If you're going to China ... and thinking about buying a guitar while there, or just wondering about the manufacturing and sales of guitars from China:
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DON'T FRET
Global Times
May 31 2010
http://beijing.globaltimes.cn/community/2011-04/537056.html
The first time I came to China I bought a guitar in Xidan. Less than 300 yuan ($42), six strings on a cobalt blue soundbox, how could you go wrong I thought? Well it did go wrong. As a novice I didn't know anything about strings and on this one the strings were a good centimeter off the frets.
But I played my first chords on it and later bought a better guitar, after a teacher alerted me to what I should be looking for. That's when I started visiting those shops on Gulou looking for advice and guitar options. Guitars I found were plentiful but advice and service were both hard to come by. Nice to look at and nice to hold but I could never get it explained why one Yamaha costs 900 yuan and that one 1,300 yuan.
It is, I now know, mostly because one is a spruce top, the other pine. A couple of years later one of my favorite weekends in Beijing still is walking Gulou, and passing time in the guitar shops. I've never seen a city with so many independent musical instrument stores. Few of them have the tradition of legendary stores like the Wawa in Manchester, where Oasis and Joy Division both bought their gear, or Bronstein's in San Francisco, which sold to a young Metallica.
China-made
The more I've visited those shops I've become clearer that while there's not so much expertise there is plenty of product in China. There's several makers of drum sets, accordions and pianos in Beijing alone while several firms in Tianjin industrial estates make every stringed instrument you could imagine - the city built a musical city, a kind of theme-park cum mall, to highlight the fact.
China, you see, is the latest stop on the line for Western and Japanese producers like Gibson and Yamaha, which moved production to Korea, and now to China. China's guitars are made by a bunch of local manufacturers who when they're not making instruments for the likes of Yamaha or Gibson (if they're good enough to do so) sell instruments under their own labels - names like Axe and Starsun abound.
Most of these instruments are for Western music stores and chains like Wallmart. But given the way the huge dip in the European and US economies Chinese manufacturers have had to look elsewhere to keep afloat. Where else to look for new customers than at home in China? Instrument makers are also trying to drive sales in every conceivable location, which is why a shop assistant who's never strummed a string came to sell me my first guitar in Xidan.
There's an understandable fear given local youth's penchant for Western culture and consumerism - how many times have you seen a guitarist portrayed as the epitome of coolness in an advert? - could do for China's own traditional instruments - if all the young dudes pick up a guitar rather than an erhu.
Shopkeepers, I've discovered, usually open their shops for the same reason others open a pub - to socialize, to hang out with other musicians. Customers are local learners/ musicians but I'm still mystified as to who on earth is buying all the guitars on offer in Gulou's guitar shops.
Instrument manufacturing
Rather than grooming master craftsmen, companies here have relied on unskilled migrant laborers to produce low-cost instruments for Western mass retailers. Gibson started out as a one-man cottage industry and grew through quality craftsmanship and constant refining.
I've been to visit a few such instrument factories in Qingdao, which is a hub for this business thanks to its connections to Korea. Factory owners there have simply moved the business onwards to avail of cheaper labor. Enormous in scale and ambition, the enterprise churns out guitars for the world's biggest brands.
The music may eventually die away. We took a ride to perhaps Beijing's biggest piano maker, Xinghai, a State-owned giant making 40,000 pianos a year. The trail will lead on from here to Indonesia and Vietnam, predicts Wang Gentian, president of the China Musical Instruments Association. It already has - I've seen locally made Yamaha guitars selling in Jakarta and Hanoi.
Instrument makers are moving on because labor costs and prices for wood and metals are rising. Wang thinks too many manufacturers are making low quality instruments, especially guitars, pianos and violins. He wants them to amalgamate and spend more money on R&D so that China has something when instrument manufacturing moves elsewhere.
Firms like Xinghai and Zhujiang employ foreign experts to help them improve their pianos. Domestic sales will rise and take a share of the lost exports, predicts Wang, an avuncular bureaucrat. "But China's not going to be making these cheap instruments much longer."
Guitars forgotten
It's a source of embarrassment for Wang that despite all of the instruments made here, most of the instruments in the new National Center for the Performing Arts are imports. He thinks locals should be able to make them to spec.
Instrument exports were worth $1.2 billion in 2007.
Half the world's guitars are never played since most of them are impulse buys by those without the time or patience for the hours of practice involved in mastering. Because they're so visually appealing even the non-musically adept find themselves imagining making great sounds. They imagine evenings in living rooms, impressing visitors, afternoons in garages, practicing. Or stealing the limelight at a friend's party with a sharp slab of Clapton or a rub of blues. Money paid, guitar's back home. It's like gym memberships - bought in a flush of exuberance and enthusiasm, then forgotten.
I saw some of that the last time I sat in a guitar shop waiting for some guidance on string changing. Office types wandering in, admiring the sheen of an Epiphone electric and stroking the bodies of Yamaha exclusives, and obviously dreaming themselves plucking one.
China's factories and Gulou's guitar shops do something for musicality however. Cheap, entry point instruments make it easier for those with more talent than money to play.
If you go down to Gulou today I hope you get a bargain, and have a lot of fun plucking and strumming the strings. But all that shines isn't a good guitar.
Some tips for guitar shopping in Gulou:
Don't buy in a department store.
Look for musicians and ask their advice.
Is the salesman/shopkeeper a musician too?
Ask him to tune the guitar and you'll find out.
Be double-careful in buying an amplifier.
===========
--------------------
Click here to view the attachment
--------------------
DON'T FRET
Global Times
May 31 2010
http://beijing.globaltimes.cn/community/2011-04/537056.html
The first time I came to China I bought a guitar in Xidan. Less than 300 yuan ($42), six strings on a cobalt blue soundbox, how could you go wrong I thought? Well it did go wrong. As a novice I didn't know anything about strings and on this one the strings were a good centimeter off the frets.
But I played my first chords on it and later bought a better guitar, after a teacher alerted me to what I should be looking for. That's when I started visiting those shops on Gulou looking for advice and guitar options. Guitars I found were plentiful but advice and service were both hard to come by. Nice to look at and nice to hold but I could never get it explained why one Yamaha costs 900 yuan and that one 1,300 yuan.
It is, I now know, mostly because one is a spruce top, the other pine. A couple of years later one of my favorite weekends in Beijing still is walking Gulou, and passing time in the guitar shops. I've never seen a city with so many independent musical instrument stores. Few of them have the tradition of legendary stores like the Wawa in Manchester, where Oasis and Joy Division both bought their gear, or Bronstein's in San Francisco, which sold to a young Metallica.
China-made
The more I've visited those shops I've become clearer that while there's not so much expertise there is plenty of product in China. There's several makers of drum sets, accordions and pianos in Beijing alone while several firms in Tianjin industrial estates make every stringed instrument you could imagine - the city built a musical city, a kind of theme-park cum mall, to highlight the fact.
China, you see, is the latest stop on the line for Western and Japanese producers like Gibson and Yamaha, which moved production to Korea, and now to China. China's guitars are made by a bunch of local manufacturers who when they're not making instruments for the likes of Yamaha or Gibson (if they're good enough to do so) sell instruments under their own labels - names like Axe and Starsun abound.
Most of these instruments are for Western music stores and chains like Wallmart. But given the way the huge dip in the European and US economies Chinese manufacturers have had to look elsewhere to keep afloat. Where else to look for new customers than at home in China? Instrument makers are also trying to drive sales in every conceivable location, which is why a shop assistant who's never strummed a string came to sell me my first guitar in Xidan.
There's an understandable fear given local youth's penchant for Western culture and consumerism - how many times have you seen a guitarist portrayed as the epitome of coolness in an advert? - could do for China's own traditional instruments - if all the young dudes pick up a guitar rather than an erhu.
Shopkeepers, I've discovered, usually open their shops for the same reason others open a pub - to socialize, to hang out with other musicians. Customers are local learners/ musicians but I'm still mystified as to who on earth is buying all the guitars on offer in Gulou's guitar shops.
Instrument manufacturing
Rather than grooming master craftsmen, companies here have relied on unskilled migrant laborers to produce low-cost instruments for Western mass retailers. Gibson started out as a one-man cottage industry and grew through quality craftsmanship and constant refining.
I've been to visit a few such instrument factories in Qingdao, which is a hub for this business thanks to its connections to Korea. Factory owners there have simply moved the business onwards to avail of cheaper labor. Enormous in scale and ambition, the enterprise churns out guitars for the world's biggest brands.
The music may eventually die away. We took a ride to perhaps Beijing's biggest piano maker, Xinghai, a State-owned giant making 40,000 pianos a year. The trail will lead on from here to Indonesia and Vietnam, predicts Wang Gentian, president of the China Musical Instruments Association. It already has - I've seen locally made Yamaha guitars selling in Jakarta and Hanoi.
Instrument makers are moving on because labor costs and prices for wood and metals are rising. Wang thinks too many manufacturers are making low quality instruments, especially guitars, pianos and violins. He wants them to amalgamate and spend more money on R&D so that China has something when instrument manufacturing moves elsewhere.
Firms like Xinghai and Zhujiang employ foreign experts to help them improve their pianos. Domestic sales will rise and take a share of the lost exports, predicts Wang, an avuncular bureaucrat. "But China's not going to be making these cheap instruments much longer."
Guitars forgotten
It's a source of embarrassment for Wang that despite all of the instruments made here, most of the instruments in the new National Center for the Performing Arts are imports. He thinks locals should be able to make them to spec.
Instrument exports were worth $1.2 billion in 2007.
Half the world's guitars are never played since most of them are impulse buys by those without the time or patience for the hours of practice involved in mastering. Because they're so visually appealing even the non-musically adept find themselves imagining making great sounds. They imagine evenings in living rooms, impressing visitors, afternoons in garages, practicing. Or stealing the limelight at a friend's party with a sharp slab of Clapton or a rub of blues. Money paid, guitar's back home. It's like gym memberships - bought in a flush of exuberance and enthusiasm, then forgotten.
I saw some of that the last time I sat in a guitar shop waiting for some guidance on string changing. Office types wandering in, admiring the sheen of an Epiphone electric and stroking the bodies of Yamaha exclusives, and obviously dreaming themselves plucking one.
China's factories and Gulou's guitar shops do something for musicality however. Cheap, entry point instruments make it easier for those with more talent than money to play.
If you go down to Gulou today I hope you get a bargain, and have a lot of fun plucking and strumming the strings. But all that shines isn't a good guitar.
Some tips for guitar shopping in Gulou:
Don't buy in a department store.
Look for musicians and ask their advice.
Is the salesman/shopkeeper a musician too?
Ask him to tune the guitar and you'll find out.
Be double-careful in buying an amplifier.
===========
--------------------
Click here to view the attachment
