Guitars and the Validation of Our Identities on the Altar of Consumerism

Just a few more hours to go until I'm out of the Navy...specifically 15 hours and 49 minutes. When you tell people you're getting out the first (and I suppose logical) question people ask is "what are you going to do?" So I've been thinking about the various career incarnations I've had over the past twelve months and the one that sticks most in my mind is the plan I once entertained of becoming a luthier.

The idea started one day sitting in the sunshine outside my barracks in Iceland, drawing guitars while suffering through little pangs of misery that would eventually lead to me having my appendix cut out later that evening. The guitar I drafted up was a cherry sunburst dreadnought with an inlaid sun on the headstock. Simple and cool-looking like a 1960's model Hummingbird. I called it the Cargo.

I came up with the idea for the Cargo guitar after spending months looking through Acoustic Guitar magazine and realizing all the high end, "serious" guitars had two things in common: 1)they were all very good and 2) they were all very boring. All the custom jobs and high end production guitars such as Larrivee, Martin, and Taylor were fine works of craftsmanship with bookmatched tops and backs, precisely cut inlays, voiced, and laquered to perfection. And I think they all look like a set of cabinets or hardwood floors: beautiful wood grains was all the personlity you were going to find, and an almost uniformly thin tone. The one thing to be sure of when talking high end guitars with serious players is that Gibson is not going to get any respect. They'd leave those craily painted, heavily built tanks to the dumb rednecks and aging baby boomers who had the money to spend and didn't know anything about guitars except a brand name.

But Gibson offers a "cool factor" that no other brand can touch. Its a market my guitar design could tap. The bright red cherry sunburst paint job looks great on the old Gibson hummingbirds and J-45's from the 1960's. Today the company's version of cherry sunburst is much dmore of a wine and not nearly as appealing. The Cargo dreadnought would be square shouldered, braced like a pre-war (WWII) Martin to achieve that beautiful bass tone, and painted bright red cherry sunburst, not to hide mistakes as some smug luthiers suggest but because it looks good. The inlay would be the icing on a guitar cake of coolness.

So a few months later I set to work building the prototype and realized I didn't have the experience and/or woodworking talent to build high quality professional guitars. Eventually I identified that What I had was a desire to market rather than a desire to build. Which brings me to the crux of this post:

People don't make purches based solely on the product of the highest quality. They buy based on the product with the most endearing qualities. Thats why how something looks, who made it and where it was made, and the buzz around a product is every bit as important as its functionality. Just ask a Prius owner. This post is about marketing guitars but the truth holds for automobiles, knives, craft beer, and camping equipment.

BTW - my current guitars are a 2005 Gibson J-45, a 2005 Fender American Ash Telecaster Deluxe, a 1964 Gibson Hummingbird, a 1960's Harmony Patrician, and a 1980's Gibson Nouveau. I recently sold a 2004 or 2005 Taylor 310, and an Epiphone LP Junior TV paint scheme.