As a guitar journalist during the 1990s, part of my job entailed reviewing guitars, amplifiers and so on. Over the years, I saw many examples of bad practices from the manufacturing industry – although, I hasten to add, this was limited to only a very few individuals; overall the industry delivers what it promises. My fellow writers and I had to exercise extreme diplomacy on occasion, sometimes refusing to review an instrument where the workmanship was very poor, choosing to return it from whence it came rather than give it a public stoning in the magazine. I suppose, in a way, we were policing the industry – and sometimes fell out with it in the process. I remember being made to apologise for a review I wrote about an amplifier which I (and everybody else in the office, for that matter) thought was lacklustre and uninspiring. The company concerned complained to our publishers and, just to keep their chairman happy, I had to go and say sorry. I still stand by what I said, though – and the amp was soon discontinued. You work it out. On another occasion, we were sent a guitar by a company which said that it was ‘hand made’ in their workshops. We took it apart (something they didn’t expect us to do) and found another manufacturer’s trademark on he neck. Not hand made at all, then… A builder once brought us a guitar which retailed at around £1.5k and we found that the wood he’d used for the neck was ‘green’ which means it hadn’t been allowed to dry out properly beforehand. This would undoubtedly have caused the neck to warp very quickly when in use – and so we returned it to him, recommending he change his supplier.

Sometimes we’d see instruments with ‘revolutionary’ new designs. Once, a guitar came in with a boast from the manufacturer that it had a plate of aircraft grade aluminium between the guitar’s neck and body, to ‘increase sustain’. Aircraft aluminium is designed to reduce vibration and is about the dullest metal available, acoustically speaking. If they had used bell brass, then fair enough, it might have made a difference. But bell brass is expensive, heavy and not quite as ‘Top Gun’ as something used in fighter aircraft. Needless to say, it didn’t work…

There was a phase when some manufacturers would talk up the spec of a guitar like a bunch of guileful estate agents. Debates raged as to what actually constituted ‘hand made’ and so terms like ‘hand assembled’ started to appear. You don’t need a degree in etymology to see the distinction there! Another play on words involved coming clean about the exact site of an instrument’s manufacture. There was once a very famous range of guitars that we knew perfectly well was made in a factory in Japan, but the actual instruments bore the address of the US manufacturer. The scam was to fly the parts out to the US and have them assembled there. Apparently then it’s quite legal to say that the instrument was ‘made in the USA’. Ahem. One of the best ploys was to make the body woods used in manufacture sound exotic when, in fact, they weren’t. We started seeing ‘laminated pine’ on technical readouts. Laminated pine is just a fancy term for plywood…

You may think that plywood has to represent the lowest of the low as far as guitar body woods are concerned – but you’d be wrong. There was a range of guitars introduced at one point where the bodies were made from sawdust. Seriously, they got hold of a lot of sawdust, mixed it up with glue and moulded the bodies like you would a jelly. I’m okay with people trying new ideas, but saying that the body was made from ‘a brand new compound’ was out of order in my opinion, given the circumstances. The guitars were absolutely awful, incidentally.

I used to receive phone calls from enthusiastic young players who wanted to upgrade their budget instruments with top of range pick-ups. I usually advised them against it, as the pick-ups would frequently cost more than the guitar had originally, once fitted. And they would probably have been disappointed that their £150 plywood (sorry, ‘laminated pine’) guitar didn’t sound like a top of the range Paul Reed Smith just because they’d put £300 worth of pick-ups in it.

So next time you see a guitar that is ‘hand made from a totally new compound with a resonating metal plate under the neck to increase sustain’ you might just want to back away…