Import Guitars in 2020: High quality, High End, the new era and my opinion

As you my know, i've always gone toward what i consider the best quality vs price balance when i buy a guitar.

Cort factory in Korea has always been a good place to build guitars, but clearly remember the day i entered a shop and found for a really cheap price an Ibanez AXD81. It was made in china and it was the main reson it was not selling.

I love how it looked andd there was not a single flaw in the construction. No visual defects. No other issues.

It was around 2003-2006, brands made the first step to change the quality of import guitar. As far as i know they send people from the "custom shops" to the big factories to train both in building and QA check.

And that move leads to today market.

I take this as the main example:

It's a beautyful MAJ200XFM fro Sterling. Its priced around 1800 euros and it is made in Indonesia. It really tells us how the world is changing.

But, where do brands want to go with similar moves?

Let's look at the situation. We have all the brands that we all look at (Fender, Gibson, Ibanez, Music Man, ESP, Jackson, Schecter, Charvell, Dean, Yamaha to name a few) with their own small factory for high end production and the a small number of imort builder like Cort and World Music Instruments that ghost build the most of their lower priced guitars.

Some brand will hint this by using a different name (Squier for Fender, Epiphone for Gibosn, Sterling for Music Man) some will use the same brand (like Ibanez, Schecter, Jackson). But the stratigy is no different.

You want that guitar, you can afford the real deal, we can offer you a better deal.

But as they rise the quality (and also the price) of their import lines, they are eating their own high end market. Why?

My guess is that. You need to have a high end production, more for the reputation than for the money you directly made from that sales. Squier sells more than Fender and i think the earn from Squier (in percentage, not per single sale, obviously) is better. For a lot of reason. Production cost vs market price. Facility cost. Taxes.

So, if i build better quality import instruments that people are happy with. As a brand, i can focus on being a designer and a promoter of my brand. And let someone else do the hardwork.

That is the future i am thinking of. We will be buying more import guitar, better made, probably in the same factory, with the same quality and we will be choosing focusing on the design we like better than on the build quality.

So if i want a classic strat, i can buy a Squier, i can buy a cutlass from sterling, a charvel dinky, an ibanez AZ (to name some) just by choosing the desing a like better, knowing that it will be build by the same hand and at the same quality.

A tip on buying a guitar in the far low end of the price range. If you are buying for the chapest, as you go down there will be less quality check and the quality may vary from one to one. Go to a real shop. Spent some more money but get your hand on the one you will buy. Just check that everything is ok with your eyes. The finish, the fretwork. You wil find a better one, one that you will be happy with for a longer time. 

Be your own quality check department!

This is the safest way to buy a cheap guitar and find a good deal (the cheap guitar that rivals the expensives ones) and avoid the lemon, to avoid issues.

good luck on your next import guitar!

Gain stages, compression and tone stacks made simple

Understaing how gain (overdrive and distortion) works is a lot helpful to control your tone.

I like to think that  also your picking and the pickups are gain stages. It helps understand all the layers and how to get the right tone.

This is a bit of explaination of the "tone is in your finger" thing.

Let's say that anything that affect volume also affect gain stages and then overdrive (distortion) and tone.

Then, how hard you hit the string, the pickup power and its volume control, any gain stage that come after and you may know and control, or not.

First of all, lets get rid of one thing: the boost.

A BOOST is a gain stage that rise the volume of the signal without distorting or overdriving it. I know, the final effect may be overdriving of distorting. But that job is done by the next stage. The boost  in fact, help the following step in its work by rising the signal and making the next step overdrive sooner and better.

Since it rises the volume, usually it also compress the tone. What does it mean? Pratically, it shorten the gap between the higher and the lower part of the signal. This may be good or bad, depending on your taste and needs, and also the amount. Too much may be too much. I will come later on this because is relevant part of the gain stages game.

Usually boost have some sort of EQ controls.

TIP: any overdive pedal, with the drive control set at zero can be used as a boost. Obviouls in the same color of the pedal itself. A tube screamer is  frequently used as a mid boost by setting the drive to zero.

So, if you dont mind, i would like, after this explainations, to take all the boost thing out of the equation and concentrating on the overdrive stages and tone stack on its own.

So, why do we stack overdrives? Let's look at pedal stacking for one moment. A lot of pepole se it this way:

"I put 2 overdrives on my pedalboard, a light one (we will give it a value of 3) and a mild one (we will give a value of 5), if i use it together i wil get an higher one (3+5=8!)"

But it not just that. 2 gain stages gives you a slightly different result than a single gain stage of the same "amount". Flavor apart.

Now lets get into it! Let's consider something relitively simple like a plexi. Britsh overdirve in one of is classic incarnation. As we raise its gain from 0 its sweetspot we may notice the first rule of the gain game,

High frequncies distort sooner. 

I think this is the gold rule when you manage gain stages.

Lets think american vs british. american is mid scooped, british is mid pushed. You get something noticeably different when you push the gian in the low overdrive territory. At hte same amount of gain, the american amp will have a lot more high freq overdrive, and a lot less mid freq overdrive, resulting in a arsher, raw overdrive. On the other side the britsh will even mid and high freqs, making the mid frequences overdrives at the same time of the higer ones. This will. result in smoother tone.

So we can see, overdrive flavor has a lot to do with how much we can distort various frequency.

But if you where in the golden era of the plexi you would have want more of it. The first thing to do was rise the volume and use the power section as a second stage with the obvious porblem of the volume.

Then, people like Jose Arredondo stard modding amps to get more gain stages. Modern amps have more gain stages, both valve and solid state. The classic JCM800 has a clipping stage to name one. Just like a fixed overdrive pedal in its gain channel.

Why? 

How to evolve your guitar tone

How do you master the tone of our guitar?

How do we find our how sound?

How do we make a step forward in the path of guitar voicing?

Here's my perspective.

We all are in love for the tone of some artist. And most of us have a phase where we try to emulate someone else tone. We read, we search, we experiment, we copy we clone.

It is ok. It is good. It teach us something.

But... most of us want that same exact thing, in the good and in the bad.

But there is more about it. Just listent. Find that part of the tone you love that really strikes your heart. Focus on that. Give you the ability to really understand how that part work. Make it your. And then try to change the rest. Make it different, make better. Take out what you feel wrong, impefect, unneeded. Put in something else.Pick that something from different recipes and make your own recipe.

Petrucci Allround preset AKA Ultimate dual channel solution

As you may know i am struggling finding a solution to for the limited stomp preset chaning offered by my beloved mustang I v1.

My comfort zone would be the ability to have the classic 3 channel solution at my feets:

1) clean

2) crunch rythm

3) lead

But i can have only 2 of the 3 and this has alway got me mad...

I recently found a solution that consists in using a pedal platform oriented clean (i discovered that my sparkilng cleans preset are really bad as platform!) that can handle a decent MB emulation from the Zoom Multistomp to use for the crunch rythm and the other state of the footswith is set to the lead tone.

It is a compromise: the crunch is only decent, as i state, and the clean is not the wonder.

So today inspiration leads me to something different:

Introducing MB CRUNCH 1 DC MORE aka PETRUCCI ALLROUND PRESET.

After i found a very good tone to perform Damage Control (see the DC in the name) i decided to try to find a sweet spot between the gain i need for the rythm and the gain i need for the sole (that is obvously MORE!!!). Again is a compromise: it is a bit less tight and clear and  a bit less headroom in the rythm and a bit less gainy for the solo. But just a bit. And has no 450ms delay when you are soloing. I could use the classic trick of the pitch shifter for the shot delay and the proper delay for the longer one but i would have ruined the tightness of the preset and render it unuseful for the rythm section. It is a compromise, but is a really comfortable compromise. And, oddly, it works on an LT25 or LT50.

(oh! and i recentrly discovered that all my preset are also available to download in the fender library for the new GT and GTX models! So plenty of compatibility!)

And it only works very well on my JP70, but i guess that with some tweaks it will work better also on the SZ, but not in the same patch!

I most admit that i am pretty excited about this preset!