While it’s definitely possible to get an inexpensive guitar that gets the job done, especially as a beginner, high-quality acoustic guitars mostly tend to be expensive. This fact is particularly true for acoustic guitars that are geared towards highly-skilled seasoned musicians. Some price tags might be baffling for someone who’s just getting familiar with the acoustic guitar world, so you’ll probably wonder why quality acoustic guitars are so expensive.
Quality acoustic guitars are expensive because they are made from rare tonewood, require a lot of knowledge and skill to make, and their production is usually not outsourced. The brand name also plays a big role, as a popular brand name can greatly inflate the price.
This article will explain all the influences that affect the high price tags of quality acoustic guitars. We’ll also go over the sound differences between cheap and expensive acoustic guitars and discuss whether buying an expensive guitar is even worth it.
Related: why is your acoustic guitar so quiet? 6 reasons and why is your acoustic guitar so quiet? causes and fixes.
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1. Tonewoods Are Not Cheap
You can’t just take any piece of wood and use it to make a guitar. I mean, you could do that, but the results probably wouldn’t be anything to write home about. The types of wood used for acoustic guitars are carefully chosen because of their acoustic properties.
We call these woods tonewoods. Luthiers choose them because of the following properties.
- Hardness: This refers to how hard the wood is, literally speaking. Hardness accentuates higher frequencies, so a guitar made from harder wood will typically have a higher sound.
- Flexible strength: Stronger and more flexible wood receives more energy from the strings. This makes it produce a wider dynamic range, along with more volume, clarity, and projection.
- Density: The density of the wood determines how the energy from the strings is absorbed. Dense wood absorbs less energy, particularly above the mid-range, which results in more influence from the wood. Less dense wood absorbs more energy, which gives a warmer and better balanced mid-range.
More than anything else, tonewood is important because of its resonance. In simple words, resonance refers to how well the guitar top vibrates when the strings are plucked. Wood that’s too stiff won’t vibrate well enough, but wood that’s not sturdy enough will degrade over time, leading to lower sound quality.
High-quality tonewoods are increasingly hard to come by. In some cases, it can be difficult to find lower-quality tonewoods. But if you’re looking to build an acoustic guitar that’s as good as money can buy, you want the best of the best.
The best of the best tonewoods are scarce. As we all know, scarcity inflates prices, which means that guitars are more expensive for the manufacturers to produce. This eventually adds to the price you pay at checkout because otherwise, guitar manufacturers would lose money.
Indian rosewood is a good example of this. This wood has been used for quite a long time in guitar production. Luthiers make fretboards, sides, and backs from it, for example. It is common on high-end acoustic guitars because of its amazing performance.
However, its use has been heavily regulated, meaning it’s much more difficult to import enough of it. Therefore, it has become scarce, and thus expensive. Cheaper alternatives exist, but they don’t get the job done so well.
Scarcity becomes an even bigger problem when it comes to old-growth wood. This is wood from forests that haven’t been harvested for at least one hundred years. Such forests are not so common, so their wood is incredibly rare.
However, it’s questionable whether this has a noticeable influence on a guitar’s tone. This might be more of a way to hike up the price of a guitar rather than to affect its sound in any meaningful way.
Some companies like Martin are also dedicated to sourcing their wood ethically and sustainably. While this is surely commendable, it makes scarce materials even scarcer. This is one of the factors that lead to their dizzyingly high prices.
2. Guitars Are Not Made Easily
Building a high-quality guitar takes rare skills and years of experience. This is particularly true for handmade guitars, and most of the super-expensive guitars you see are not mass produced, but handmade instead.
A luthier with decades of experience will have experience and knowledge that’s hard to put a price tag on. The instrument you’ll get from such a craftsman will probably be unmatched by most other things you’ll ever play. Since their skills are rare, and each instrument they make is unique, those instruments will naturally come at a steep price.
With a handmade guitar, you’ll probably get a guitar made specifically for you and strictly according to your needs and preferences. No matter what product is in question, such services don’t come cheap.
While the skills luthiers have are rare, and their guitars are thus much more expensive for that reason, this doesn’t mean that factory-made guitars are made cheaply. Even the workers who mass-produce guitars have skills that are not super common, so they have to be paid accordingly, at least ideally.
Even though CNC machines have drastically sped up and simplified the process of guitar making, we still can’t build a guitar overnight. Plus, the workers who operate those machines are always in demand, and manufacturers have to try to keep them in their companie