Buying a at least RS 30,000 classical guitar in Chennai

EDIT: No hijacking, I'll create a new thread.

 

K, so it IS a b00tique segment then, with no easy maintenance.

The reason why I talked about not carrying t00bs is because I read about them getting bust every now and then.

I had a Philips t00b radio at my place. It got bust after 10 years of usage.
But then that t00b was used as a hi-fi amp. Used in the linear range, where the t00b is designed to intend to work.

So I have my apprehensions about using t00bs for non-linear overdriving of signal - they will become less reliable than t00b hi-fi amps.


Flood, actually I don't prefer cundums, I don't like the feeling or the sensation.
Plus its feels like a "chore" to do when you are turned on.

 

PS: Pacifist, though I didn't realize it earlier, but you are coming across as a t00b-fanatic in your post, who is totally intolerant to any questioning.

 

I wanted to let you know that "tubes bust earlier than SS" is not the case since, usually, tube power-stages are more forgiving than Solid state in case of an impedance mismatch, which is the most common cause of frying an amplifier.

So really, which question of yours was I "intolerant" to?

As to your second post, Spare parts would be available only where they are in demand. The Indian market is not yet exposed to tube amplifiers for guitars the way US and European markets are. So naturally, the availability of tubes would be lesser in India.
Actually, I should have mentioned that Ansar of BE3 could also be a good source for tubes.

"So I have my apprehensions about using t00bs for non-linear overdriving of signal - they will become less reliable than t00b hi-fi amps."
Now these are the kind of statements I am intolerant to. There is a vast body of knowledge regarding how tubes work. Their application for a guitar-amplifier have been studied since mid-1900s. We have umpteen number of individuals (amp-makers, amp enthusiasts, tube-engineers) who have reduced it more or less to exact science (barring the elusive aspect of mojo).

Within context of this knowledge, any "apprehensions" are, least to say, dumbfounded. The longevity of tubes cannot be predicted individually, since it is affected by the conditions of usage of every single tube, if that's what you mean to ask.
You are free to discuss the facts underlying tube-based amplifiers and how they would behave under speicifc conditions of usage. But sorry to say, you having "apprehensions" does not have any valid meaning or implications. It would be a good time to register yourself on forums and start asking questions, so you are more aware of this particular method of amplifying a guitar signal.

 

@alpha1:

99.98% of my tube collection (not small by any means) was bought in india. i refuse to talk about my sources though.

i'm surprised your tube radio was bust - i had a telefunken tube radio in germany, all original parts and tubes. it worked fine till the day i sold it, and i suspect it works fine even now (although cap changes msut happen soon). i dated it back to the early 1950s. i last enjoyed the smoky sound of chet baker from my ipod right before sending it to the buyer in feb 2007. i also stuck a 6.3mm jack in there and used it as a guitar amp. it sounded quite fab, honestly.

i remain by my beliefs: if you are posting on this forum, condoms are of no use to you at all.

do tube amps need maintainence? yes. they need some care. a good tube amp is an investment that will reward you longer than you can play them if you treat them right. yes, you will need to replace tubes depending on usage, and filter caps every 5-10 years. for me, the tone is the payoff. i'm not against solid-state and digital technology - quite the conrary, in fact - but when it comes to fat, organic, huge sound, i don't think anything else does it for me but tubes.

but let's not hijack this topic - it has gone WAY off course. open another thread and migrate these posts, somebody.

does this place even HAVE mods? if not, PC++ EVERYTHING AND KILL IT WITH FIRE

 

Regarding handmade instruments...I found something.

Some background about it
https://www.sevenstring.org/forum/jazz-acoustic-classical-and-fingerstyle/98079-zacary-guitar.html
https://www.jemsite.com/forums/f19/zachary-guitars-86239.html

And the main thing.
https://www.zacharyguitars.com/

Sounds nice. I mean, forget patriotism for handmade stuff, this guy's anti-CNC to the core. Lovely. And after reading his site, I don't know if I really want to buy the Ibanez RG7321/Schecter Omen 7 I was planning to...*nervous laugh*

ultra-edit-
How the Devil Builds Guitars
Wow.

 

Why? Because now you want a God-crafted guitar?

You live in India. You don't earn. This is what you can afford. There's nothing to feel bad about.

 

Yeah, that's true. I'm getting a Zach when I earn enough for it. Or atleast something like it, which suddenly doesn't seem that impossible...

...because reading a bit further in the SS.org thread...wait. It suddenly doesn't sound that innovative anymore.

So it'd seem there are others like him, even if he hates that particular fact. It'd be surprising if others *hadn't* done the same.

ultra-edit: But no denying the fact that the guy sounds like the maddox of the luthier world.

 

Who the hell cares. There are plenty of amazing luthiers in the world. Pay them a personal visit to see how dedicated they are to their work.

 

You sound kinda angry over him, lol. I personally like his oil-finish over plastic-finish idea, though I don't know if others do that as well, and I've never really tried an oil-finish guitar.

Could you name a few luthiers whom you feel deserve a mention? I'll research them, I'd love to learn more and gain a wider perspective.

 

I meant who the hell cares about the controversy he's generated.

I don't know of any names, I've only seen the work of luthiers that post on forums. What I meant was that you have to take this guy's words with a kilo of salt.

 

i don't know about this zachary dude. i find his guitars incredibly ugly and his attitude makes me retch. $400 for an ugly-ass BOOST pedal? pete cornish commands those prices (and much, much more) for a reason. this looks like it was thrown together by some random solder jockey usiing the klon centaur schematic (or for all you know, BD-2, but MOST probably it's simply a slightly modded tube screamer, which is an excellent overdrive any way you look at it!) ripped off FSB. oh, and labelled by a monkey. MY WORK IS BETTER THAN THIS. crap-tastic and shitty work. he should post pictures of the guts.

aha, he has a bow-teek amp too. $700 gets you a glorified valve junior type amp with an extra boost stage. wow. the lead dress looks like frigging spaghetti.

i don't know whether he's lulzing, schizophrenic or... both, probably.

do yourself a favour and check out these real luthiers who deliver less BS per $:

marleaux basses
claudio pagelli guitars
jens ritter (ritter bass)
magnus krempel
tommy's special guitar
john suhr
uli teuffel
tom anderson guitars
nik huber guitars
vulture bass
sandberg

 

if you want to see a LOT better and high quality work, also accomplished without a CNC in most cases, sign up at the project guitar forums. the completed and in progress build section has knocked the wind out of me on a number of occasions. and the GoTM contest always has a great guitar...

 

Guitars being ugly is the last of my concerns, really. What really moved me was the oil finish idea. I wonder how many luthiers do that over a plastic finish, and whether it's any good on the tone. However, buying his stuff is a ten-years-down-the-line prospect for me right now. In between, I want to try a few custom made ones (another 5-years-down-the-line prospect), just to know what's good and what's bad.

Rofl ^^

Okay, you referred to this?
https://projectguitar.ibforums.com/
Sounds fun, particularly the 'How To Build A Custom Case' caught my eye xD
They seem to have this kind of a section on sevenstrings as well.

 

lol. a lot more than you think and zachy boy would have you believe. between the tirades and the endless blurbs on his site, this guy convinces me even less than an amway salesman.

a luthier custom building a guitar for you would probably be glad to oil finish it as well, since this is actually slightly less of a pain than to poly or (shudder) nitro it. nitro is great, and has a bit more openness than poly, but a pain to get on.

i'm not really golden eared enough to notice the difference, but i'm sure that there is a measurable difference in the vibrational characteristics between poly and oil finish. that being said... the rest of your signal chain better be up to the mark as well. and with distortion, the difference will barely be noticeable. i prefer oil finishes myself though, cause they just feel great - warwick does oil finishing on production instruments.

just speaking for myself, i've played a LOT of guitars in the higher-priced segment, and i've been very indifferent to the finishing in terms of tone...

i'm actually wondering if this site is a joke on zachary vex (zvex). either way, i think i'm going to call zachary "zockerei" (german for gambling, with a preposition it means ripping off) from now on.

what is it with the zacharys in the bow-teek business?

if the HC reviews are any indicator, the guitars sound pretty good on the whole. but $2k for a guitar made from ikea wood? **** that. for that money, i can get myself a killer warmoth strat and oil finish it, and have top-notch pickups too. rip-****ing-off.

one word of warning: 50% of all the information and blurbs on audio equipment is BS, overexaggeration, marketing drivel and bile. that number increases exponentially in the hifi segment. go by your ears and your eyes, by engineering principles and scientific fact. at the end, the most important factors are "how does it sound?" and "is it worth my cash"?

the project guitar forums ROCK. totally. great stuff hidden deep in their threads....

 

That's why he advocates them (or more accurately, flames anything that's not oil finish) xD

Tonally, yes, it's true, such attention to detail is best complemented by an amp which can portray that detail well.

That gave me an idea...can we strip (more accurately, sand I think?) the plastic off a guitar (I saw someone do it to a low end Ibby on SS.org, just can't find the thread) and finish it then? It seems easy, though I'm not acquainted with the process of oil finish. Hmm...

Sig updated.

 

Bacchus' higher-end LP replicas are almost exclusively tung-oil finished and have been getting rave reviews.
There's a lot more to a finish then simply the material used, although the material plays a big part nonetheless. The thickness of the finish matters a lot too.
Having said that, IMHO the finish of a guitar would be the last thing in my purchase decision. If you're down to that level of detail regards your tone, a million other things come into play. Your amp affects your tone a LOT more than your guitar. Different tubes, different OTs, different topologies will bring about a more significant change in tone as compared to a poly-vs-nitro finished guitar.

A nitro will still be wet (technically) 2 months after application. Poly sets almost immediately.
In humid conditions, poly fares better than nitro in terms of playability of the instrument.

Nothing can strip poly off a guitar short of a heatgun! If you intend to strip it, you need to have bionic arms or something to accomplish that. People have reported that it's a pain even with belt sanders etc etc.

 

I've not read through the entire BS related to zachary, but if it's any indication, I haven't come across any good luthier posting BS about any particular method/aspect of luthiery, unless it's widely known that a particular thing IS BS.

Luthiers are usually people with a lot of knowledge about woodworking in general, and with that comes a sense of tolerancy where they'd rather point the facts rather than keep ranting on. This leads me to believe that the anti-poly tirade is stupid. Poly is, by not a small number of tone purists, considered beneath nitro when it comes to guitar. However, that does not mean that it does not have its merits. And with bedroom warriors that most of us are (actually unless you crank a JCM800 to 11 in an open venue with an attendance of 20000), you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

EDIT:
After having (or tried to) read this
https://www.zacharyguitars.com/Strings.htm

I can say one thing, this guy ain't getting any of my money, not even for his ZOG strings!
He comes across as a pure snob, abuses every other guy, says "The standard strings defy logic. you don't have the brains to understand it. I have invented history"....but!!....I still don't see a single line of reference to why the tension on his strings is "logically" better, except that he says it is, and if I, or Hendrix, or Paige, or Slash, or Vai, or Satch, or Beck didnt "get" it, we're all just a bunch of fools! Since Yngwie "knew" about it, he deserves a Ferrari and since he came up with a solution, maybe everybody should give their Ferraris and Maruti 800s to him in honor of letting us know what fools we are without ever knowing why!!!!!!

My answer to that -:
LOL WUT?

 

He *is* something of a crank.

About those strings...He doesn't claim to have invented them, (he says that) lotsa people have felt the tension problem before (and he stresses this). That's close to what led to Ernie Ball "Skinny top heavy bottom" things...and he says that the standard strings sets are inaccurate, it's the 'signature' ones, which command extra royalty and eventually higher MRP, which should be standard. And his 'all-people-are-Idiots-some-way-or-the-other' approach is odd to me, too, but other than that, it makes sense, doesn't it? He explained the thing pretty technically - the only thing stopping me from totally supporting is that 1. I'm not that experienced as a player, particularly my sparse electric guitar *practical* experience 2. I've never tried his strings 3. The costliest string set I ever bought was a D'Addario Hard Tension Nylon.

Anyways, it doesn't really concern me at this point. I'm currently just what you called a 'bedroom warrior'. That site just intrigued me, thought it'd be a good mention here. xD

 

optimized guitar strings my ass. for one, this concept is NOT NEW AT ALL. he hasn't discovered shit. it's a well known and documented fact, and i believe at least one major manufacturer has alluded to it before.

of course, zachary has to make sure that your tone stays great all the time, so you can't just buy one set from him - minimum order is 5 sets.

they're fantastic strings, eh? this review tells me otherwise:

https://www.thegearpage.net/board/showpost.php?p=4505317&postcount=21

so.... we have ridicullously overpriced ikea blocks for guitars, value-added strings that.... you could put together for yourself, from a better quality manufacturer at a lower price and a pedal that you'd have to be rich and stupid to buy. in fact i'm thinking of buying one just to open up it's guts, trace and publish the schematic and expose the circuit for what it is. something tells me it's not particularly new. something tells me it's one of the followiwng: tube screamer, red llama, BD-2 or maybe (although i don't think he made the effort) klon centaur.

inventive? no. aesthetics? fail. funkiness. zero. honesty. har-de-har-har. this guy is a frigging ripoff, plain and simple. i can't stand bow-teekers who are this full of themselves. this guy is ed roman lite.

if i had that cash, it would go straight to emmett chapman as down payment on a stick... that's an instrument worth my money.