Fender Custom Shop... meet your CHALLENGER

so about a year ago I hit up my friend sea to see if he wanted to help me out with a little experiment basically Fender had recently come out with their kuna pickups which were like a higher-end pickup alternative that I'd really only seen come stock in like some pretty high-end Custom Shop Tellies now I knew this would be a pretty cool process and that in the long run it was probably going to be something that bonded me more to this guitar simply because I knew how unique the specs were to me but what I didn't know at the time was that less than a month later I would actually be getting my first ever custom shop the gnl S500 now getting this guitar was really cool simply because of the fact that I had owned a different gnl for about 5 years a legacy and I was really interested in seeing the differences between the two Mainline models but I think at the time I was way more interested in Basking in the fender alternative that I geek out so much about than I was in actually finding out what makes custom shops so sought after and what makes people go so incredibly crazy for them but after having had this bad boy for almost a year I think I have a much better understanding of what it actually is and more importantly what makes custom shop so sought after in general so real quick I want to show you okay so obviously the first thing we need to talk about is the sound pretty much anyone who's considering the potential of getting a custom shop it's pretty much presume that you're at the highest end of the quality Spectrum tonally I mean when I first got this thing it was just assumed in my mind that it would sound straight up top of the line out of the box and let me show you what I mean real quick so I've been going quad cortex in like 99 for % of cases more recently simply because I have a lot of gigs coming up and it's easier but with this bad boy I feel like you got to go real mic and real amp so I pulled out the Royer and I know that essentially I'm just going to have to let my neighbors hate me for a minute also the supro happens to not be super noisy but more on that in a second [Music] okay so when I first started playing this the sound quality was pretty much exactly what I expected which was phenomenal I mean listen to this but I wasn't really surprised or I wasn't really dumbfounded in any way because my expectations going in were so high to begin with now keeping in mind that the guitar sounds fantastic it's by a very large margin the most expensive instrument I've ever owned you'd think it would be my number one choice to use for every gig every single gam it would be featured in every video and it would just be sitting there on the wall for completely easy access at any time of the day however that ended up not being the case at all for a few different reasons mainly involving well this neck pickup right here you see my particular taste has always been that I like having the humbucker and the bridge of a strat as opposed to the traditional single coil simply because I've never really vibed with the Strat single coil Bridge pickup sound however the traditional sound of a single single coil neck pickup on a strat that might be my favorite guitar sound ever so when I first picked up this guitar I was emphatically excited about the potential idea of seeing how good this would sound on like a custom shop G&L for the first time but the second I plugged it in actually something really interesting happened I noticed it was actually quite noisy now this became sort of a two-fold problem because a lot of that noise comes with knowing and fully accepting that a lot of that actually has to do with the fact of well the room and knowing that if I was in an ideal scenario in an ideal Studio that was completely treated to deal with that I wouldn't have to deal with that hum but that's not necessarily the world that I live in now on the other end of the argument I actually know of a lot of guitar players who embrace the hum sound they view it as like a part of the character of the tone that you're trying to get and even in a modern world where we have all of these different Innovations especially when it comes to guitars and different pickup options with something like noisess pickups there are a lot of different people that think that they produce a pretty lifeless sound and actually wouldn't mind and would want to embrace some of the hum that comes out of a more traditional pickup style now the idea of embracing the hum and embracing some of that noise from the amp and from the guitar is a very new idea to me I've always fought that wholeheartedly but in wanting to be realistic and thinking back to what a lot of the really early guitar Legends were dealing with guys in the 50s 60s and 7s the claptons the Chuck barries the Jimmy Hendrick's they didn't have all the different luxuries that we have today in terms of the technology of what you could put in a guitar especially back in those days if they were playing with a strat where God forbid a P90 which was what a lot of the guys they were playing with you had to sort of deal with and embrace the noise and I can totally understand if someone's going to make a big purchase like a custom shop wanting to fully Embrace what some of their Heroes might have experienced if that's who influenced them and getting as close to that as possible so I guess the question just becomes then for yourself personally how much noise can you actually handle [Music] okay so the next thing that's really important is actually the Finish now this is something that I wasn't really hipped to until more recently when I got my American vintage two Strat when I discovered that a lot of the reason why people were excited for those is that they actually came with a Nitro finish which is important because that's something that you don't really see on a lot of modern gay guars outside of say I don't know custom shops and learning that information made it super important for me to actually take a look back at this guy to see what we were dealing with now with this guitar you do have a Nitro finish which are generally known to Relic better but in general as a whole not just with custom shops because more guitars in the modern day are trying to do this artificially it really really just comes down to whether or not you like relicing at all this guitar happens to have a heavier Relic job than pretty much any guitar I've ever owned outside of my Telly which now that I'm looking at it simply because of the cracks on the G&L this does seem like a more vintage antique style look but when you really look at the big picture neither of those guitars are even close to as Relic as some of the heavy relics that you see out of different custom shops now for being completely honest we all know that relicing and finishes those aren't things that ever really drastically affect your playing ability or your Technique now you could get into the conversation of ton Woods as Accords to getting sounds but I think when it comes to finishes and relicing it really all matters because let's be honest Custom Shop guitars are expensive they are the most expensive guitars for a reason and if gnl fend or whatever company is charging so much for the custom shop you want to make sure that they get it right price matters a lot with guitars and we're lying to ourselves when we say it doesn't now the thing that I've noticed in 99% of cases when it comes to custom shops specifically is that the people buying these guitars are usually people who are using it on a strictly professional basis like the guys who make their income playing guitar in studios are on the road like the real professional cats or someone who is looking for a lifetime dream guitar like the type of Acts that you'll play regularly on a consistent basis maybe for the next 25 years and with a guitar that you're going to be using for that long a period of time that means that much to you you really are invested in that consistency of build quality especially getting it customized exactly the way you want it now there's one last thing that I really really wanted to address on this it happens to matter more than ever when you get into the world of custom shops and that happens to be the branding and you know what I'm talking about the name on the headstock now just like with the Finish because Custom Shop guitars tend to be more expensive this matters more than ever because you want to bang for your buck you want to get right what you're paying for so this isn't something like with a lot of other guitars when we can just flag off and be like it sounds good so why does the rest matter now my first thought with this idea if someone's spending so much if someone's getting their dream guitar why wouldn't they just go to the big Brands the fenders the Gibsons they obviously have a higher resale value however like the point we were saying before that when someone's getting a custom shop a lot of people they aren't looking for that guitar that they're going to sell two years down the line they're looking for the ideal build of something they're going to keep for the long term and if resale is less of a factor because you plan on keeping this possibly for the rest of your life I think that's where the G&L Fanboys and for the Les Paul as the Heritage Fanboys really start to come to play and where a lot of their marketing can take shape so at the end of the day why does any of this matter and why should I care and I think for a couple specific reasons that I keep thinking about first of which is when I first discovered the guitar and when I first started getting into the world of gear I thought that someone would want a custom shop simply because of the name you're saying that you play a custom shop Guitar it gives you some sort of relevancy or gives the guitar some sort of aume quality which I wouldn't necessarily disagree with even all those years later with all that I've learned there is an inherent quality depending on the factory that it's coming out of that you're assuming you're going to get when you're coming out of a custom shop and none of those assumptions are really a bad thing and the other thing I wasn't really thinking about the potential customization that you get here I was thinking about one overall quality of sound that every guitar player was hypothetically trying to achieve that you couldn't get unless you were looking towards a custom shop Guitar because that was the highest threshold of sound where I didn't necessarily realize that once you start getting into the higher end of guitars the plane of how much better the sound quality increases per $1,000 that you spend kind of goes down and it's less about wanting a particular quality of sound and more about wanting a specific sound and once you know what exactly that is and what specifically you want I think that's where the magic of custom shops really come in and I think the general art of knowing what you want and getting the knowledge of what makes All These Little Things Different that can sometimes take years and years that's what I'm trying to learn right now in studying gear but once you know those things the strp can become way more than a strat and a guitar can become way more than just a guitar because it specifically fit every single detail to exactly what you want it like more than just I wanted an SSH configuration or even specifically I wanted the pickups to sound like this but I needed these specific pickups for this specific sound but at the end of the day I really love this guitar I've loved having it in the times that I've gotten to play it and I do look forward to some future gigs and some future shows with some less noisy rooms where I'll be able to show more of what this thing can do or also just being able to embrace the hum which is something I want to be able to do more and more with different guitars but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter what I think what matters is what you think so please let me know what do you think of custom shop guitars as a whole have you ever owned one what's your dream guitar please let me know in the comments anyway thank you so much for watching this video I've been meaning to make another video on this guitar and really go into depth about custom shops in general for a while but I just hadn't gotten around to it but if you want to know anything more about the gnls 500 custom shop I got it from the homies at Sweetwater the link is in the description make sure to check it out it's one of the best ways to support the channel if that's something you want to do or if you're just curious about any of the other gear like the mics the amps pedals that I use in this video make sure to check out those links also thank you so much to my patrons there's some cool stuff upcoming on there if you want to join the community like And subscribe if you had a good time and most importantly like most important of all have a fantastic day

Channel: Mike Cole

Views: 49,265

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Id: L_7bT8R62ZY

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2024