The world of guitar is full of Bullshit, a lot of bullshit, so much I'm surprised there's not a requirement for a stable-boy any time the NAMM convention comes to town. The amount of bullshit spewed against "cheap gear" is astounding. Since I'm disspelling a myth though...we're going to get the FUD out of the way first (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).

The Electric Guitar has always worked the same way since the Rickenbacker frying pan: a plank of wood with a neck with frets on it is plugged into an electrical box with a speaker called an Amplifier. The picker picks a string, it disturbs a magnetic field around the pickup(s) - blocks of magnets and hair thin wire - which in turn generates electrical current at the apropriate timbre and pitch. This current is then sent through a bunch of switches and potentiometers for filters, and then sent through the cable, to a guitar amplifier that takes millivolts and milliamps of current from the guitar, and turns it into a very very loud 5-200 Watt version of that same sound produced - and then spits it out of a paper cone with hair thin wire in it called a SPEAKER.

That's the gist of it in a nutshell.

But for some reason, people seem to think that you need to have a $2000 plank of expensive, exotic woods capable of enacting the Lacey Act 10x over, and then plugging it via a 50 karat gold contact cable with space age Neutrik connectors into a amplifier designed by a Autism addled electrical engineer with a 8 year degree who just happens to play. And of course, only 5 guys in the world have the amplifier in question, and so the guy has about the price of a brand new Tesla wrapped up in a guitar rig owned by a man whose income is even lower than mine in a lot of cases.

Now, I'm not at all denying if you pay more for a piece of gear it (should be) better than something cheaper. What I am denying though, is that it's a requirement that everyone play a $2600 Hoboken Limba Limed Korina Shibuya Wood piece of wall art into a series of pedals built by Jimi Hendrix's old guitar tech, into a Dumble in order to be taken seriously as a player. It's a bloody joke, and many famous guys "made it" on way cheaper gear".

Plus "Cheap" Is subjective. Cheap to me, or the closest thing to it, is the $69.99 Amazon guitar at the top of the page. Cheap to someone who plays an $800 Fender Strat, is anything Squier Affinity and below. Cheap to most of the cork-sniffin gear-snob types, is anything that doesn't look like the furniture guy down the street was on shrooms for an entire day.

The point I'm trying to make is a guitar is a guitar, a pedal is a pedal, and an amp is an amp. And all should be accepted until proven unacceptable by the person who actually PLAYS that gear.

Now, ol' CreepingNet here has his own issues with some gear, but guess what, I don't carry mwy own personal biases as judgement over onto other people's gear because it's cheaper or more expensive than what I use. I have almost everything from Aria to Zion, I've touched guitars that cost $0.00 all the way to nearly $10K, and guess what - I can't justify spending $10K on a guitar, nobody really can, unless they are rich, and impressing their rich "friends" with "rich things". And even then, I'd more than likely rather have the cheaper version still as a rich man, and maybe instead save that money to contribute to my own personal retirement fund.

So here's the truth about cheap gear overall - what you don't pay for with money, is what you pay for in personal labor getting it into playing condition. It's a bit like buying fruit at the supermarket. A good, ripe, $150.00 Stratocaster copy really does make me happy...because it's cheap, easy to get parts for, reliable, easily replaced, and most of all, I like Strats. A nice sounding Behringer Pedal makes me a lot more comfortable than forking out $300 on the original version made by someone else whose name is now mixed up in a sea of speculation by gear nerds. My Bugera 333XL has played hundreds of shows and sounds awesome, as does the $114 Peavey VTM cabinet I bought when people were still shitting all over Peavey.

Actually, let's talk about Peavey for a moment. People, even today, shit all over Peavey because - and they WERE an American company for fuck sake, like Gibson, like Fender - but unlike Gibson or Fender, they rarely probed you for "Brand recognition"...unless Eddie Van-Halen was at the factory I guess. The truth was, Peavey gets shit on because their Predator Strat copy was only, oh, I dunno, $210 whereas a base-model Fender at the time was TWICE that. But let's look at a Predator. You got a decent, mid-tier guitar with decent electronics, a whammy that stayed in tune, that had excellent playability out of the box. So I don't see what's not to like. Sure, their amps used plastic jacks, but what do you expect from a $150.00 amplifier. Now EVERYONE uses plastic jacks, even Marshall.

So let's say I bought on of those Peavey Predators - say I went back in time to the Guitar Shoppe and bought one brand new. I seriously would just do a full setup, maybe a fret level at worst, and be fine playing that thing live. And I don't mean just playing pop or grunge covers, I mean the full on whammy shredder stuff I like to do. Maybe I'd wire the tone control into the bridge pickup to get some thickness via capacitance - but I'd still have to do that with a Vintage-style Fender Strat at $1500 anyway - so that doesn't count.

This trickles into components to build a guitar.....

I recently bought 2 necks from Yinfente in China for the cost of 1/2 of a Warmoth neck. The necks I got were not the level of quality I'd expect from a Warmoth product - understandably -b ut they for sure were not bad. I got a properly constructed neck, with just a few guffaws here and there. One neck had the inlays off-center.....so what. It's INLAYS, all Inlays do is show you where the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 12th, 15th, 17th, 19th, and 21st, and maybe 24th (if equipped) frets are. THey have ZERO Bearing on the rest. That same neck just needed the nut end of the fretboard leveled with a file - took me about 10 minutes and it was PERFECT. Both necks needed fret dressing, but to be honest, whose going to do that on a $50 neck? That's how you save, I saved money due to a small guffaws in precision that I Could correct myself in a total of about 1 hour of work maximum. Now the necks feel as good as my Jag-Stang's neck - a neck I hold in high regard, so much I was willing to put down $250 on a ripped up Music Master to get a second guitar with that style of neck.

Let's talk about pickups. Most cheap pickups can and WILL cut the mustard. Actually, some really cheap pickups ARE my favorites.....see above. First is the Samick X14 high output as found in my Memphis 302HB strat (around 12.5K Ceramic Magnet clone of a DiMarzio Super Distortion) , next is the Harmony H801/802 guitar pickups I call "Anti-Foils", then is the 13K Humbucker in my STriker 100ST! I also really like the Duncan Designed pickups in my Kramer and Jagmaster guitars.

What you're paying for with most pickups - is brand recognition. Basically, the name of a man who flew on the same Boeing 707 with Steve Miller, or had brunch with Aerosmith to sell Whitman and Perry on some custom set, gives free pickups to Metallica, or have Earnie Bailey's phone number. Everyone wants to touch a star or fame at least once (I'll talk about that one later), but that's like eating Fish And Chips made for you personally by Gordon Ramsay - a once in a lifetime thing. You're totally fine getting fish and chips somewhere less expensive. Hell, I have plenty of name-brand pickups in my quiver...all the big ones - like Seymour Duncan (Fender Jaguar), DiMarzio (Hondo Paul Dean II), and EMG (Jag-Stang) - and yes, they don't squeal, sound great, and sound amazing, but guess what, they share the roost with a host of cheaper instruments and pickups that are every bit as good. Heck, my home built Jazzmaster has one official FENDER pickup in it, and one BOTIQUE Canadian hand-made Pickup Wizards pickup in it - but guess what, the guy in Canada sold me the pickups for a VERY reasonable price. IIRC, I think I read somewhere he had something to do with Tone Rider....and Tone Rider is who Joe Keithly, Odyssey Guitars, and PAUL DEAN freakin' use. And their pickups are not that expensive either. However, I'm not sure many in the USA have heard of either brand.

So where's the "what you don't pay for" on pickups? Usually Wax Potting - that's it. And guess what, I already have the tool to do it, and the hardest part about it is waiting for the bloody wax to melt! That's it. I literally use a L'oreal Wax Bath for skin therapy on your hands for potting pickups. Mom bought it for me as a birthday gift 15 years ago, and I've used it on ALL of my guitars, including some name-brand pickups that went microphonic after awhile. Ever wondered why I can stand 5" from a speaker with the Hondo Paul Dean and have infinite sustain with no squeal (or why I'm not putting a Veyz Sustainiac clone in it) - well, there's your answer.

That's not to say that SOME parts that are cheap are crap. Cheap switches mean you have to solder fast enough not to melt the lugs off, some cheap pickguards have literal photographic adhesive labels for the pattern, with a huge sheet of packing tape on top for the glossy surface that peels off. I have a profound hatred of open back and "Diamondback" tuners after having owned a lot of cheap guitars with them and replacing them with sealed gear units or Kluson Revolutions. But if you can make that stuff work to your advantage somehow - more power to you - I'm not going to make you feel like less of a guitarist for having them, you might even be better than me at it, and that's more than fine. And these nightmares don't apply to ALL of these cheap parts - just SOME of them.

Let's talk about a cheap guitar as a whole. The most common problems I see on a modern cheap guitar is that - since these are mostly milled by CNC - they are just not well setup. Sure, there might be some minor woodworking things to mess with, but usually that's not a problem or so minor it's not worth it. The main issues usually are the nut is cut too high (easy fix), the neck might need a shim because production runs changed necks used and now the neck sits too low for my taste, the pickups might need wax potted, and the fretwork needs leveled, crownd, and dressed (I can do that myself too). And guess what, it's not just cheap guitars that need this, I consider anything $500+ expensive. And even then, even your $5000 guitar from a hand-made botique Luthier on the same level as PRS, Dan Smith, John Cruz will eventually need these issues addressed if you play it a lot.

Older cheap instruments have more problems, ie improperly placed bridges, poorly milled nuts, low output pickups, terrible tuners. And these guitars, typically, sell for so cheap, they make an EXCELLENT test mule to learn how to work on your own guitar with. It's amazing how far you can take the humble little Harmony H804 with some careful work. I suggest, if you want to get started in this, go get a $69.99 Amazon special, or nab up some old "boat paddle" guitar (Harmony H804, Kay KE-17, Gremlin, Jaguar (not the fender guitar), Memphis A-2 series, Hondo II Strat Copies, etc), and just get cracking learning the fine art of working on this stuff with one of those. They might surprise you.

Let's talk about cheap pedals, because this is some of the biggest horseshit....

I bought Behringer Pedals when I started in Smokin' 66' with the intent or replacing them later, well guess what, over 15 years later, and I'm still using them. They never broke, they are not noisy, they work fine. I paid sometimes as little as $15 a pedal for some of these. Honestly, I've replaced more EHX, BOSS, and DOD stuff than I ever have Behringer.

I build my own pedals because the cost of some of this stuff is too stupidly overpriced. You mean for a single transistor fuzz, you're asking $255? Then why am I able to roam to Vetco and end up with enough to make a run of 10-30 of these pedals for like....less than half of that. Actually, that's what got me started. The Fazz Fuzz was about $30 in parts, and the Skullfuzz was only about $20 in parts. But both pedals have more features and sounds than some of these booteek pedals do.

And don't just take it from me....there's PLENTY of rock legends who used cheap stuff...

Before Kurt Cobain - Fender Jaguars were $80 - don't believe me, look up Ric Ocasek - yep, even THE CARS singer was using CHEAP guitars. J.Mascius plays a Jazzmaster because he could not afford a sTratocaster. Edward Van-Halen build his own guitar for $150.00 out of premium Charvel parts with the rest of the parts coming from guitars he bought for cheap and had experimented on. Paul Dean literally took a smashed up Stratocaster and put it together with some of the cheapest ingridients you could find in Rural Canada and literally created a unique voice for himself with it.

Heck, before Jack White - that MXR Blue Box pedal was probably only $50 used. Seems like everyone in the eighties had a Pro Co Rat at one point, now they are one of those expensive pedals. Apparently Eddie, despite being poor in the 70's, had enough Ecoplexes to fill a bomb containment unit - now you'd be hard pressed to find one that's affordable. Paul Dean apparently saw less enough value in the Roland RE-301 Chorus Echo to stick one in lieu of a Preamp in a Marshall for "Take me to the Top". About the only pedal that survived price-wise was the Boss DS-1 Distortion that Kurt Cobain used, and that's probably because in a clever move, BOSS realized they could really profit MASSIVELY at a affordable price on that pedal.

And amps? Ricky Wilson of the B-52's was using Silvertone amps when everyone was drooling over Marshall Plexis with inline Variacs. Some people made due with old PA Amplifiers found in the school or church podium, or some kind of general purpose amplifier. Paul Dean wrote all the early Loverboy catalog patching into a Ghetto Blaster - his words, not mine. Kurt Cobain used whatever he could grab....heck, the producer of The Cure's first album had to practically FORCE Robert Smith to buy a Jazzmaster to put a Wards Top Twenty pickup in because Smith like that pickup a lot....I could keep going all day.

And all these guys are rich and famous. Maybe for some of the gear snobs out there - maybe take that ego and redirect it into something constructive...like say....making YOUR OWN story instead of rote-ly following someone else's life story. I know this sounds rich coming from a guy who owns two guitars designed by two fo the guys I mentioned above more than once, but you don't see me trying to live off how well I can cover "Come AS You Are" or "Working for the Weekend" - I got my own catalog to curate and take care of (albeit I'm a bit lazy about it).