Gilmour a Classic Series MIM Strat and he will sound like David Gilmour. Other guitarists may notice. However, the average person will not. Moreover, translate this example to Bass which the original discussion was about and see how many people notice.

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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 2:27 pm
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WildintheStreets wrote:
Now, wood imo is purely based on the supply and demand theory. Prettier and better sounding woods are getting harder to find. The better looking AND sounding wood usually has the more grain, right? There just isn't as much grain in the wood world, these days.


Again .... No... Grain or for that matter growth rings which we see on the parallel really are not that important other than on a visual basis. It's more about the density of the wood and how the fibers are aligned that determine how that piece of blank will react to vibrations traveling thru it's fiber's..... A highly figured maple Stratocaster will look stunning, but it may also very likely be dull sound wise just because figured Maple is not a good tone wood... I have a figured Maple blank routed to a Stratocaster shape which I hope will not prove to be a Fail sound wise...
But the general application is to laminate a highly figured Maple top to an Ash or Alder blank.
That will be a better sounding guitar for the most part.... Amusingly wood is just not always cooperative but I will have exults good or bad in a few weeks concerning this topic...

Cheers....

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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 2:39 pm
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OK.... Then let's hypothetically hand Jaco Pastorius a Squier Bass and see how long it takes before it gets shelved and he picks up his P.Bass...

We were comparing Squier's not Mim's or MIA's...
I brought them into the discussion as an upgrade, not as a starting point...

" "... Do you truly believe that David Gilmour or any of the classical players you named could not perform their work on lower quality pieces and the "Average" audience member would be oblivious ... " "

To the 1st part of the statement.. No.... But I doubt they would be satisfied with the quality if they even would bother to play those inferior instruments.
As for the 2nd part... You were the one that stated the audience is incapable of discerning quality in either the performance, sound or instrument being played.... Regardless of being low end or custom made.... I disagree and as a musician, woodworker and builder of my own guitars I know that it is rare that I pick up and buy an instrument in the $500 to $1,500 range and not alter something to improve that instrument to a higher plane... ( no puns intended )
But YMMV as Our Favorite Martian would say... :wink:

Cheers

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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 2:48 pm
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53magnatone wrote:
OK.... Then let's hypothetically hand Jaco Pastorius a Squier Bass and see how long it takes before it gets shelved and he picks up his P.Bass...

We were comparing Squier's not Mim's or MIA's...
I brought them into the discussion as an upgrade, not as a starting point...

" "... Do you truly believe that David Gilmour or any of the classical players you named could not perform their work on lower quality pieces and the "Average" audience member would be oblivious ... " "

To the 1st part of the statement.. No.... But I doubt they would be satisfied with the quality if they even would bother to play those inferior instruments.
As for the 2nd part... You were the one that stated the audience is incapable of discerning quality in either the performance, sound or instrument being played.... Regardless of being low end or custom made.... I disagree and as a musician, woodworker and builder of my own guitars I know that it is rare that I pick up and buy an instrument in the $500 to $1,500 range and not alter something to improve that instrument to a higher plane... ( no puns intended )
But YMMV as Our Favorite Martian would say... :wink:

Cheers



I'm not saying that they wouldn't seek out a better quality instrument, or that the craftsmanship isn't worth the price paid. I'm saying that when that decision is made it is for their own reasons and not the fact that they NEED it to perform at that level. I could get by with Squiers. I don't. The reality is that most non-musicians would never know the difference. I would certainly play and sound better on a finer instrument. However, that really would not translate. I firmly believe that. Remember, especially where rock is concerned many of the people who recorded really great sounding stuff didn't have hand crafted gear. Many of them slugged it out in the trenches for years with regular instruments that were no better than anyone else had. They didn't get choice gear until they had already "made it".

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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 3:21 pm
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Many notable symphonists do not actually play their own instruments... the instruments they play are owned by millionaire sponsors or museums. When the Fender Stratocaster reaches 300+ years old it would be interesting to know if musicians might play a 300 year old electric guitar like a symphonist might play a Stradivarius now. If electric guitars are still playable that far in the future (we still use electricity and still listen to music derived from string-based instruments) then I have no doubt a circa 1960s Stratocaster would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars even if it was not ever owned by a famous musician! Even so though... nothing will change the fact that modern instruments are mostly fabricated in an assembly fashion and are not individual works of art by a single luthier. So I only see the value of modern electric guitars increasing in accordance to their antiqueness and rarity and not because they possess a irreplicable tone.

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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 3:22 pm
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53magnatone wrote:
WildintheStreets wrote:
Now, wood imo is purely based on the supply and demand theory. Prettier and better sounding woods are getting harder to find. The better looking AND sounding wood usually has the more grain, right? There just isn't as much grain in the wood world, these days.


Again .... No... Grain or for that matter growth rings which we see on the parallel really are not that important other than on a visual basis. It's more about the density of the wood and how the fibers are aligned that determine how that piece of blank will react to vibrations traveling thru it's fiber's..... A highly figured maple Stratocaster will look stunning, but it may also very likely be dull sound wise just because figured Maple is not a good tone wood... I have a figured Maple blank routed to a Stratocaster shape which I hope will not prove to be a Fail sound wise...
But the general application is to laminate a highly figured Maple top to an Ash or Alder blank.
That will be a better sounding guitar for the most part.... Amusingly wood is just not always cooperative but I will have exults good or bad in a few weeks concerning this topic...

Cheers....


I'm trying to make sense of this. You're saying the denser wood(which is generally the core, right?), because of it's tight grain, is desired for vibration. I'm with you there, but aren't the most cosmetically desired woods from that very same tighter grained core? So, the wood's grain and growth rings aren't that important for tone, yet the denser wood really is? Huh? Doesn't the denser wood have the tighter growth rings?

I think the better/tighter grained wood is more demand both acoustically and cosmetically...for a reason. The two truly go together.

I gotta retract some of this. The tighter grains usually form further away from the center of the tree. It's the actual thickness of the individual grain, and the way the wood was cut that leads to a "nicer" appearance.


Last edited by WildintheStreets on Wed Feb 12, 2014 5:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 3:35 pm
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When I spoke of bass frequencies I was speaking in terms of decay over distance. Not tone. The audience isn't likely to hear much of the nuance that is picked up by the player.[/quote]

This kind of thinking could have led to the invention of rock and roll as we know it. Pretty cool.


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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 4:05 pm
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We need to remember that classical musicians are playing for two audiences - the audience sitting out in the seats, and also their fellow musicians and the people who will be hiring them. It's a very competitive business, and it's probably worth spending four times what your neighbour did for a serious instrument if it means your sound has that extra quality that gets you a prestigious position in a top quartet or orchestra.


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Post subject: Re: Spoiled Guitarists: That Guitar Costs How Much?!
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 5:43 pm
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TheKingofPain wrote:
1) When I spoke of bass frequencies I was speaking in terms of decay over distance. Not tone. The audience isn't likely to hear much of the nuance that is picked up by the player. Solo or otherwise, and certainly not what you'd hear recorded. Both the inefficiency of the instrument, the nature of low frequencies and how poorly they travel, competing sound of other instruments and distance all go into making much of what is gained by that higher quality construction negligible to the audience.



2) Better looking and sounding wood is subjective. Tone woods are better at producing different frequencies. One is not better. They are simply different. What wood you use should reflect what you are trying to bring out of the instrument.


1) Have you never been to a decent symphony hall? Even a half-way decent one has outstanding acoustics -- people in the balconies and back rows can hear a bassist's fingers squeaking on the strings. Segovia could fill a hall playing solo classical guitar and everyone in the audience could hear the nuances. The audience has to be polite/silent, and the room can't just be a big rectangular space, but bass (and every other instrument) fills the room.

Modern huge halls have sound reinforcement systems that are an audiophile's wet dream. They're individually designed to compliment the room's natural acoustics.

2) Better looking/better sounding may have been arbitrary hundreds of years ago in Europe, but over time a broad consensus has been formed. Certain tonal qualities are revered because they're the qualities that the music was written for. Whether people like them just because it's what they've learned to like, what they've always been told to like, or whether it's something more intrinsic -- perhaps some sonorities trigger neurochemical reactions in our brains -- whatever the reason, most fans agree on what constitutes "better".

Those valuations vary from culture to culture. A cheap fiddle may sound better for zydeco than a Strad would, but fans of classical will overwhelmingly chose the Strad for their music even in blind tests.

As for looks, again there's a broad consensus. Most people will "ooooohhh" and "ahhhhhhh" when they see fancy flame maple, even if they don't care about music.


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