I love the electric guitar. To me, it’s the greatest instrument ever created. It’s not suited for everything, but nothing is. I’m not alone. A lot of people love electric guitars. Some of them spend crazy money on gear. My entire site is about getting the best bang for the buck, but that presupposes that you’re going to spend bucks. From the low end to the high end, there’s gold in them thar guitar hills.
Eek. Good thing I don’t write for a living. Anyway, if you had asked me in 1983 how many fuzz pedals the market needed, I’d say maybe 4 or 5. If you asked me now, I’d say maybe 15 – 20. But if you include small builders, there are hundreds of fuzz pedals out there. How about a box that gives you distortion of some type? Hundreds or more. And new builders show up every week, building their version of a fuzz box, a Klon, a Marshall amp in a box. The pedal market is oversaturated.
Same with electric guitars. How many custom builders are there? Hundreds, maybe even thousands. The big brands have huge lines plus more affordable versions made overseas. PRS and Fender both have cheaper versions made overseas, and then cheaper versions than the cheaper versions made overseas. Overseas is a mystical place where you can make everything cheap.
Amps? There are more amp companies than at any time in history, because the Internet enables anyone to make anything and sell it to anyone. Pickups? An infinite variety. Even cables. And pedalboards. And guitar parts.
Most people only hear about the companies they see at Sam Ash or Guitar Center, but those in the know can tell you about the other stuff. If it’s made by one guy in his backyard shop, it must be superior quality compared to the crap they’re mass producting in Korea, right? Not necessarily. But that’s the perception.
Is it good or bad to be a consumer in an oversaturated market? It’s good, because you have a huge range of choices that cover the entire price range. But it’s also more work. How does a small business stand out? Basically that’s determined by how good their Internet presence is, and how good their product is. In other words, online marketing.
Suppose you wanted a piece of the action. What would you choose to go after? What, in your current setup, is there not much choice in? Well, there aren’t a hundred different kinds of EL-34 tubes. There’s a handful of companies making tubes. But that’s a complicated process that requires a high level of skill and the use of rare tools. Um… yeah, I got nothing. Everything is oversatured.
A really good question might be: Is there still room for innovation in any of these spaces? And that one’s super easy to answer – yes. There are holy grails that have not yet been achieved. For decades engineers have been trying to make a non-tube amp sound as good as a tube amp. But most pro guitarists will tell you no one has succeeded. Yes, the jazz players sometimes like their solid state amps, but the vast majority of players aren’t jazz players. I’ll go one better – the real innovation would be to make a non-tube amp that sounds BETTER than a tube amp. To my mind, this will ultimately happen. As technology gets cheaper and faster, today’s top modeling technologies will be tomorrow’s children’s toys. Maybe the object isn’t to try to imitate a tube amp, but rather to make something that just sounds fantastic.
Some would argue we’re already there, with the top modeling products. But they’re super pricey today. And eventually they’ll be cheap. That’s how tech works.
For guitars? I think the quality of low end guitars has continued to improve. But the entire industry is based on having multiple price points. Fender is the best at this, in my opinion. They have the entire range from $100 to $10,000 covered. But Fender has blurred the lines – the top of the line Squiers are arguably as good as the regular Mexican-made guitars, and the top of the line Mexican guitars are arguably as good as the regular American-made guitars. This does create some “pain” for the guitar buyer, but it’s a good pain, as choice almost always is.
So some would argue that we don’t need any major innovation in the area of electric guitars – the quality of the lower end continues to get better and better, and you can buy a good instrument at almost every price point. The Line 6 guitars that model other guitars could be seen as innovative, but the mass market doesn’t really care about them. To most, the electric guitar is a hammer – the design doesn’t need to be changed because it’s already doing the job very well. But would you buy a hammer that automatically always found the nail and never accidentally hit your thumb? I would. Could guitars get to the point where they almost play themselves? I hope not.
This is maybe a bit of a downer, but true innovation seems to be very rare in this industry. Does the world really need your version of a fuzz pedal? No, it probably doesn’t. I think the next big stars of this business will be people who come up with something new that is super useful. I do think there’s room for innovation in the pedal world, and some new pedals explore that. But most are just refactored tube screamers and fuzz pedals. I think there’s room for a guitar that is shaped like something we’ve never seen, AND looks cool and is comfy to play. There’s definitely room for an amp that sounds great both clean and dirty. So right now we have tons of everything but true innovation is rare. I think when someone does something innovative, they’ll have a massive hit on their hands.
