What's Up With Asian Made Guitars Before 2010?

[VanEpsInDeChirico]

Hello

Reading forums, I get the sense that guitars of all kinds made in Asian factories have seen a dramatic uptick in quality during the last decade or so. At least this is what people seem to believe. Not only in the area of quality control, but electronics as well. I'm wondering what others' opinions are on this topic and WHY they hold them?

I have the opportunity to by a Korean made 2008 Gretsch G100ce for a good price. Unfortunately I'm unable to test it out before buying. But I worry that because of the period it was made, the pick up will be terrible and construction subpar compared to the same model made in say, 2018.

On the OTHER hand, forums are also full of people claiming that Korean factories churn out the highest quality guitars in Asia, and in fact go out of their way to find Korean-made models from the 2000s or even 90s, rather than far newer Chinese and Indonesian versions of the same guitar made in the 2010s.

What's the story here?

[RJVB]

It is my understanding too that Korea has long produced good quality lower-priced guitars. I briefly had my hands on a Korean-made children's acoustic flattop guitar which cannot have cost much in the mid-to-late 80s. That wasn't a bad instrument at all.

I've always assumed that this had something to do with Korea's history with Japan and its culture - I don't think anyone would assume older Japanese guitars are "subpar Asian instruments"?

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

There have been many excellent guitars from Asia over the years. There’s been an equally large volume of low end instruments with cheap and shoddy hardware, electronics, fit, finish etc. But all of them are quality instruments in the true sense of quality. You have to understand the concept of quality to understand Asian guitars in context. Quality of design is what we usually think of as quality, from how something looks and feels to how well it works to how reliable it is and how durable its virtues prove to be. So we think of an L5 s a top quality guitar and a $100 Korean strat copy as low quality. But this isn’t entirely accurate.

The other kind of quality (and in many ways the more critical one) is quality of conformance to specification. Consistent and accurate manufacture of a product that exactly meets its specifications (including tolerances) is a fundamental characteristic of almost all modern production facilities throughout Asia. Those cheap pickups meet their design specs and criteria exactly, often with 6 sigma accuracy. Of course, the specified tolerances for dimension, windings, DCR, magnet strength and position etc are probably +/- 10% or more, which is why they’re so cheap and so inconsistent . Bridge position, finish standards, tuning machine looseness etc are similarly imprecise - but production runs meet their design specs exactly. So they’re high quality products from a manufacturing perspective because their quality of conformance is high.

My 1997 Ibanez AF207 is a beautiful guitar that’s made very, very well and has been both durable and reliable. It has high quality of design and high quality of conformance. I had a mid-‘70s Ibanez “335” that was similarly excellent. But I also bought a new $500 Ibanez flattop several years ago that played terribly, had poor intonation, and was generally mediocre at best. As I recall, it was an early product from one of their facilities outside of Japan. Whether it was perfectly made to lousy specs for a lower price or an outlier from a well designed & spec’ed production run I don’t know. But the next $500 Ibanez flattop I bought some years later is a gorgeous guitar that I stilll have and love. It was made in China.

There are Asian facilities that have consistently produced excellent guitars for years and some known for mediocrity or worse. Multiple “makers” contract with many of them, so the name on the headstock means much less than the true manufacturer. There are some very nice $250 guitars coming from Vietnam now. I’m sorely tempted to order one of the Grote semi hollow 7s, just to see how good they are.

[orri]

As far as I know the good reputation South Korean made guitars were made in the Samick factory.
In addition to their own brand, they made guitars for other brands like Squier, Epiphone and Washburn.


I have a Washburn HB35 (335 inspired) from the Samick factory, which I bought new in 2001. It's very well built but upgrading the pickups was an improvement, and I replaced the bridge at some point too when it showed signifcant signs of wear, and the pots are starting to be scratchy (not surprising to for the age).

In general it seems that they might have somewhat cheaped out on some of the replaceable/upgradable parts (but it does though have great Grover tuners) while the build quality (much harder to repair or replace) is really good.


Some years later, Washburn moved the production of at least the HB35 (probably other models too, but I've followed the HB35 a bit more) to China with a significant price decrease. I have no idea about how it affected the quality of specs.

[jim777]

I think it is fairly rare for an Asian company that produces guitars to make them for only a single company, or to be owned by a single company. Korean companies/factories like Samick, Cort, and World all make lower end versions of a large number of brands, including their own. FGN is the 'house' brand of Fuji-Gen Gakki, where the majority of Japanese Ibanezes are made, but they have also made high end Yamahas and Fender Japan guitars as well on the same lines, by the same people. Deviser in Aksa, Japan, currently makes Headway acoustics (which are fantastic, btw), Bacchus, Seventy Seven, Momose, and STR guitars and basses. But Deviser also makes guitars in Indonesia as well, and in other places. It's not something you see too often with US made instruments.

So...you want one of these companies to build guitars for you, and they can. You determine the body shapes obviously, but also all of the other specs of the instrument, and the factories build them for you. If they don't need to be highest spec the factory will build them to a lower spec to fit your requirements. It isn't always a story like, "Cort makes adequate guitars at best", or, "World really makes the best out of Korea" but the fact that whoever ordered the run from Cort or World and signed the contracts requested they use plywood and cheap pickups, etc.

Just noticing Dave made all the points I could think of in much finer fashion, so re-reading Dave's post is probably a good idea lol.

[VanEpsInDeChirico]

So basically what most of you are saying is that if for a long time Asian manufactured guitars like Epiphone had a reputation for being inconsistent and of lower quality than American or even Mexican made products, this had a lot to do with the fact that Epiphone or Gretsch or whoever was designing lower quality instruments for their Asian partner factories? Not really a fault on the factoty part. And if the quality of those Asian model guitars has improved considerably in the past decade or so, this is largely because the designs and specifications Epiphone or Gretsch now send to those Asian factories are set at a higher standard?

[mr. beaumont]

Asia's a pretty big continent

Japan has made top notch stuff for decades now. Korea has made excellent budget instruments for a long time as well.

Chinese quality has been the big upward jump in the last 20 years. Sure, there's still some of the worst junk in the world made there too, but the good stuff has gotten really good.

Then you have smaller countries with less of a guitar making history that are more hit or miss. The body of one of my telecasters is Indonesian, and it's nicely done.

[John A.]

I don't think it makes sense to attach a single timeline to quality of "Asian" guitars. In several countries, guitar making has evolved from super cheap, almost disposable instruments, to decent knock-offs, to off-shore OEM lines of higher end brands, to high quality original designs. This has happened in fits and starts on different and overlapping timelines in Japan, S. Korea, China, Indonesia, and maybe now Philippines and Malaysia. Each time the name-brands have shifted OEM arrangements to new countries, though, they've doe so at at a pretty high quality level.

Speaking to Korean quality specifically. I bought a new MIK Madeira (Guild's offshore brand) when I was in high school ca. 1979. It was awful in all ways. It basically self-destructed and was literal garbage within about 3 years. In 1994, I bought a Samick archtop new, which sounded and played pretty well, though it was clearly a budget instrument (e.g., spliced neck, no-name pickups, some cosmetic flaws alongside fancy binding and inlays, meh finish). I wound up keeping it for around 20 years, and it was still in great shape, with no signs of the implosion that befell my Madeira.

In 2011, I got a 2005 Korean-made D'Angelico semi-hollow in NOS condition that was made by SPG (The company formed by former Samick employees who took over the operation after Samick left Korea in the early 2000s). This is a very noticeably better guitar than the Samick I had. Not just "good for the money," but a top quality instrument in its own right that compares very well to US or MIJ guitars. The only thing separating it from a premium US or MIJ instrument is that it has a fairly thick polyester finish (though thinner and prettier than the 94 Samick).

Based on this and on what I've seen with some other MIK instruments (e.g., Epi, Ibanez), Korean factories started making the transition from garbage to good in the late 80s, and by 93-ish Korean companies developed the ability to manufacture high quality guitars to pretty much any price point. But price point is key -- if a model was made to be a bargain instrument in 1992, 2005, or whatever year it'll still have aspects that make it seem in some ways like a lower-end instrument. It might sound and play OK (or even way better than OK), but there will be details that aren't as nice as something more expensive. I don't know how this all plays out specifically with respect to Gretsch, though.

[Gitterbug]

I've had only well-made Korean guitars from the 1990s onwards. One pot replaced. A -99 Gretsch G3156 Streamliner has fantastic DeArmond PU's for example. It's funny how reputation defies or at least trails reality - and this cuts both ways. Gibsons get their fair share of criticism, yet many people still consider them the benchmark. Anything Asian seems to be inferior by definition. Japan is a qualified exception, decades after the now-cherished pre-lawsuits.

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

Asia's a pretty big continent

Japan has made top notch stuff for decades now. Korea has made excellent budget instruments for a long time as well.

Chinese quality has been the big upward jump in the last 20 years. Sure, there's still some of the worst junk in the world made there too, but the good stuff has gotten really good.

Then you have smaller countries with less of a guitar making history that are more hit or miss. The body of one of my telecasters is Indonesian, and it's nicely done.

Cort moved from Korea to Indonesia, and they're well-regarded.

Then again Indonesia has a population of over 270 million ... way bigger than S. Korea or Japan!

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

if the quality of those Asian model guitars has improved considerably in the past decade or so, this is largely because the designs and specifications Epiphone or Gretsch now send to those Asian factories are set at a higher standard?

I think that's correct - but it's largely because new factories with computer controlled production environments can turn out much better and more consistent stuff at lower prices. It's easier and cheaper to meet more stringent specs now than ever before. Once a few contract mills got better production equipment, they attracted the lion's share of the business and the others had to keep up or drop out. It's all based on a business case. The specs are tighter because we now have a reason to expect better products for the same (or even lower) prices and the internet makes it easy for us to find the good buys (and avoid the bad ones). The demand for better inexpensive guitars has resulted in more decent inexpensive guitars. Somtimes the market works!

It used to be that maintaining spec required intensive product checking during all phases of production, and tighter tolerances meant more precise manufacturing methods as well as more intense QC. Once computers took over, they could maintain sufficiently precise and consistent output to reduce the need for manual inspection. The ability to measure everything during production with lasers, ultrasound etc completely changed mass scale manufacturing and reduced or eliminated costly manual quality control. Once your production line is working within the specified control limits on every measurable parameter, you don't need QC.

My Raines Tele 7 is a perfect example. The wood was designed by Chris Forshage for Matt Raines (at least according to Matt - I haven't called Chris to confirm this...) and manufactured in a Chinese plant with full CNC control. The quality of the entire instrument, apart from the hardware, is absolutely top notch. The neck, body, joints, finish etc are as good as anything I've seen short of bespoke or low production runs from good luthiers. It was well worth investing in a Hipshot bridge, better pickups than the $20 builders' specials that came in it, proper Sperzel tuners, and a Tusq nut. I have a top quality, no frills mahogany body / flame maple cap 7 string Tele for under a grand. Chris Forshage now makes basically the same guitar in his Austin shop for twice the price, and I suspect it's a lot more refined and elegant. I'd probably have bought one if he'd been making them when I got mine.

[Bluedawg]

So basically what most of you are saying is that if for a long time Asian manufactured guitars like Epiphone had a reputation for being inconsistent and of lower quality than American or even Mexican made products, this had a lot to do with the fact that Epiphone or Gretsch or whoever was designing lower quality instruments for their Asian partner factories? Not really a fault on the factoty part. And if the quality of those Asian model guitars has improved considerably in the past decade or so, this is largely because the designs and specifications Epiphone or Gretsch now send to those Asian factories are set at a higher standard?

There is much truth to this ... I think ... they were making cheap guitars because that's what they were asked to do .... but I don't think it's the whole story.

When a manufacturing company first starts up production, they are doing their best to complete the task according to the original specifications.

But as they continue to produce the product, they are finding ways to improve production and to improve the product. Sometimes they are even lowering the cost while improving the product.

The Asian guitar companies not only gained a better understanding of this western musical instrument, which was not historically part of their culture, and how to produce it, they were also training up new luthiers who began to master the craft of instrument making.

And of course they were also working on ways to make more money .. and one of those is to make even better guitars with the knowledge and experience they have gained.

IMHO YMMV

[John A.]

So basically what most of you are saying is that if for a long time Asian manufactured guitars like Epiphone had a reputation for being inconsistent and of lower quality than American or even Mexican made products, this had a lot to do with the fact that Epiphone or Gretsch or whoever was designing lower quality instruments for their Asian partner factories? Not really a fault on the factoty part. And if the quality of those Asian model guitars has improved considerably in the past decade or so, this is largely because the designs and specifications Epiphone or Gretsch now send to those Asian factories are set at a higher standard?

Basically, yes, the quality of an instrument is a function of the quality specified by the brand name contracting for OEM services. However, for each of the Asian countries where guitar-making took off there was a period of maturation. In Japan and Korea, the maturation period was pretty long. But as manufacturing methods have become more and more standardized and as CNC technology spreads, and as more of Asia reaches greater levels of technological development, that maturation period gets shorter and shorter. So now if an Ibanez, Epi, Gretsch, Yamaha, etc. decides to contract for manufacturing in a new place, they can bring quality up to speed much more quickly than 30-40 years ago.

[Bluedawg]

I think my first electric guitar was a Cort Les Paul .. probably around 1977 or so. It was cheaply built, but actually a decent guitar. Probably Chinese, but it could have been Korean ... too cheap to be Japanese, even in those days. I let my cousin borrow it and someone stole it from him.

I started work at a music store in 1980.

Many Japanese guitars were already high quality by then. The Japanese brands benefited from the widely held opinion that Norlin Gibson and CBS Fender guitars were crap (now they're vintage!! LOL). Players were looking for alternatives and found them in Japanese brands.

The really cheap Chinese guitars could be quite bad in the early 80s.

By the 1990s the Japanese guitars were widely considered to be as good as American guitars and often better. Their prices were also catching up with American guitar prices.

There's been a steady improvement in quality from Asian guitar companies since then. Indonesian and Korean guitars were very good by 2000 or so and the Chinese guitar quality has skyrocketed in the last 20 years.

Even the cheapest guitars today are extremely good compared to the cheapest guitars of the late 70s and early 80s.

These days you can spend more on a new Chinese archtop guitar than a pre-owned US made Gibson 175.

[RJVB]

Gretsch... their "Roots" series are built in China, and QC is about as good as The Loar's QC from what I've seen and heard. Several people I know have had to make considerable costs to make their resonators correctly playable, which is a damn shame given the brand's history and the price asked for them.

Mine has (roughly in the order in which I noticed the issues):
- blemishes in the finish in a visible location
- one of the 4 soundposts that hold up the soundwell has a big nail sticking out and is split by it
- the soundwell itself is lousily finished and too wide meaning I've had to block the cone from moving sideways
- the tailpiece is fixed well off-centre, apparently "corrected" from its initial position only slightly off-centre, which caused the cone to shift (not to mention the additional sideways torque that's not supposed to be there.

To add insult to injury Fender informed me that my replacing the nut had voided the warranty. So I bought a backup tailpiece (just before they stopped providing parts alltogether) and twisted the original one so it mounts via the original holes but has the stringholder properly centred.

I've known for decades that China can produce the quality you ask and pay them for (every iPod and iPhone is proof of that), so I put the blame for this with Fender (I'm guessing they're making a juicy profit on this popular Roots series!)

[mr. beaumont]

Cort moved from Korea to Indonesia, and they're well-regarded.

Then again Indonesia has a population of over 270 million ... way bigger than S. Korea or Japan!

Lol, yeah, bad word choice--smaller only in sense of "presence in the guitar world."

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

Remember how the Japanese guitar clone industry started. A luthier-turned-music-store-owner in Bryn Mawr, PA (a Philadelphia suburb) named Harry Rosenbloom became the North American distributor for Hoshino Gakki in about 1965. He'd started his own guitar company called Elger, which was derived from the names of his children Ellen and Gerson, in the '50s and made a few pretty nice guitars himself under that name. By the early '60s, HG had bought a small Spanish guitar maker named Ibanez. They moved production to Japan but continued to market their instruments under that name. HG bought Elger from Harry a few years later, and he ended up working with HG / Ibanez to make them what they are today (and, we all assume, to make a small fortune for himself).

Harry is widely believed to have been the one with the idea for Hoshino to make high quality copies of GIbson and Fender guitars under the Ibanez name, and he became the leading proponent of the entire concept in the US. Most of us locals who knew him and followed this in real time believe that the "lawsuit" guitars were his idea, although I can't confirm that they were. Hoshino is in another Philadelphia suburb to this day because of him. His store (Medley Music) closed years ago, and I haven't seen his son in longer than that. But they were in our neighborhood for many years. I had many friends who worked there, and Harry sold me my first Ibanez guitars at very low prices. I assume he wanted to get them into the hands of working musicians, and the really fancy ones weren't yet available from other local music stores. The nicest one I got was a 335 style NAMM demo from about '75 with gorgeous pearl and abalone inlay, very high quality fittings, multiple binding, etc. It was a far better guitar than the '73 LP Custom that I bought new and had used as my main working guitar until I got the Ibby.

[RJVB]

Remember how the Japanese guitar clone industry started.

Is that before or after the cloning of western cars and MCs started?

Good guitars were already being built there well before ... and remember that most classical guitars are also more or less straight clones of a small handful of originals!
Classical Guitar International - Database : Masaru Kohno - The history of his life and his guitars

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

Is that before or after the cloning of western cars and MCs started?

Good guitars were already being built there well before ... and remember that most classical guitars are also more or less straight clones of a small handful of originals!
Classical Guitar International - Database : Masaru Kohno - The history of his life and his guitars

My first decent classical was a ‘69 Aria 559 with Ryogi Matsuoka’s initials stamped on the heel block inside the guitar. He was probably not much over 20 years old at the time, but he made their 559s and 560s (the 2 top models) back then.

Elegant lutherie is not new to Asia. They’ve been making fine guitars there since at least the mid 19th century.

[sgosnell]

Musical instruments have been made in Asia, especially China, for far longer than they have been made in Europe, and certainly in the US. Not modern archtop guitars of course, but quality musical instruments. It's a tradition spanning millenia. The early Asian electric guitar manufacturing turned out cheap instruments because that's what the US and European importers wanted. If you demand and pay for cheap guitars, don't expect to get the highest quality, because everyone involved has to make some profit. But if you demand and pay for high quality, you can get it, and because wages are so low in Asia, you can get very high quality for much less money than you would pay for guitars produced in the West. I don't believe that American craftsmen are any better than Chinese, or Korean, or any other nationality. Where one was born or raised has nothing to do with it. What matters is what is expected of the craftsmen. If they're paid to turn out stuff quickly and cheaply, that's what they will do. If they're paid to produce high quality products, and given the necessary time and resources, they will produce them, whether in Asia, Europe, or the Americas. Current Asian production appears to be at least as good as that in the West, if not better.

[Christian Miller]

My conclusion on this subject is that no one knows anything and any correlations they might perceive are beset with noise to the point of meaninglessness.

a lot of people think Samick guitars are firewood for example. Other people say Gibsons are overpriced junk.

I have a Samick factory Ibanez. Played it for years. I think it’s decent and it would totally do on a gig. But I like my Gibsons more.

Meh. I don’t think my experiences in isolation mean much.

[RJVB]

quality musical instruments. It's a tradition spanning millenia.

Of course, and not just musical instruments.
(The quality of their traditional instruments is not always easy to assess to us beyond the craftmanship, I think because they sound so different, and using them in our music isn't always a success ... but that's a different rabbit hole.)

[Litterick]

But if you demand and pay for high quality, you can get it, and because wages are so low in Asia, you can get very high quality for much less money than you would pay for guitars produced in the West.

You can find a great deal if you don't let ethics get in the way. Some workers in China are not paid at all: they are political prisoners or members of ethnic minorities who are forced to work.

[sgosnell]

I'm aware of human rights issues in China, and they haven't changed in hundreds of years, probably thousands. But I rather doubt that political prisoners are building guitars. It's not possible, AFAICT, to avoid buying products made in China. Practically all the smartphones in the world, and most computers and computer chips are made there. Without Chinese products, WalMart and Amazon would not exist, which wouldn't bother me at all, but they're far from the only companies doing business there.