Perceived Value in Guitars

Perceived Value in Guitars

When people talk about value in guitars, the conversation usually centers around the things that are easiest to see: exotic woods, fancy inlay, elaborate visual details. I am not against any of that. Rare and expensive materials have objective value. Beautiful work has value. Aesthetics matter.

I just do not think that is the whole picture.

I try to build objective value into my instruments wherever I can, and much of that comes down to resilience and ease of service. I use the strongest glues that make sense for the application, highly environmentally resistant finishes, reinforcement where it is useful, and construction methods that make the instrument approachable for a competent guitar tech. I want a Bezard guitar to perform at a high level when it leaves my hands and continue doing so for a very long time under real-world conditions.

A lot of the most important qualities in a guitar are not obvious when it is new. Figured wood and ornate details are immediate. They photograph well and are easy to appreciate. Serviceability, durability, and good long-term design usually become apparent years later, when the instrument needs fretwork, repair, modification, or some other kind of maintenance.

I want my guitars to still be good instruments to own decades from now. They should be stable, durable, and straightforward to work on. I do not want the next person who has to service one cursing my name because I made routine maintenance unnecessarily difficult.

This may be controversial, but just about anybody can start a guitar company. The barrier to entry is not high enough to be any meaningful guarantee of quality or experience.

That is not inherently a bad thing. New builders bring new ideas, aesthetics, techniques, and sometimes genuinely useful innovation. But not everybody who starts building guitars comes from a background that prepares them to understand what happens to instruments after years of use. Repair work, service work, and long-term exposure to old instruments teach things that are very difficult to learn from building new guitars alone.

It is also not uncommon for somebody to make a fortune in an unrelated industry and then pivot into guitars. Sometimes that produces excellent work and interesting ideas. It can also produce instruments that have clearly been designed around what they look like when new, with very little consideration for what happens when they eventually need to be worked on.

The owner ends up paying for those decisions.

A guitar can be beautiful and still be poorly considered. It can be innovative and still be miserable to service. Meticulous workmanship does not automatically mean that the design accounts for fretwork, environmental movement, electronics changes, wear, or future repair.

Part of building a high-value instrument is understanding what happens to it after it leaves the shop. How will it age? What will need to be serviced? What happens when somebody needs to modify it? What happens after thirty years instead of three?

Fretboard inlay is a good example.

There is beautiful fretboard work being done, and I understand the appeal. I like it too. I have also seen boutique guitars with elaborate fretboard designs where portions of the design were literally colored in with marker. Yikes.

My issue is not decoration. My issue is when decoration takes priority over the long-term serviceability of the instrument.

Traditional shell inlay material often starts around .060" to .080" thick. By the time it has been installed, the fretboard has been properly prepared, and the instrument has gone through fretwork, there may not be much material left.

That matters later.

When I inlay something into a fretboard, I want the material to be around .125" thick or more whenever possible. This is one reason I primarily use novel materials instead of traditional shell.

Anyone who has dealt with fretboard correction on something like a vintage Gibson knows the problem. In some cases, the original inlays have to be removed and retained before the board can be properly leveled. The pockets may need to be recut, and the inlays then have to be reinstalled before the fretwork can continue. This assumes the fretboard has enough material left to be corrected in the first place.

Routine maintenance can become expensive very quickly because of a decision that was made decades earlier.

I do not want a luthier leveling one of my fretboards to have to think about the inlay at all. There should be enough material there that sanding through it is roughly as likely as sanding through the usable fretboard itself. If the inlay is gone, the fretboard should already be at the end of its useful life.

The same reasoning applies to electronics cavities.

There is a trend toward extremely neat electronics cavities with exactly enough room for the components installed in them. They can look incredible, and I understand why builders do it.

As somebody who also works on guitars, though, I am wary of them.

If a tightly packed boutique electronics cavity came across my bench for a modification or repair, I would be reluctant to work in it for fear of damaging something. There is a point where optimization for neatness starts making the guitar harder to service.

Electric guitar players also change things. They change pickups, pots, switches, wiring schemes, and entire electronics configurations. That has always been part of electric guitar culture.

The Stratocaster is probably the most obvious example of the opposite design philosophy. The entire electronics package lives on a removable pickguard. It is easy to access, easy to replace, and easy to modify. I do not think that is a small part of why the Stratocaster has remained such an adaptable platform for so long.

I want my guitars to account for the fact that somebody may eventually want to change them.

None of this means I care less about appearance. I care a great deal about materials, aesthetics, refinement, and visual identity. Those things are part of what makes a boutique instrument worth owning.

I just do not think they should be purchased at the expense of the instrument's durability or usefulness.

The way I think about value is fairly simple. A guitar should be beautiful and exceptionally well made when it is new, but it should also be designed with some understanding of what happens afterward. It should tolerate environmental changes. It should withstand wear. It should be repairable. Routine service should not become unnecessarily complicated because somebody prioritized a clean photograph over the future of the instrument.

I want every Bezard guitar to be capable of surviving several lifetimes, including some amount of neglect and mistreatment along the way.

That is the kind of value I am interested in building.