[moon]

"The market price is always correct because it's always exactly equal to the market price".

This is literally the foundation of prevailing economic "thinking". It's a glib way of deflecting any serious analysis of value, of cost, or of the ways in which wealth is created.

You could almost say it's deliberately designed to conceal our true, interconnected, co-operative nature and isolate us one from each other. Predators always find it harder to tackle a tightly-knit group and the amoral ideology of the market is nothing if not a licence for predation which concentrates huge amounts of unearned wealth and unaccountable, undemocratic power in fewer and fewer hands.

But OK let's stick to guitars..

First we'd have to define what we mean by value. A musical instrument has to play well and sound good. Also look good if you often stand in front of an audience, or a mirror.

There's no single formula. Just look at all the Tele threads for example. One person's favourite Tele with bright, low-output pickups, fat neck and brass saddles could be another person's nightmare. There are guitars with long, bell-like sustain, eg many neck-through designs, and then there are guitars like the Jaguar with a more punchy, staccato sound which are prized exactly because they don't have good sustain. Guitarists won't even agree on frets. How tall? How fat?

It's hard to pin down exactly what we mean by a good guitar and even when you do, it's even harder to pin down what specific construction methods or materials make it so good. A lot of instrument makers will tell you they are never 100% sure how an instrument will turn out. Ultimately the tonal characteristics of the plank of wood are defined by a complex and subtly balanced series of resonance modes which can be altered by something as simple as changing tuners to a new design with a different mass.

Wood is a living material. No two pieces are ever exactly the same and so no two guitars can ever be exactly the same. Who's to say the cheaper piece of wood in the cheaper guitar will not sound better than the expensive piece of wood in the expensive guitar? Usually wood is graded on its appearance. No-one is taking any measurements of resonance characteristics or euphonic potential. Subject to some minimum manufacturing standards, I think cheap guitars can sound every bit as good as more expensive instruments.

If you don't believe me read up about Leo Fender whose genius, you might say, was in knowing when to stop.

OK a finely-crafted instrument from Collings is probably going to have a gorgeous depth of finish and aura of quality which a cheaper guitar cannot match. If money was no object, I'd own a few. They won't necessarily be better musical instruments though.

Another thing people often forget about the electric guitar is just how limited an impact the plank of wood actually has on the final sound.

The physical construction and components such as the bridge define how energy bleeds out of the strings and hence the volume envelope - attack, decay, sustain, release. Part of the reason Teles have such a twang-tastic reputation is the big break angle of the string-through bridge and the massive traditional saddle pieces.

However, the timbre and harmonic content of the sound you hear pumping out of a guitar speaker has many other influences. Pickups tend to have well-defined resonant peaks which boost certain frequencies. After that the response drops off a cliff like a low-pass filter. Guitar speaker drivers similarly have a dramatic low-pass cut-off. The amp will add its own ideas about dynamics and timbre, as will the speaker cone.

The guitar, pickups, amp, cab and speaker are really all separate parts of a single instrument and it could be argued that these are listed in reverse order of importance to the final sound.

That's not to say that the plank of wood has no effect at all on the sound - of course not - but I do think that any reasonably well-made guitar, even from some of the budget manufacturers, has a good shot at sounding fantastic if it's paired up with good quality pickups, amp, cab & speaker. The sound may begin with a vibrating string but the final view of that pristine tone is very heavily filtered and processed.

Even a diddley bow or a cigar box guitar can rock the house. As a musician, I guess your job is to listen to the sound and figure out how it wants to be used. Everything has a place, somewhere.