Is Fender USA Ripping Us Off?

so in a few seconds you're going to see a clip of me playing three different strats i'll put the prices up on screen and what i want you to do is think about based on what you're seeing and hearing which is the best value for money [Music] be so this video is the second in my series on does it matter where your guitar is made last time we looked at the components and quality differences between china mexico and the usa this time we're really gonna zone in on value for money we'll look at the law of diminishing returns to understand why the more you spend the less you get for your money we'll deep dive into the differences between mexican and american fenders to see if the huge price difference is justified and then we'll head out to the shops to see some japanese fenders and how they fit into the mix we'll focus on strats but all the concepts are applicable to other fender guitars and basses now there are two thunder strats which i think represent the best value for money and later on in the video i'll tell you which ones they are and why now before we go any further we should really talk about fenders ever increasing prices so 10 years ago a square affinity strat used to cost about 149 and today it's 199 so that's a 25 increase but in that time uk inflation's been around 29 30 so this is kind of right where you'd expect it to be and also the guitar has had some upgrades recently particularly the tuners on the bridge so this still looks like a pretty good deal as for the mexican guitars 10 years ago the old mexican standard strat used to cost about 429 pounds whereas today the player series which replaced it cost five nine nine so that's a forty percent increase so quite ahead of inflation however there were quite a few upgrades when they moved from the mexican standard to the player series and i've made a whole video on that so there is an argument that this price increase is justifiable however when we look at the american guitars the old american standard strat ten years ago was about eight nine nine whereas today the american professional is up to one five nine nine so that's a huge 78 increase way ahead of inflation now in that time they have updated the spec but it's hard to say there's much in the way of genuine upgrades the main difference is being they tint the neck a bit more and the plastics were a bit more aged but nothing that really justifies that huge 78 increase in price it should be noted that fender have achieved these price increases with some pretty unsavory business practices and in europe at least they have been fined for price fixing the upshot as a buyer is that 10 years ago you used to have to pay about double the price of the mexican to get an american guitar whereas now it's approaching three times as much so this is a real consideration when you're deciding which one to buy [Music] now three things that keep coming up in my comments firstly the resale value of fender usa guitars versus the chinese ones i promise we're going to do that in the next video secondly workers rights and the wages between different countries we're definitely definitely going to do a video on that soon and thirdly the japanese fenders a lot of people saying they're great quality and we're going to go and see some later on in this video for now i really just want to zone in on if you're just looking for a guitar to play not as an investment then where's that best place to put your hard-earned cash to get that best value for money now at the bottom end you can buy a cheap copy on amazon for less than a hundred quid and then at the top end fender custom shop you're talking five grand plus so to help us understand why there's such a huge range in prices let's have a look at the law of diminishing returns so let's use the graphic on screen to see how the law of diminishing returns applies to fender strats so level one at the bottom end you can buy a cheap copy for around 100 pounds or even less on amazon or ebay but even at this bargain price i tend to find a lot of these guitars just aren't worth it because there's a certain level of quality you need to get to for a guitar to be enjoyable to play and at this price there will be corners cut not just in terms of the hardware and components but in terms of the playability moving on to level two then and if we double our money to 200 pounds this is where we can get the square affinity strat so it's double the price but is it double the quality well in my view yes because it might not be the most high-end guitar in the world but i think the square affinity strat is a serious guitar that just does what it needs to do you can learn on it you can record with it you can gig with it and it will get the job done so we've paid an extra hundred pounds for a hundred percent better quality so that's one pound for every one percent increase in quality on to level three and let's double our money again to 400 pounds and now we can get a squire classic vibe strat so it's double the price of the affinity but is it double the quality well in my view no there's lots of things which are much nicer about the classic vibe like the tinting of the neck and all the vintage features on it but it's not twice as good as an affinity so i'm going to say it's 50 better so now we paid an extra 200 pounds for 50 increase in quality so that's four pounds spent for every one percent increase in quality on to level four and let's double our money again now up to 800 pounds and we can get the mexican vintera strat so double the price but is it twice as good as a classic vibe well i think you'll find these two guitars are actually quite similar the vintera definitely has upgrades in terms of the components and materials used but from a practical and playability perspective you won't find a lot in it so i'm going to say the vintera is 20 better so now we've paid an extra 400 pounds for that 20 increase in quality so that's now 20 pounds for every 1 increase in quality and you start to see how this law of diminishing returns really impacts the value you're getting lastly let's double our budget again to sixteen hundred pounds where we can now get the full-blown american professional guitar now this is undoubtedly a slightly nicer guitar to own than the vintera feels a bit more quality but is it twice as good no not at all i'm just going to say 20 better again so now we've paid an extra 800 pounds for that extra 20 so that's 40 pounds for every 1 increase in quality so as you see that as you go up the scale you have to pay more and more for those slight improvements in quality you'd appreciate there's a sweet spot on the scale somewhere where the best value for money guitars are and i'll talk about what those are later in the video [Music] so that's how the law of diminishing returns works in practice for fender strats but why what is it that makes those increments of extra quality cost so much more so let's look at this with a real life example comparing the player series guitar here to the american professional strat now at the moment these are going for five nine nine whereas the american professional is going for one five nine nine so there's a nice round one thousand pound price difference there that's a huge difference for what kind of essentially look on the spec sheet as very very similar products i will break it down into three parts firstly there's the extra effort it takes to make a better product or get a better end result and the analogy i'd use here is painting a wall so say i gave you a wall to paint and i said you've got half an hour get as much as you can done but don't worry about the edges you'll probably get your roller out and in that half an hour you might get 95 of the wall covered now if i said to you i want you to go around the edges with your brush and get a really perfect result there well that extra five percent there might take you an hour to do and it's that attention to detail that time spent which makes a difference between you know a bit of a rush job and a really really good end result what's the extra effort that goes into the u.s guitars versus the mexican models well i can tell you where the u.s guitars really excel is on that feel of the neck and it's clear they spend a bit more time on the sanding on the rolling of the fingerboard edges and possibly on the fret ends as well and all that really adds up to really great filling necks on the fender us guitars but how much is that actually worth in cash terms well a full set up on a guitar these days probably cost about 75 quid which includes you know full fret leveling and they'll tidy up the fret ends and so on and a full refret maybe costs 250 so aftermarket you can get a tech to do quite a lot of work for you know not huge sums of money so i'll go somewhere in the middle and say that extra effort that they're taking working on the guitars in the u.s factory is probably worth about 150 pounds the second part of the equation is upgrades and what manufacturers tend to do is add some upgrades to the spec but then increase the price by a lot and a prime example of this is my apple laptop costs around a thousand pounds now if you want the next model up which has an extra 250 gig of storage that costs 1250 pounds so you're paying 250 quid for an extra 250 gig of storage when we all know you can buy a terabyte hard drive for around 40 quid so it is a genuine upgrade in spec but they're using it to drive a much higher price point and we see this a lot with fender guitars the way i'm going to do this is look online at the price difference between the american and mexico conversions and see if we can work out how much extra value we're getting in that u.s model first things first the american guitar comes with a case whereas this mexican one doesn't come with any case at all so looking on tonemen here we've got the fender deluxe molded strap tele case which is what those american guitars come with i think 129 quid so let's put that on our list so next let's look at pickups and i can't find these exact models online but here for example we've got fender vintera pickups which are used in the mexican guitars 79 pounds and then scrolling down a bit i saw some fender fat 60s custom shop pickups 179 so they're quite high-end american pickups so we could say maybe 100 pounds difference in the pickups onto the bridge then and here we've got fender american strap tremolo 81 pounds i can't find a mexican version but let's just assume the mexican would be say half the price so that's a 40 pound upgrade on the bridge and lastly what about tuners well i think i've seen here somewhere um here we go american standard tuners 40 pounds there again can't find a mexican version but let's assume half the price and call that a 20 pound upgrade on the tuners we probably need to account for the fact that things like the pots and the switch are going to be a bit higher quality on the american and maybe maybe even the woods are slightly more select but without going into all those bits let's just add on an extra 50 quid for those upgrades as well so by my mast it's 129 for the case 100 for the pickups 40 for the bridge 20 for the tuners and 50 for everything else that comes to 339 pounds for all those upgrades we're getting between the mexican and the american and remember this is the retail price of these upgrades fender will be getting them for a lot cheaper and then the third aspect we need to think about is the branding so we all know that like a gucci handbag costs three grand but most of that value is in the brand name and to some extent the same is true on fender guitars so having fender on the headstock as opposed to squire that's a branding aspect which they can up charge for having branding on things like the pickups you know they use these v-mod pickups that's part of a branding that they're trying to charge more for and the word american in the name of the guitar that's a huge part of fenders branding that they are up charging for so we had 150 pounds of extra effort going into making the guitar 339 pounds in upgrades so that leaves us with 511 pounds in unaccounted for money in that thousand pound price difference and really what that comes down to is branding are you willing to pay extra for that fender american brand so looking at these numbers you'd have to conclude that fender could make a guitar the same quality as the american professional but bring the price down by about 500 quid if they took the mexican guitar spent a bit more time on the neck and put some higher quality components in it so why then would you choose to buy the 1600 pound guitar well the fact is if you want it if you want that high quality product you have to pay for it fender have chosen to keep those higher end products within their american production and charge that higher price point my issue with fender usa guitars is not that they're excessively overpriced it's just that when they're great they're great and you really feel you've got your money's worth but when they're not so great they're not so great and if i'm going to spend 1600 pounds i really want a bit more of a guarantee that i'm really going to get a great product but that's just not my experience it's far too mixed you know i've got the made in the usap base which has been really great and i've got exactly the same series exactly the same year the jazz based version which you know the net keeps moving the fret job's not quite as good and i can never really get the action quite where i want it it's that consistency that i really want to see when i'm shelling out 1600 pounds plus [Music] many people have been commenting about japanese vendors so i thought i'd go and see some and this being a video about value for money i'm taking the cheapest bus down to siam now japanese fenders aren't that common in europe these days but here in asia they are a bit easier to find so i'm back at my favorite shop music concept so let's see what they've got first up we have this traditional 60s strat which is very similar to a vintera but it's got a bass for body if that bothers you but this is coming in at 36 000 which is about 850 pounds then we have this red hybrid 2 strat which i guess is like fender japan's standard model these days on paper the specs are very similar to the mexican player series with maybe a couple more vintage features but it's well over 900 pounds this guitar so you're definitely paying a premium for that japanese build and here's the made in japan modern strat hh definitely something different this one 55 000 that's nearly 1300 pounds so you're getting into usa money here so fender japan are definitely making some nice guitars albeit at a fairly high price point they are still using real rosewood which is a bonus and from what i can see here the fit and finish does seem a slight step up from some of the other guitars now look at this jazz bass and the fret work down the binding that's absolutely perfect and this is something that guitar makers often struggle to get right so if you're in the market for a new fender it's definitely worth making the effort to see if you can find any made in japan options out there [Music] so i said earlier that there were two fender strats i think represent the best value for money and those are firstly the classic vibe strap now for me this is a real no excuses guitar by which i mean if you've got this guitar you've got no excuse for playing bad no excuse for sounding bad it really really does a great job now some people take issue with the fact that the finish on the neck is quite thick and the neck is actually a bit thin for a vintage style guitar but i actually quite like the necks on them find it really comfortable to play and i think for the money you're paying you're getting a guitar that can last right from you know starting out up to full-on digging and recording you might say the square affinity strat is quite a bit cheaper so surely that's better value for money but in my opinion it's probably not just because it's nowhere near as enjoyable to play and i think for most people a time will come with the affinity where they want to move on to something better now i have the classic vibe telly and i also have a much older squier standard series telly and i can tell you it's pretty kind of night and day in terms of the amount of enjoyment i get out of playing those two guitars so if you can get the money together for a classic vibe then i really recommend it's worth that step up of course if you're buying the guitar at that price point you need to look out for qc issues and i actually think that buying online at that price level is not a bad idea because you get a chance to look at it in your own home and then send it back if it's not up to scratch the second strat in the fender range which i think is best value for money is this one the player series so for me it's a clear upgrade over the classic vibe and fender have done quite a bit to this series to bring it up to scratch in the last few years to the point where it's now very similar to what the american guitars were 10 years ago so things like gloss fingerboard we've sat in back of the neck we now get arnico 5 pickups which got a lot of clarity in them and then some little modern touches like you know the two-point tremolo here but overall it's a pretty classic strat this which just kind of does everything you want a strat to do and gets you into the fender branded game at a kind of reasonable price point you'll still need to check for qc issues if you're buying one of these in my experience particularly check the neck pocket for any finishing issues check that the fret ends feel good to you but if you find one you like you're definitely going to look the part and sang the part [Music] [Applause] [Music] so then coming back to our overall topic does it matter where your guitar is made in terms of value for money well fender like many other guitar companies does charge a premium depending on where the guitar is built but sometimes going for those really really cheap guitars isn't the best option value for money-wise i should say though if all you can afford is like a squad bullet or an affinity then those are still great options to just get you started and get you playing now if you've got the money and you want the best and you want to go american then of course do it but just do it with your eyes open knowing that you are paying an up charge for that branding and also not every guitar that comes out of that factory is 100 great you still need to do your own qc checks and just because you're spending a lot of money it doesn't mean it's guitar that you're going to fall in love with as i found out several times to my detriment anyway thanks for watching and i'll see you on the next video [Music] you

Channel: Jules Guitar

Views: 381,458

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Id: 7YSDM6sjRR8

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Fri May 13 2022