ACOUSTIC GUITAR'S TENTH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL

The New, Affordable American Guitar

By Richard Johnston

 

With the demise of the last of the big guitar factories in Chicago some 30 years ago, where hundreds of thousands of Kays and Harmonys took shape, American guitar manufacturing began to aim almost exclusively at the high-end consumer. Inflation in the 1970s took its toll, and the inexpensive versions of big-name American guitars were discontinued because they weren't profitable to build or market. That fact came back to haunt American guitar manufacturers during the Big Guitar Slump of the early 1980s, when high-end guitar sales slowed to a trickle and imported guitars ruled the lower and intermediate price ranges.

  

A Fadal CNC machine a Taylor

d Johnston

Even as recently as ten years ago, a guitar player shopping for a new instrument in the intermediate price range didn't have a lot to choose from. Guitars from Japan, which had long been mainstays in that portion of the market, were rising in price dramatically as the yen rose in relation to the American dollar. If you wanted a good beginner's guitar, imports from other Asian countries would do just fine, but guitars at the intermediate price level were likely to be just fancier versions of less expensive models. And from there, prices rose too steeply.

Ironically, this huge gap in the price structure coincided with a tremendous surge in the popularity of the flattop acoustic guitar. Hot new instrumentalists, singer-songwriters, and back-to-basics country stars all made the acoustic guitar an icon of the '90s. Good grief, even rock stars were going acoustic! It was almost like the '60s all over again.

In the upper end of the guitar market there was no shortage of choices for buyers inspired to rediscover their acoustic roots. Martin, Taylor, Gibson, Guild, and Larrivée all offered seemingly endless variations of the over-$1,000 steel-string guitar. The guitar market was growing like mad, but the only customers being courted were experienced, second-time buyers who were increasingly overserved. It was clear that the room for real growth was in the middle price ranges, as that's where new customers were storming music store doors only to find limited choices they could afford.

There was a revolution quietly going on in woodworking technology as this old-fashioned marketing dance of currency exchange rates and labor costs was taking place. CAD/CAM (computer aided design/manufacturing) was a new phrase to woodworkers, and the functional end of this new field was CNC (computer numerical control) machines that could turn a block of mahogany into a guitar neck without much intervention by human hands. In fact, the CNC machine could carve guitar parts while the guitar maker was eating lunch.

Of course humans had to design the program that ran the machine, plotting coordinates in 3-D on a computer so those powerful cutters left a guitar neck behind when they were finished, but CNCs were the biggest advancement in guitar making since power tools. They made it possible to have all the parts of the guitar go together with far greater accuracy, since jigs and fixtures as well as guitar parts could be manufactured off the same precise model conveniently stored on a hard drive. More importantly, greater accuracy in machining the component parts resulted in faster assembly.

Bob Taylor began experimenting with CAD/CAM in 1989, and he was one of the first to harness this new technology for the guitar industry. The new manufacturing methods made possible by CNC enabled the Taylor company to approach the challenge of building a less expensive acoustic guitar from a whole new angle. Rather than search for cheaper labor in order to build a guitar for less money, why not delegate the truly monotonous tasks to a CNC machine and save human labor for assembling and finishing the instrument?

Taylor fired a highly competitive salvo across the bow of other acoustic guitar manufacturers when it debuted the 410 model in 1991. Sure, it had a low-gloss finish, but all the woods were solid, and the 410 even sported an ebony fretboard and bridge. Since the list price was only $999, the street price was far below the previous cost of similar guitars made in North America. The 400 series allowed Taylor to roll out the welcome mat for guitarists of all stripes who couldn't spend over $1,000 for an acoustic guitar. For manufacturers, the search for cheaper labor in foreign countries was replaced by a mad dash for state-of-the-art woodworking technology that was being developed right here at home.

To his credit, Bob Taylor was ready to share what he'd learned with other manufacturers who wanted to try the CNC advantage, and sure enough, during the rest of the '90s there was a proliferation of low-priced guitars from other major guitar companies.

Martin entered the intermediate-priced acoustic guitar market with the D-1 in 1993. The company then expanded many of that model's time-saving construction features to both less expensive models (DM and D-15) and to the more expensive and wide-ranging 16 series as well. Infused with new capital after being purchased by Fender, Guild was soon back in the game, and Larrivée also weighed in with simplified, low-priced mahogany guitars like the D03. Even Gibson added a workingman's variation of a few of its most popular acoustic models. Suddenly buyers had lots more choices in guitars with street prices of about $600 and up. Could prices get any lower?

One Korean manufacturer responded to these dramatic changes in the guitar market by building its own plant in Tacoma, Washington, in 1995. Young Chang's Tacoma division, which is now independent of its keyboard-manufacturing parent, has come up with some radical designs as well as a wide range of traditional acoustic guitars. The Chief series, with its offset soundhole and Fender-type neck attachment, brought highly innovative construction techniques at entry-level prices.

Martin's latest effort to reach beginners has been the X series, guitars with bodies made entirely of high-pressure laminates similar to Formica. Although sales of the original DX have been sluggish, the newest version, with a solid spruce top ($649), may prove to be a winning combination. Meanwhile Taylor went after the beginners' market with the Big Baby, an almost full-sized version of its popular travel and kid's guitar that debuted in 1996. At a list price of only $428 including gig bag, this model will make serious inroads into the beginners' guitar territory once held almost exclusively by imported models.

Of course CNC machines shouldn't be given all the credit for these low-priced models by companies that formerly made only expensive guitars. Some of this trend is driven by intense competition for market share and other age-old business concepts. Yet there's no denying that new technology changed the rules, making innovation more important than labor costs. As a result, North American guitar companies now have a much stronger position in foreign markets as well as here at home. The real winner, however, is anyone shopping for a beginning- to intermediate-level guitar. With all the choices available today, there really is an acoustic guitar out there for everyone.

Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine's Tenth Anniversary issue, July 2000, No. 91. That issue features an extensive collection of stories, essays, and articles about the artists, trends, guitars, gear, and music that defined the 1990s.


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