Comment by bityard
1 month ago
I am looking to get back into playing bass and have been completely out of the loop for about the last decade. When I started looking around to see what was available, it seems to me that guitar and bass prices are attached more to brand/model reputation than the actual objective and subjective quality of the instrument.
For example, the Squier and Fender basses with the same features are essentially identical. The Fender might have a higher quality finish and slightly better hardware (and is maybe made in a different country?) but I watched _many_ YouTube videos where professional bass players could not make one sound better than the other. Despite a 2x-3x price delta.
And most interestingly, Yamaha bass guitars are among the lowest cost for a brand-new bass, yet are also made surprisingly well and sound as good as some basses that cost an order of magnitude more.
This just further confirms my observation that in most any market, it always seems that the most popular brand is rarely the best overall value.
You're pretty much correct, yeah. If you want to know what the actual benefit to playing a more expensive and/or name-brand instrument is, it's because it's largely a signal to others about your self. Playing a recognizable brand or a obscure-but-expensive brand can show to others that you're serious & knowledgeable about the hobby, instead of just playing a $150 strat clone you bought off Amazon. If you want to make money off of it, it's also a sign to your potential customers that you know what you're doing. Above like $500, they all play pretty much the same, but they make different statements about your self. It's up to you how much value that has to you personally, but please don't make the mistake of being surprised that others put a lot of value on how others perceive them. That little fact accounts for an absolutely enormous chunk of economy activity, it'd be silly to write it off as unimportant.
Yamaha makes fantastic stuff, they're a great choice.
> Above like $500, they all play pretty much the same
Yeah, really cheap guitars (like $150 cheap) can be great but they also can be terrible due to non existent QC and electronics and hardware being the cheapest available because every cent matters.
But as soon as you hit a price point where QC exists a lot of reasonably priced instruments just need a proper setup and better electronics (not the pickups, but pots, wiring and shielding, the cheapest mods that you can do in a guitar or bass) to feel like a professional instrument that you can use in any situation.
And you are dead on on yamahas, if you play a pacifica you can be sure that almost every single pacifica of the same model will feel very closer, yamaha consistency and QC is amazing at their price point.
> can be great but they also can be terrible due to non existent QC and electronics and hardware being the cheapest available because every cent matters.
This also perfectly describes the CBS era of Fender (late 1960s to 1970s). There's survivor bias in the ones left, but the prices absolutely do not reflect the quality relative to later ones.
Above a price point their is no objectively ‘better’
I have been playing for 40 years and can tell you I can be mediocre on a fender/squier/gibson