Like most electric guitar gear nerds, I look forward to the Winter NAMM show… or rather, watching YouTube clips from all of my favorite gear channels.  There’s always awesome coverage, and you can see what the big buyers (like Andertons) think are the most important items.  After countless hours of video watching, I offer the following summary:

  1. Gibson has no serious interest in the low/medium market.  They’ve priced themselves out of the running, and if you want a Gibson for around a grand, you’re getting a Les Paul Special Tribute, meaning a slab body stripped down version of a stripped down guitar.  Gibson and Fender are both pricing themselves up much faster than inflation, and I think they’re both wrong – players will start buying more used and less new, which means they’ll have to jack their prices up higher, which will cause more players to look elsewhere…
  2. Epiphone is the new “low end Gibson.”  The new Epiphone series looks great, like all Epiphones.  Epiphone pricing seems pretty consistent and fair – I think they’re a decent value.  Despite a lot of hint dropping, there doesn’t appear to be a new Phil X Epiphone model, but when that comes out, it could be huge.  Epiphone is still pushing their “ProBucker” pickup line as being something special, but it isn’t.  Still, the dirty secret is that putting the same pickups in an Epiphone Les Paul and a Gibson Les Paul will reveal that there’s not a world of difference.  Outside of the guitarist world, no one gives a shit what you’re playing.
  3. Oh look, some new guitar pedals.  The pedal market is beyond oversaturated and it’s headed for a giant crash one of these days.  I couldn’t care less about a new dirt pedal or a new chorus pedal.
  4. The Line 6 POD GO at $450 looks like what the HX Stomp should have been.  I think Line 6 listened to what people really wanted and they built it.  I’m very interested in one of these myself, to replace my ancient Floor POD Plus that I still gig with in my solo “one man band” gigs.  There are two dirty Helix secrets: one is that the Line 6 modeling has gotten slightly better since the POD 2 days, but it’s not a huge leap, and two, that you can get great sounds out of a Helix once you’ve loaded your own IR cab files.  You can load them in the GO, which I expect to be able to get in early May.  THIS is why you never jump on the new modeling technology right away.  Hang out long enough and it’ll get much cheaper.
  5. PRS keeps showing Gibson how it should be done.  Between $999 and $1,500 you can get a good S2 American-made PRS guitar.  But let’s be fair for a minute: the S2 Satin 24, which I own, is about the same price as the Gibson Les Paul Special Tribute, which actually comes with much better pickups… but the S2 Satin 24 is a better looking and better playing guitar.  PRS gets it, but they’re still putting cheapie pickups and parts in most of the S2 series.  But PRS has the SE line, made overseas, and it’s very good for the money and has the PRS name (as opposed to Epiphone.)
  6. Meanwhile, the other big name, Fender, has the American Ultra series and the ugly ass Acoustasonic Strat bastard.  Yawn.  The Mustang and Champion lines continue to get smoked by the BOSS Katana line, and they’re selling modeler amp versions of their tube amp counterparts starting at… $899?  And the Mexican made “low end” Strat is now $699?  Or you can buy a used old MIM for $350.
  7. Lots of other interesting stuff not related to guitars, like what Moog is doing, but I won’t address all of that here.  Other than that, lots of small refinements and price markups going on.

I do understand capitalism.  A thing is worth what someone will pay for it.  If you do some easy fuzzy math and pretend 5% inflation, you could argue that Fender’s $500 guitar last year should sell for $525 this year.  But that doesn’t factor in things like improvements in technology and automation.  Still, it’s interesting to see that guitar prices keep rising and there are more and more pedals being made each year, but eventually things could come crashing down.  I think there’s a massive untapped “budget” market out there.  I think Fender could sell a metric ton of brand new MIM $500 Strats if they made them, and Gibson could sell a ton and a half of $1,000 Les Paul Studio Tribute models if they made them.

I’m mostly waiting for the complete takeover of digital when it comes to effects and amps.  Today’s $2,000 Kemper is tomorrow’s $200 Line 6 product.  I mean, not really, but technically does march at a different pace than everything else.  There’s only so much you can do to make a speaker less expensive while still sounding great.  Same with a tube head.  But the entire Kemper rig will fit on a $20 chip twenty years from now.  Today’s $200 “toy” keyboards have better sounds than keyboards from 1983 costing over a grand.  Tech changes all the rules.

Overall, I am most fired up about the POD GO.  I was looking at getting a Stomp, but now I’m going to wait.  For my needs, the GO is a better featured product for two hundred bucks less.  In the meantime, I’m going to play my MIM Strats and my 2013 Gibson Les Paul Tribute models and enjoy them, and feel fortunate that I don’t need to rebuy them now.