I spend too much time on Reddit. A lot of what I look at is guitar and pedal related. Some of the types of posts that you see there seem to be cyclical. And I’ve noticed a certain type of post is taking its turn again. And I hate them.
Occasionally, I’m sure some of these posts are troll posts, but most often, they’re not. And, no. I am not talking about the posts where folks are asking if the guitar they just bought is a fake. Those aren’t cyclical. They’re always there.
The ones I’m talking about are the ones where someone has gotten a new guitar, and they take pictures of things on it that they think are problems, and then they ask if they should send it back or not. And the stuff that they are asking about is usually dumb. For instance, today there was one where they had taken a picture of an inlay, and they were asking if it was a problem that the inlay was made from more than more one piece. “For the money I paid, should this be two pieces?” It was a budget guitar brand. Granted, it was one of the higher end gujitars of that brand, but it was still a budget brand.
I could have understood them asking the question if the inlay had a gap between it and the wood. Or maybe if a piece of the inlay was lifted on one side. But this inlay was perfect. It was just made from two pieces. Two pieces that fit perfectly together and perfectly in the guitar.
They also had two other pictures. One was a picture of the binding right next to the neck where it was slightly discolored. Like 1/8″ of binding that should’ve been cream colored that was slightly yellower than cream. The other one was a very small dent on the edge of neck right next to a fret. Looked like a slight tooling mark that you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it.
My thought is that, if the problem is small enough that you have to find it, then don’t worry about it. Especially on a budget brand. If you buy a custom shop guitar, then all bets are off; they should be perfect. You’re paying 10% or less of that on a guitar that comes off an assembly line, and it may not be technically perfect. Does it affect the playability? What about the feel of it? If it does, is it something you can easily fix? If the answer to either of the first two questions is no, then you should probably keep it. If the answer to the all three questions is yes, then you should probably keep it.
Problem is that few guitars that come off an assembly line from the budget brands are going to be perfect. They do things to make those guitars more affordable. That includes using multiple pieces of wood for the bodies and multiple pieces of mother of pearl or mother of toilet seat for the inlays. That means that, if you decide to send your guitar back for these minimal imho non-issues, honestly, the odds that you’re actually going to get a better guitar are pretty slim.
So order your guitar. Play your guitar. Be happy with your guitar. If you’re paying under a grand for a guitar, I’m not saying that you need to settle for just good enough, but I’m also saying to set your expectation before it arrives. And your expectation shouldn’t be perfection.
That said, I’ll also say that I’ve got a couple of budget guitars that are killer guitars and a couple of my main players. I’ve also got a couple of budget guitars that were definitely budget guitars. Because they’re budget brands, I set my expectations up front. And part of those expectations were to expect some slight imperfections.