Re: Have any "cheap" guitars that surprisingly plays/sounds awesome?
Sometimes great wood shows up in a cheap guitar. Conversely, sometimes dead wood shows up in an expensive one. And wood goes a long way towards determining the character of an instrument.
I got a cheap Eko two years ago. $99 brand new. Pseudo-Stratlike, but a different (and pretty cool) body shape. [Tried to upload a pic but I think there's a problem with the system tonight, I just get a red exclamation point...] Anyway the neck plays exceptionally well and in terms of overall liveliness and musicality the thing's a real gem, more resonant than most of the recent Fenders I've played at any price point. Even the hardware isn't too bad, now that I've replaced the cheesy trem block with a solid one. Sure, the pickups are cheap, but they can be upgraded. There's no substitute for good wood.
You can build a deluxe Strat with all the best parts and still wind up with a dog if there isn't life in the lumber to begin with. Even the super expensive Historic LPs- I sometimes wonder if they aren't more interested in wood that looks good than in wood which sounds good, though it might not be so pretty. That's one major downside to building a guitar like that. You almost have to make good looks your top priority, or people won't be willing to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for it.
I'm lucky to have one of the PRSs made back in the 80s when Paul was checking every board with his rubber mallet before he would buy it to make into guitars. The good pieces rang like a bell, and the guitars made from them just sing, astonishingly musical compared to most. But that's an exceptional case. As a general rule, making guitars in a factory is pretty much a crapshoot; each production run turns out a few really good ones, a few pretty bad ones, and a bunch of okay ones. That was just as true years ago as it is today.
Leo Fender was fond of saying, "They don't make 'em like they used to- and they never did!"
I see three reasons why old guitars tend to be generally better than new ones: First, they were willing to discard the worst ones or sell them off as factory seconds; today these tend to be shipped out anyway. Second, the "just okay" ones often do become better with age than they were originally, especially if they're played & loved. And third, the real lemons got destroyed or parted out over the years, or languish unused baking in somebody's attic. People used to consider a guitar pretty disposable until it was ten or fifteen years old. After many years fewer of the bad apples are visible. But there were
lame ones in the old days too.
Do production standards fluctuate over time? Sure. But a lot of those vintage collectibles (especially the old Fenders) were pretty crudely made, on primitive equipment by what today would be considered semiskilled labor. Even the classic Gibsons were made by factory woodworkers, not by master luthiers. And they're some of the most valuable guitars in the world now.
Anyway, my point was this: being cheaply made doesn't preclude a happy coincidence of wood making a for really good guitar. I don't think all the other $99 Ekos were as good as mine, in fact I'd be very surprised if many of them were. But I'm sure happy with mine. It's easily as good a player as many of my Fenders, some of which cost more than ten times as much. And most of those Fenders got their factory pickups swapped out, too. Now that I think of it, most of my Gibsons don't still have the original pickups either.
