The more I work on electric guitars and amps, the more I realize that the guitars, pretty much across the board, can all be made to play about the same. Which is to say that barring a twisted neck, I can make any guitar play as well as someone would like. I think that guitars differ mainly in construction. Solid body, chambered, hollow, semi-hollow; pickup type; and scale length. Other than that, I think most of the tone search is a load of hooey. The primary factor in a guitar is the set-up, and the neck profile preferred by the user. And the set-up is not really a big deal. Even make the nut is really straight forward once you do a couple.
I'm building a tele style guitar. I think the learning curve in building a guitar is way, way steeper. My first amp took a little troubleshooting, but at the very core of it, it's just a circuit. It works or it doesn't. Making a guitar takes so much individual effort, just to shape the neck, to sand each contour, and build the templates. Nowadays a lot of guitars are probably C and C milled, so this doesn't apply. I think you can take any Squier, Turser, Ibeenhad, Johnson and make it play as good as a Suhr, if you give it a fret level and a good set-up. You won't get the same attention to detail, fit and finish, but none of that effects the tone in any meaningful way that isn't absolutely dwarfed by the amp circuit. So for a guitar, if you wanna drop the scratch, you can get something uber customized, with cold rolled steel trem blocks and pressed saddles, etc. But you really aren't gaining much, IMHO. I just played a '69 Tele this weekend (same guy who has the ampeg), and I'd take my '94 MiM Squier Series Tele over it every single day and 2x on Sundays. Mojo in guitars is a pile of BS. It's wood wrapped in a plastic coating. There's no mojo in there. The mojo in a guitar is in the fingers and in how the player feels about his guitar. So that's tough to quantify. You can also probably gather that I'm not too keen on expensive guitars. I think about $500 will get you all you could ever need in a guitar, and $150-250 will also get you something today, that is more consistent in quality, and probably better too, than the stuff they built in the 50's and 60s. The $150 Turser is probably a better instrument than the one that Jimi Hendrix played. Seriously.
To the extent that you can define mojo at all, I think you can do it with an amp more than a guitar. You can tweak resistors to get different response, you can try different tubes to get different tone and response, you can vary all these things in a repeatable way. If you are patient enough, you can dial in any amp to what a player wants (provided they can communicate effectively what it is they want, and are open to an iterative approach).I've worked on a more than a few amps. I've built 1 from the ground up, and I have another one in progress. I can hear the difference in components, such as capacitors. (but the difference comes from the value of the cap, not the material). In an amp, certain fit and finish aspects do matter, like lead dress, transformer quality, and wire management.
I find leveling a fretboard to be a pretty simple undertaking compared to changing out tube sockets. So the amp ends up costing you more throughout its life. A friend just dropped off an old, old Ampeg for me to look at. It's not working right. It's got 7 or 8 tubes, IIRC, and it's gonna need a retube. A couple are gonna have to be NOS. It's gonna cost a couple hundred bucks in tubes, plus I gotta remove the death cap, replace the electrolytics, and wire it for 3 conductor. That's gonna cost some cash, too. On a guitar, you just need to change the strings, and if you play the living sh!t out of it, a refret. So in the end, I think you pay more for an amp.
What does this all mean? I have no idea, but surely I've laid out something worth discussing.
oke
