I love Jackson guitars. I think the fit & finish is very high all through the product line, from entry level instruments thru USA Select.

But the prices I don't like so much. Wood is a renewable resource, and the volume of wood harvested solely for the manufacture of musical instruments compared to, say, home construction, is so small as to be statistically negligible. What we guitarists have in our hands is basically glorified furniture.

Labor involved in manufacture is not a big deal as virtually all the steps in turning the wood is fully automated. Painting the airbrushed designs like Nebula or Pile O' Skulls is a big ticket item but have you ever seen two of these guitars side by side? The designs are virtually identical, too identical for an artisan to reproduce painting by hand.

I would say that these guitars (as well as Fender/Gibson/PRS) are at least 50% overpriced. By way of comparison, I recently bought a Dean ML model for $600 with case. It was made in Korea and is solid mahogany set-neck with a carved maple flametop, rosewood fretboard, floyd rose trem, bound neck & headstock with abalone fret dots and abalone Dean logo on the headstock. $600! With case! This is BY FAR the best value I've ever gotten for my dollar on an electric guitar. This model has been discontinued (a carved top ML-must have been a one-off deal with the factory in Korea but still!) but if Dean can sell a product like this then so can Jackson. Who wouldn't go and buy a set-neck Soloist set up like this if it only cost $600-700?

Seeing a list price of $3,333 for the top of the line stuff is just too too much.

Yeah, but at the same time, you bought a Dean. What self respecting guitarist would play any Dean produced in the past what, 10, 15 years? Theyre mostly all junk "toy" guitars. Comparing Dean to Jackson is like comparing a Kia to Cadillac. Yeah theyre ok for what they are, but thats just it. Need a REAL instrument? Spend a bit more and buy a Jackson.

Now I cant speak for the new Made in India X series so dont hold me to that.

RobRR, you could not be more wrong about this Dean. I cannot speak for their whole product line, but this model is equal to Jackson's USA Select Series in fit & finish. It is NOT a 'toy guitar' by any stretch of the imagination. It was precisely due to these attributes that I made this thread in the first place. Floyd Rose tremolo and Grover tuners, top of the line stuff. Mahogany body & neck, rosewood fretboard, carved maple flametop, abalone binding/fretmarkers/headstock logo...how in the world do you call this a toy? The only items worthy of debate are the Dean pickups, but tone debates are always subjective, and believe me I have A/B'd the tone of this guitar with my Gibson and my Jackson and it is not wanting at all. The single biggest difference is the PRICE.

$3000 vs $600 for nearly identical tone. And not that one sounds better than the other, just different, and even then you can compensate by a subtle twist of a tone knob on your amp.

So if Dean, which is a flyspeck on the wall compared to Jackson in terms of marketshare, can sell this for $600 then why do I have to pay between $1,200-$2000 & up for a similarly appointed Jackson?

First off, the "carved maple top" on your ML is a 1/16" veneer, not an actual maple cap. That guitar would not be $600 if it was. A piece of flamed maple big enough to cover that body and then to some "carve" each one would make that guitar easily x2-3 that much.

Second, working in a shop for 6 years that carried Dean, I ran into alot of problems with their QC. There guitars are cheap for a reason. Their dedication to quality woods and materials is nowhere close to what Jackson has. Dean is not a comparable brand to Jackson, and just becuase you got that guitar for $600 ($100 below MAP pricing) tells me that the store is trying to get rid of it becuase it didnt sell, or it was after they were discontinued and MAP pricing was no longer in affect for these models.

Either way, I'm not saying I would be mad about lower prices but you get what you pay for in MI world

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Kelly and Warrior 7 Strings please

First off one must take into account that guitars that are manufactured in Korea are probably put together by someone making $100 or less a week. You think the guys at the Jackson custom shop could live in todays economy making $100 a week? I think not. Next get online and price a piece of maple for a quilted maple top guitar. Its not cheap. When somebody goes to market to buy wood for Jackson or PRS or Gibson or whatever guitar you want to scrutinize it takes that person or persons time and money and vast knowledge of woodworking to make the proper selections. Go to the Ed Roman website and check out their wood guide. Very Informative. Rosewood and Ebony have to be imported and there are strict rules and regulations regarding such matters. Next if your buying a USA Jackson or a custom shop that guitar is handmade. If you could afford it would you buy run of the mill furniture or would you rather handmade furniture? Thats why antique furniture is so darn expensive. Its high quality. It was built to last. Personally if I could afford a house full of custom shop pieces I would do it. But sadly enough I cant.

1/16 or 1/4 inch whats the difference sonically in a mahogany guitar? True,
the model has been discontinued but it does not change the fact that the fit & finish is just as good as a USA made Jackson. And no matter how you slice it, paying over $1200-2000 for a Jackson/PRS/Gibson is just too much money. Its only WOOD, not gold.

What the guys working at Jackson make in salary is not my problem, nor is it yours. And we're not talking about custom shop guitars either-its just the good ol' Select Series with all the paintjobs offered. Custom shop guitars are custom ordered, i.e. instead of mahogany or alder you get a guitar made from korina, basswood, maple, etc. I'd expect to pay more for a guitar thats made to order, not one churned out in an assembly line with CAD robots. And about the wood....do you think that Jackson has its own private forest of tonewoods or something? ALL guitar instrument wood comes from several specific places, and ALL the manufacturers get their wood from there. You seem to have some stange ideas about how much effort goes into selecting figured maple tops too...you almost make it sound romantic. That is far from the case. There is a room at Jackson, somewhere, full of figured maple ready to be carved or finished for guitars. They are graded either AA or AAA or AAAA and sorted & labelled as such. When an order comes in for a custom shop guitar with figured top, the tech strolls over to the pile with the grade the customer specified and picks one randomly. He does NOT spend time agonizing over the decision because he doesn't have to! Its already been done for him by whoever graded the wood. And just so you know, I have ordered guitars from Ed Roman in the past. I've got two David McNaught Signature Series, each one with a "diamond grade" flametop and quilttop, made out of white korina. They were very very pricey each, so much so that considering what I bought them for in the 90's and what DM charges NOW, I'll never be able to afford to buy another one! And when I compare those guitars to this Dean, I ask myself how could they all be so close in fit & finish yet be so disparate in price? As for importing rosewood & ebony, or any other wood considered an endangered species...that whole deal is a big pile of BS. The reason its a big PITA for the guitar manufacturers is that our stupid Federal Gvt. is overdoing it as far as enforcing the Lacey Act. The Lacey Act basically stipulates that an imported wood specified on the list to be endangered, has to be worked by people from the country of origin. In other words, if a slab of Indian rosewood meant to be made into a fretboard comes into the USA unfinished, its here illegally unless the gvt of the country of origin gives permission to the US manufacturer to finish it! On the other hand, if a slab of Indian rosewood is imported and it has already been cut/slotted for frets/adorned with inlay, then its OK! Here is a link to a story where the feds raided Gibson guitar's plant in NAshville and confiscated several pallets of imported wood that was unfinished...the gist of the story is that the US was actually ENCOURAGING Gibson to use non US labor to work the wood! They didn't want workers in the US to do the work!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 59286.html


Antique furniture is valuable because it is OLD. Old furniture is high quality & handmade because they didnt have machines to do it back then. If you want handmade furniture now you can have it....at 10x the price of machine made.

No...No it's not.

Maybe YOU don't want to pay that much for a guitar, but some people will. If there weren't, they wouldn't produce them. If there weren't people who buy $9,000 PRS's, PRS wouldn't have the Private Stock, same with the Jackson Custom Shop, Fender Custom Shop, Gibson Custom Shop, plus all the small builders out there that charge +$4000 for a guitar. It is wood, you're right about that, but the rarity and differences in grain, age, sound, stability make some woods more precious than gold to some builders/players.

Bottom line, you don't like the price, don't buy the guitar.

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Kelly and Warrior 7 Strings please

But I am not talking about custom shop/custom ordered guitars. I am talking about production guitars that are listed on the Jackson 2011 Price list. Guitars that are mass-produced. USA SL1 Soloist Ebony fretboard, Blue Ghost Flames....MSRP $3,666.65. No wood grain there showing, new guitar right off the wall. It's at least twice as expensive as it should be.

http://support.jacksonguitars.com/price ... p_list.pdf

When you talk about "the rarity and differences in grain, age, sound, stability make some woods more precious than gold to some builders/players" you must be referring to collectibles, i.e. 1959 Les Paul Standard, or 1950s Teles & Strats. Those guitars are in demand by collecors, not necessarily players. Many of those guitars end up in display cases, too precious to be risked playing for fear of checking the finish and adversely affecting the value of the guitar. I just know you can't be talking about new guitars...you can go to warmoth.com and order custom bodies with your choice of flame/quilt top and your choice finish all day long for much, much less than what any big manufacturer's special order dept. would charge. You pay a lot for the NAME, you know.

Do you think that, once a tree is harvested and cut into body blanks, it knows what guitar brand it will be made into? Wood is wood is wood.

There's the problem. A USA Soloist is not a "mass-produced" guitar. They don't make near the same quantities of USA made guitars as they do India/Indonesia/Korean made guitars. The ratio is probably 20 or 30 to 1, probably more. Also, the MSRP you quoted ($3,666.65) is just that, MSRP. The sale price of those guitars is about $1,000 less. Which is still not cheap,but considering the rising price of quality ebony, and specs that increase price like, quartersawn maple neck, Original Floyd Rose, Ivoroid binding, real mother of pearl, plus the paint job is a time consuming process. It's not like black that they shoot on all their other guitars, they don't have 100 bodies going in to get the same finish like they do for imports. All these factor in to the higher price.

Btw, rare woods like Ziricote, Brazilian rosewood, African blackwood, and some mahogany and walnut with beeswing and bearclaw figuring can make the price of guitar skyrocket. Especially in the acoustic world. A set of African Blackwood back and sides for acoustic guitar can easily reach $600-700 and make the price of the guitar jump up $1500. So certain woods can be more precious than gold. Look at the old pre-war Martin's with brazilian rosewood back and sides, and see how much they are going for.

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Kelly and Warrior 7 Strings please