Can You Help Me With Some Perspective On Pricing Here? Guitar Vs Piano

[ggm1960]

While at the local music store the other day something really struck me. Bear with me, if you care to, while I do the unnecessarily elaborate setup.......

 

There is a highly reputable guitar service tech at our local West Music store and I took my 2012 Gibson SG in for new strings, intonation and any necessary adjustments. I've always resisted taking my guitars into a shop stubbornly believing I can do all that is needed myself. In truth of course, I cannot! Anyway I decided it was the thing to do because 1) this is the only guitar I currently take to gigs, 2) my main band function is keyboards and that in itself keeps me very busy, 3) the main guitar player often complains that my guitar is out of tune and he is right, 4) I need more musician related tax write-offs. The tech does some nut work, polishes it all up, changes strings, makes some minor adjustments and strobes the intonation turning this guitar into a finely tuned rock and roll machine, quite nice!

 

Stepping back a moment though, the tech is not there at the time I, and my soon to be wife Brenda, bring the guitar in. While there we are looking around at stuff as musicians are want to do while in a music store. She's checking out pop music song books; she typically plays classical pieces from sheet music while I play and sing pop/rock piano/guitar both by ear and sheet music and we'd both like to work up some tunes to play together for fun. I get to looking at pianos and they have a Yamaha U1 upright piano, the absolute standard in upright pianos, a beautifully crafted piece of art that sounds and looks stunning. The price tag on the piano reads something very close to $10.3K and I think to myself that's actually less than twice what it costs for some of these high end production acoustic and/or electric guitars. How can it be that I can buy such a large, heavy, intricately crafted instrument; 88 keys, probably 230 strings with all it's massive mechanical complexity for less than the price of two little six string guitars!?

 

$6000 for this while for less that $11,000 I can get this? It seems so incredibly disproportionate to me, can anyone help me understand? There can't be but a fraction of the material that it takes to build a piano in a guitar and the time.......is it going to take longer to put together a guitar than a piano?

 

An interesting wrap to my.......rant? Brenda has a refurbished nearly 100 year old Steinway baby grand which is absolutely amazing. Recently she had the piano tech over and I noticed the bill for tuning was right around $90, incidentally just about the same cost for the work that was done on my guitar which, although I thought was great, was rather expensive.

 

[Ernest Buckley]

Don`t let the physical size of an instrument bias your value of it. Those high end guitars have rare woods and intricate details which the piano most likely does not.

 

EB

 

 

[onelife]

First of all, why are you looking at pianos when your wife to be has a 100 year old Steinway?

 

 

Price is no longer directly tied to the effort that goes into making a product. With profit now being the most important thing, the market (and its associated marketing) are what sets the price.

 

Leo Fender used to build guitars and amplifiers. Now, the company that bears his name markets guitars and amplifiers using that name and, for the most part, gets someone else to build them. They've convinced people to pay more for a "real" Fender (Squier) than they would for a similar or even better quality instrument that may have been made in the same factory.

 

In fact, when the first Squier Series JV Strats and Teles came out of Japan in the early '80s, they were being built in the same factory as some of the Ibanez Roadstar series. People were willing to pay more for a Fender than for an Ibanez.

 

 

 

 

 

[Phil O'Keefe]

With all due respect, I think you're looking at instruments that sit at different points on their respective price / quality scales.

 

A six thousand dollar guitar is generally considered a very nice instrument. True, you can pay considerably more for a highly-prized vintage model, or for a custom-built instrument from a highly respected luthier, and some custom shop models go for more, but you can generally get just about whatever you want in terms of regular production model guitars for six grand or less "street" price.

 

A Yamaha U1 is a nice enough upright - it's a quality instrument... but it's not a particularly high-level one as far as acoustic pianos go. Maybe a better comparison would be with something higher up the line, like a Yamaha C7x. That's a $75k piano, and you can spend even more than that on some pianos... and IMO, that's generally justifiable due to the increased amount of raw materials used in a piano compared to a guitar, and the mechanical complexity and increased labor required for their construction.

[blue2blue]

Phil's right -- but it still strikes me as pretty amazing you can get a nice, well-made upright for that money. One of my pals bought that or a more-or-less equivalent a decade or more back -- and It's a nice, well made piano. That said, you're not going to mistake playing it for a high end Yamaha grand, and, of course, you wouldn't expect to.

 

But, let's be real, there are people charging those prices for high end guitars because the industry was so tanky that some key companies decided to push their 'high end' prices up (Gibson, Martin, even Fender with their 'custom shop' stuff) and that provides market cover for slowly raising prices on bread and butter lines, as well. When business gets slow, you cut prices. But when it tanks, you cinch your belt, get your reserve accounts in order, and raise your prices. If you're not going to make many transactions, you might as well take as much profit as you can.

[ggm1960]

First of all, why are you looking at pianos when your wife to be has a 100 year old Steinway?

 

 

I'm sure it wasn't overly obvious that I felt the need to get that included in my post!

 

 

[ggm1960]

Phil's right -- but it still strikes me as pretty amazing you can get a nice, well-made upright for that money. One of my pals bought that or a more-or-less equivalent a decade or more back -- and It's a nice, well made piano. That said, you're not going to mistake playing it for a high end Yamaha grand, and, of course, you wouldn't expect to.

 

But, let's be real, there are people charging those prices for high end guitars because the industry was so tanky that some key companies decided to push their 'high end' prices up (Gibson, Martin, even Fender with their 'custom shop' stuff) and that provides market cover for slowly raising prices on bread and butter lines, as well. When business gets slow, you cut prices. But when it tanks, you cinch your belt, get your reserve accounts in order, and raise your prices. If you're not going to make many transactions, you might as well take as much profit as you can.

 

Yes, as one of the many here who go back in years a ways it blows me away the incredible rise in price I've seen on some of these guitars. I thought I was interested in getting a PRS for a while and tried a couple out. Sure they look great, play nice and all that but I just don't feel like I'm holding $3500 worth of guitar!