I'm not sure how he gets his commission checks, but should he ever open a guitar store, Anywhere,USA, I want to be one of his first customers. The first order will be to find a good EPI Wildcat (w/P-90s) in White. (It's got to play out w/ my Dyna/Falcon) I'm sure all set-up would be done right.
Thanks for all the Gretsch worldly knowledge. s/Vin
I've been wanting one forever!!! I Still Do!!! I read this review on the Musician's Friend Website (there was also another bad review) and I wanted to see if any of you have had in bad experience's buying a Gretsch. I'll have one one day!!!
Grab one....you won't be sorry!
Man, I don't see why some many of you are freakin out about this? It's one review of a particular guitar. I don't think the reviewer ever claimed that all Gretschs are like this.
The stuff about the radius/bridge is very strange for such an expensive guitar. He does praise the guitar's general construction, finish, and sound, so it actually balances the good and bad.
I actually like to see reviews like this; much better than HC's usual 10/10 on everything (my vintage Gorilla combo amp is the best ever!).
TG
TG
traynorgarnet said: I actually like to see reviews like this; much better than HC's usual 10/10 on everything (my vintage Gorilla combo amp is the best ever!)Hahahahahahaha! You almost made me spit out my very nice Ridge Geyserville Zin on that one. Too too funny. I voted you up!
Funny, my vintage Gorilla combo amp sucks.
The tolex is coming up on one corner and there's a glue smear along one corner inside. Besides that, the treble and bass knobs aren't calibrated to the same taper.
The guy's conclusions weren't supported by the evidence he offered, yet the negative tone provided the context for the entire "article." It was fair to point all that out, particularly when the original poster was asking whether he should take the review to heart.
WE knew it was BS - the guy asking might not have.
I already commented on this Harmony Central review. For those of you that missed it I will re-post my interpretation of this review:
I wouldn't pay any attention to the drone that wrote that review on MF. He seems a lot more concerned with trying to impress others than trying to convey real, useful info. What I find troubling about that little screed is the fact that many of the "issues" brought up are ridiculously petty, especially for a "luthier" with 30 years experience.
Neck relief? C'mon, that's a tiny, tiny issue which can be corrected in a matter of a minute or two. Including that in a product review is analagous, to my way of thinking, to complaining because your new car needed a little air in one tire when it first came off the transporter.
His pickup rant/conspiricy-theory is laughable. Does this guy really think that Gretsch is turning out bootleg TV Jones pickups?
Here's my take:
"First a little about myself. I am a professional musician and luthier for 30 years and have professionally repaired and setup numerous guitars."
Translation without the BS:
I played a gig or two 30 years ago and I still play a gig or two these days, this makes me a professional musician . . . when I'm not gutting fish for a living.
"First a little about myself. I am a professional musician and luthier for 30 years and have professionally repaired and setup numerous guitars. "
Translation without the BS:
Sometimes when I'm gutting fish I dream of being a luthier. I adjusted a truss rod for a guy once and he bought me a cup of coffee as a show of gratitude. That year I told H & R Block about it and offered to pay taxes on the value of the coffee, that makes me a professional luthier. (Of course after I adjusted that truss rod the guitar smelled like fish for the next three years.)
"If you brought this guitar to a Professional Guitar Tech for evaluation on whether to "Buy it or Not", here is what he would say: From the factory these Guitars are assembled with Mismatched Parts, specifically the Fretboard is a 9.5º radius and the Bridge is a 12º radius which means, if you set the strings up for normal playing, some strings will be higher off the fretboard than the the others. The fix for this is to replace the Bridge Saddles a have the saddles cut to a 9.5º radius . . . "
Translation without the BS:
My uncle Herman once was offered a cup of coffee and a doughnut for adjusting a truss rod and he didn't like the Setzer model, mostly because he hates orange.
"The First thing that I saw when I opened the case, was that the strings were not correctly aligned over the Pickup Pole Pieces. After going to TV Jones' website and getting the spec's for their Classic Pickups both the Neck and the Bridge Pickup Pole pieces, did not match the Spec's from TV Jones."
Translation without the BS:
"I forgot to take my medicine yesterday and aliens from the planet Zigon were chasing me. Then I got obsessed with pickup pole pieces for a while. When I woke up this morning I was in a nice white room with wrestling mats on the walls. They forgot to double-knot my straight jacket and I got free and ran over to the nurse's computer to post the first thing that popped into my head.
"(The Pole Pieces were measured with Calipers accurate to 1000th of an inch)"
Translation without the BS:
Theye were giving away special rulers in boxes of corn flakes. There aren't any pointy corners so they said that they'll let me keep it at the home unless I try to eat it. I held it up to a picture of Brian Setzer holding a guitar and then I got confused. After that they gave me my medicine I slept for three days. When I woke up again they said I could go back to work and gut fish if I remembered to take my pills.
His tone is a little over the top and a few of his statements are certainly hyperbolic, but some of the issues he has raised have also been noted by others. He also praised the finish, wiring, pots, and (most importantly) the sound of the guitar; he's not simply a "Gretsch hater"!
Like the reviewer, I too cannot believe that when I pick up a $2400 guitar it badly needs a setup. This isn't solely a "Gretsch Problem" but it does occur on Gretsch guitars. I can't tell you how many Gibson's I recently played that needed major nut attention. Stores should do a basic setup when their guitars arrive, but somethings are not the store's fault.
Some of you guys are like teenagers who just heard someone say something bad about Led Zeppelin; is your identity really that wrapped up in a commodity? The reviewer may make a few problematic claims but all in all he just mentioned a few problems with a particular guitar; he didn't kill anyone.
TG
And he blamed Gretsch for the problems – ALL of which (beyond the radius mismatch, a known issue) were SETUP stuff. And he laid all those at the factory's doorstep, when we have no way of knowing from his text where they originated.
Stores SHOULD set up high-end guitars for the guys who buy them, tweak them to taste. Great stores do. Most don't.
And still, it's been my experience with numerous new Gretschs of my own, as well as others I've tried in stores and unpacked for event displays (all in the FMIC era, can't speak about anything before that), that they are more nearly set up and ready to go than most Gibsons I try. Particularly in nut and neck prep.
Had he been discussing a neck twist or hump, or badly finished frets, stripped screws, poor binding work, or other structural problems, his points would be valid. But he wasn't. He was whining about what appeared to be a poor setup – and speculating with the force of probability that adjustments would reveal other problems.
This forum levels plenty of criticism at Gretsch, and they really don't get away with much. This guy was an odd combination of bombastic (and I know from bombast!), apparently confused (I still can't figure out how he thinks relief and fret-leveling are related) – and unfair.
I'm guilty of running on too long, and it's not the first time, but I stand by the gist of what I said.
I sympathize with the notion that a "2,400.00 guitar" (and it could be a 500.00 guitar, or a 30,000.00 guitar, depending on one's economic perspective) should be perfect. So should Cadillacs, BMWs, Mercedes, and Macs. None are. In the end, no matter what we pay, a guitar is an aggregate of wood, wire, plastic, and other assorted materials, and it's put together by humans. To a greater or lesser extent, all are subject to the same kinds of problems.
Price doesn't repeal physics: Cadillacs leak oil.
I'm told that Ettore Bugatti maintained guest quarters for Bugatti owners who brought their cars in for maintenance, where they (the customers) were also maintained in high style while their cars were worked on.
Apparently one guy kept bringing the car back because it was hard to start on cold mornings. After determining that the car was completely within spec, Ettore said, "What, you can afford a Bugatti, but you can't afford a heated garage?"
And look, JIMMY PAGE CAN BEAT UP YOUR DAD ANYDAY!!
I bought my SSLVO new. The dealer included a free setup. The guitar plays perfect and sounds great. I am a happy customer.
Every Gretsch that I have purchased had a very playable set up from the moment that I first upacked and opened the case.
Like Proteus said, these are setup issues, which are generally pretty easy to fix.
traynorgarnet said: Some of you guys are like teenagers who just heard someone say something bad about Led Zeppelin; is your identity really that wrapped up in a commodity? The reviewer may make a few problematic claims but all in all he just mentioned a few problems with a particular guitar; he didn't kill anyone.
This IS after all a Gretsch Forum and someone submitted a legit question about Gretsch Guitars and a review they saw. Most guys on here own tons of them (as well as other makes). Nobody on here would be a member if they hated Gretsch. We like the guitars. It stands to reason that we would defend the instruments, and our experiences with the company and their guitars. Many on this site have models from the 50's (in some cases actually had them IN the 50's when they were new) all the way to the new FMIC ones.
Apparently promoting and supporting something that you like and believe in makes you "wrapped up in a commodity"...God forbid it's a product of some sort. I guess that makes us all whores to corporate interests. I'm a guitar player, and I like guitars. I will promote and support brands that I think are good. Next time, I'll go make a guitar out of weeds and tree bark so that I'm no longer "wrapped in commodities". While I'm at it, I'll wipe my ass with some leaves so that I'm not part of the "great, soft toilet paper commodity institution" propagated by Kimberly Clark.
The reviewer makes more than a few comments- many which don't make sense; as Proteus already alluded to, (and bring in to question how much of a "pro luthier" the reviewer is) about how problematic the guitar was. He went out of his way to say how "pro" he was, and really just described setup issues (which in many cases are fairly subjective anyways) that are in many times inherent with any new guitar purchase, and have nothing to do with bad quality of manufacture.
I personally thought this was an unfair review. I have also seen the same one (or nearly identical one) posted other places for different guitars, which makes me question the reviewers motives (same intro, etc,).
The folks at Gretsch seem more than committed to QC according to customers and dealers alike. Just ask them. Why this "luthier" didn't just send the guitar back (if was was as horrid as he described) or call Gretsch makes no sense.
Your statement seems to imply that we are a bunch of "Tools" at this site, which is unfair and unfounded.
If you bothered to look at some of the reviews of Gretsch purchases here (from dealers and private buyers) , they are some of the most detailed, and, are rarely all "sunshine and roses" reviews. There have plenty of threads on here about Gretsch QC issues too.
If anything, I think that most people here hold Gretsch to a higher standard than most companies, and this is one of the more unbiased guitar discussion groups I've personally ever seen.
Most guys on this site own plenty of other makes of guitars besides Gretsch... I've seen other makes (from high-end archtops to cheapo tele- copies) get honest reviews here too, no matter who makes them.
By the way, I can't stand Led Zeppelin.
By prefacing his review with a reference to his status as a luthier, he made a self-referential appeal to authority to lend credence to his arguments. Then, as has been noted, he pretty much shows by the items he chooses to discuss that he is not. It's like giving a bad review to a car because the seat wasn't set right for you.
I don't think that attempting to point out this fact to someone who may be influenced by this review makes anyone here "...like teenagers who just heard someone say something bad about Led Zeppelin".
(Speaking of which, I don't feel strongly about Led Zeppelin one way or another but I'm still curious how all those old Blues guys from the '30s managed to cover so many Zep songs.)
As for having an identity "wrapped up in a commodity", do "Traynor" and "Garnet" count? 
Zep got geat sounds outa their Gorilla amps, but only used them for the first two albums.
This post has been deleted
Traynor,
I must object. Whoever wrote that HC review was laughable. That was the point of my little piece of satire.
I haven't claimed professional status as a musician in nearly 30 years and I have never claimed to be a luthier but the problems he describes are hardly difficult. Agreed, the radius mis-match is not something I would recommend as a casual project for a beginner but everything else he mentions strikes me as being one step beyond a string change. Truss rod adjustments are hardly beyond the capabilities of any player and certainly nothing you would have to pay a luthier to do for you.
If you look at his review and summarize it you end up with this: radius mis-match (hardly a startling revelation), the truss rod needed a bit of tightening and he wandered off into some paranoic fantasy about bootleg pickups. At the end he says that if I'm willing to invest $500 - $1,000 dollars in a new guitar it will meet his standards.
The radius mis-match issue can be adressed with either a Tru-Arc or staggered height bridge saddles. Either solution will cost something in sight of $100. If you dismiss the cost of two TV Jones pickups as the nonsense it is you are left with a guy that suggests we should spend $250 - $750 for some nut work, a possible fret dress, a truss rod adjustment and to smear a little Vaseline on a squeaky Bigsby.
No wonder he has a fantasy about being a luthier, he thinks that they make a fortune for doing very little.
Gotta agree with "traynor" there's something fairly childish about this thread - "guys, someone's talking shit about Gretsches on the internet!".
Well I agree that most of what he's complaining about is nonsense but when it comes to the radius problem weren't we all at one time singing a different tune? Did we just give up?
As a former factory rep for Mercedes-Benz of No America.. I guarantee even the best engineered car in the world can have glitches. In spite of rigid factory standards and quality control, and a lengthy dealer Pre Delivery Service paid for by the factory, stuff happens. That is why there is a warranty and dealers and field reps such as myself. And here too, you get the folks that pick the fly specs out of the pepper.
I view instruments a bit differently than most folks. This came from my 15 year plus association with banjos and button accordions. ( you can't hang me twice )
Instruments are "kits". Find the model you like within your taste and budget. Find the best example of that model, then be prepared to "blueprint" the unit just as you might an
automotive engine.
Play your kit for a bit then start adjusting. "Set up" as some folks call it. Then if you find stuff defective go back to the dealer or manufacturer for repair or replacement,.
When you are done with that start upgrading to your taste.
Banjo example.. tuners, tailpiece, bridge , head even so far as to switch out tone rings.
Button accordions, adjust the action ( button height) and spring tension. Corrrect all the air leaks, Adjust the reed opening height if need be get out your strobe tuner for some touch up tuning or take it to a pro. I have even swapped out a full set of reeds for some Binci Pro twice tuned with bronze frames and leather valves. This is to say nothing of different straps even bellows replaced.
So you choose you brand of guitar (easy for a Gretschofile) choose your model. Inspect for obvious glitches. Set it up or get it set up then consider tweaks for your personal taste. Bridges, pickguards, tuners, strings of course, even pickups can and are swapped out. Fret levelling maybe etc
Even "handmade" button accordions such as Castagnari ( I have owned 6 ranging from $1600-4600) can have their anomalies. Part of the game. Lots of parts and lots of hands. The main thing I would stress here is "Know thy dealer".. espcially important with a button accordion.
When I budget for an instrument, I will assume another 30% over 6 months to get what I want, because quite simply my level of criticism and observation is a bit higher than most, maybe because of my former association with Rolls and M-B and BMW. But even then I want the best of the best even if I am dealing with a '72 International pickup (which I own) or a cheap Hohner 1 row model HA114 button accordion.
I learned long ago you can get Porsche performance out of a VW but you can't get it out of a Ford
So buy the VW such as a 5120 and make it your 5120 Carrera.
As to the review (er) I see both sides. He may be right in his observations, but I see overreaction on his conclusions. Some of us ( blindly) defend our brand.. other will bash ( don't like the word as its true definition also implies bodily harm) another brand on the mere mention such as my personal target Gibson and Martin. Both are factory production units, nothing more.
I wouldn't judge an instrument based on one negative review. 2 I might pay attention. 3 I would think there may be something to it. 4 now you have a track.
As to Harmony Central reviews.. Once in a while you see soemthing by somone with a level head. But mostly it is someone justifying their purchase.
So... find a trustworthy dealer such as the ones who support the Gretsch Pages buy your kit and save enough out in the budget to tweak and modify to make it your "it", your Carrera.
And forgive those of us who have owned over a dozen banjos and 50 button accordions.
bohemian: said: As a former factory rep for Mercedes-Benz of No America.. I guarantee even the best engineered car in the world can have glitches.
I'm sure for every Ferrari sold, there's an owner 5-10 years later complaining about an oil stain on their driveway. Things no matter how much they cost aren't perfect. They're not made by God or anything. They're made my human beings. Granted, computers have made things a bit more perfect but don't forget who designed the computers....
Geez guys.....
"...you know i heard GRETSCH'S smoke & drink and don't come home at all!....especially my SSLVO!"
Guys, come on, a little nuance in your reading please. I'm not "defending" this guy and have consistently said that he is often over the top and simply wrong in places. Timthom62, you are right about the reviewers' appeal to authority but his legitimacy as a luthier doesn't really have any bearing on what I am saying.
I also wrote that the "setup issues" are NOT simply a Gretsch problem but nonetheless DO occur on some Gretsch guitars. Whether or not this is analogous to car maintenance is moot and the degree of necessary setup is debatable (obviously every guitar that ships cannot be setup to your personal preferences, but it should be within reason in terms of action, intonation, etc).
Again, despite his problems the reviewer raises some good points and doesn't simply trash the guitar (praises it in fact). The radius issues may be "known" but that doesn't mean they are irrelevant or of no concern. Thank you Robert for the link to this discussion; it seems many here are/were also quite concerned about this.
Bobbyrivera, there is a huge difference between "defending" a product and responding to (an admittedly hyperbolic) review in such a virulent way. The group response suggests a collective "how dare you" mentality that is truly strange; it's as if critiquing a Gretsch is tantamount to personally attacking someone (Walter Broes and a couple others note the same trend). The rest of your post is simply a strawperson attack of a caricaturized version of my post (and leftist politics for some reason). As Timthom62 notes, my forum name obviously doesn't suggest people are "stupid" to enjoy and use a particular product; the "tone" of your response, however, is quite interesting (in an ironic way).
As usual, this has become out of hand. The cartoon Walter Broes posted made me LOL (guilty of it myself).
Oh yeah, BTW I am still hunting for my 6120; can't wait to find the one that is right for me :)
TG
I guess I didn't really see the posts as having a "how dare you attack Gretsch" mentality to them. Most folks were just pointing out the inconstancy of his review. I have seen that same review other places, so it made me question it's validity as I stated in this and an earlier thread.
Your comment, "Some of you guys are like teenagers who just heard someone say something bad about Led Zeppelin; is your identity really that wrapped up in a commodity?" really tripped a trigger with me. I was trying to be funny (somewhat) which sometimes backfires when you're typing it, but I'll stand by the general idea I was trying to get at. Maybe I read more into your comment than was intended.
If you were half joking, I couldn't tell (the Led Zeppelin line was funny though). I didn't intend it to sound like a personal attack on you, and if you read it that way I apologize. I also wasn't trying to imply that you were saying that anyone was "stupid".
As far as my post being interesting in an ironic way, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that. I'm pretty sure irony is hip with the kids these days though, so I'll just consider myself a hip dude.
traynorgarnet: said: Guys, come on, a little nuance in your reading please. I'm not "defending" this guy and have consistently said that he is often over the top and simply wrong in places.Perhaps you could apply your own device. I've read this thread several times and I can find no example of someone copping an attitude because this guy attacked Gretsch. Frankly, I don't think he attacked Gretsch in any way shape or form. With the exception of is theory on bootleg TV Jones pickups everything he said has at least some roots in fact.
Poorly cut nut? I've seen that on guitars from virtually every manufacutrer and even high-end Gibsons with list prices above $10,000 can have that problem. It's as big of a deal as you choose to make of it. If the nut it basically good but has one high slot I'll give it a quick touch with a file but if it goes beyond that I'll probably pay someone with more experience to do it. It hardly is a problem unique to Gretsch.
Ditto for fret leveling issues. Any guitar can turn up with these sorts of problems especially if there is a big difference in climate between where it was made and where it is being sold. True, very cheap guitars may indeed have very poor fretwork but not every guitar with fret problems is the result of sloppy work at the factory. A few months hanging on the wall of a poorly humidified guitar shop can cause real difficulties. Fret problems are frustrating but not necessarily a sign of a bad guitar.
Even mentioning a truss rod adjustment brands him as a rank amateur. Truss rod adjusments are done on the spot by guitar dealers free of charge every day. Anyone with the slightest concept of how a truss rod works can do adjustments. A poorly adjusted truss rod says nothing about the quality of the guitar IMO. The worst thing I could say about this is that it could be a sign of neglect on the part of the dealer but there are a lot of dealers that do zero in the way of setup until the guitar is sold.
As I mentioned in an earlier comment on this review, everything this guy said struck me as an exercise in self-congratulation and very little useful information made it to the surface. He went off on some trivial issues, dredged up old news about radius mis-match and went off on some wild conspiricy theory about Gretsch making bootleg copies of TV Jones pickups. My satiric response was meant to mirror the amount of creedence I placed upon this review.
As far a knee-jerk defense of Gretsch is concerned, that's absolute bunk. While I like Gretsch guitars I am well aware of their flaws. The radius mis-match is something that needs to be addressed and permanently corrected. I think it's sloppy on their part to allow this to happen but it's not the end of the world.
The nut/fret/truss-rod probelems he mentioned are pathetic little nitpicks against any brand. I've seen these on all sorts of guitars including Gretsches but it tells me more about the store than about the manufacturer.
It's also good to remember the effects of shipping on all of this. Riding for thousands of miles in a truck exposes everything to a lot of low-amplitude, high frequency vibration. It's the reason that a brand new box of corn flakes has space at the top and it will cause a floating bridge to be displaced. Fender ships their tube amps packed upside down to prevent the tubes from being vibrated out of their sockets. A new guitar leaving the factory in perfect adjustment can get a bit out of sorts just by virtue of a long ride in the back of a semi.
Just to sum it up, I'm just fine with most of what this guy says (except the TV Jones bootleg thing) but I don't see most of it as being that big of a problem and I sincerely doubt that a professional guitarist and/or luthier of 30 years experience would see these as quality control issues.
Bottom line, the guy that wrote that review strikes me as being a clown and while I don't really think that he guts fish for a living I do suspect that his claims of professional status as a musician or luthier are greatly exaggerated.
traynorgarnet said: Timthom62, you are right about the reviewers' appeal to authority but his legitimacy as a luthier doesn't really have any bearing on what I am saying.
But the point is that it does have bearing on what the reviewer is saying and in the minds of some would tend to lend credence to his statements. It also has bearing on my point that by doing so, he makes it appropriate to question both his statements and his experience as a luthier.
When I first began looking at Gretsch a couple of years ago, having not had any experience with them since the late '70s, one of the first things I ran across was this very review we are discussing, then posted on Harmony Central. Remembering the bad old days of Gretsch, I was actively looking for the negative reviews that I was sure would be out there so that I could have an idea of both sides of the brand.
I found few, and this was one of the most negative. I read through it, and at each of the points our reviewer felt were so deficient, I thought to myself: "setup", "setup", "setup", "ooh, bridge radius mismatch...probably have to file the saddles", "setup", etc. In the end I went away with no more useful information on Gretsch than I started with.
Not surprising because the review is less about the guitar and more about the reviewer, as is often true. I found far more accurate and honest information about Gretsch in my first five minutes here on the GDP than I got from this or any other such review that I found.
But say, for instance, that you're someone new to guitars, that you don't know which issues are setup issues or which are real problems, that you only recently found out what a luthier is and haven't yet learned the often painful lesson that they're not all equal. Now read that review. You don't know what the issues really are, but you do know this 'experienced luthier' just ripped Gretsch a new one. So it's off to GC to get that Les Paul copy like all your friends have.
This is the third time, that I'm aware of, in the last year that someone has come to the GDP to ask whether this review is accurate or not and each time they get the same answers. Kind of makes you curious how many people read the review, wonder about it, and either don't ask or don't know where to ask.
So I'm willing to bet that, whether you or Walter or anyone else think the responses to the question are appropriate or that we're being 'childish'; the next time someone comes to the GDP to ask what's up with this review that they found on Harmony Central, or Musician's Friend, or pompousassguitarreviewsdotcom, they're going to get the same response. I plan to be here to do my part, because in the end it's not so much the 'slamming Gretsch' part of the review as it is the 'doing a really bad and uninformed job of it' that I object to.
