Guitar Center has been selling other people’s guitars for so long that it’s getting a little, y’know, nuts, and so it has announced that its plans to create an all-new “revolutionary” guitar brand.
Furthermore, it wants guitar players to help them. Taking to Guitar Center's Tik Tok, CEO Gabe Dalporto adopted an Uncle Sam/Lord Kitchener-esque stance and declared that Guitar Center needs you, yes, you, to help with the design of the brand – and of whatever acoustic or electric guitars it creates.
Is this a hinge moment in the history of guitar design? Dalporto thinks so.
Article continues below“Guitars haven’t changed that much in the last 50 years, and we’re about to change that,” he says, adding that this is where the Guitar Center customer base comes in. He wants player’s ideas.
“Our customers are incredible musicians, and we’re gonna work with you in public, out loud, and share our designs, take your feedback, iterate, and make the best guitar that has ever been made,” he says, asking for said feedback on Instagram and on a sub-Reddit where feedback is indeed arriving – not all of it that positive, some of it crazy.
An AI-generated mock-up of a prototype electric guitar featuring a Fishman Fluence Modern humbucker at the neck, a P-90 and Strat single-coil pairing at the middle, and a Gretsch Filter’Tron at the bridge seems a little overkill, but then people like overkill! Oh, wait, a Bigbsy and a Floyd Rose vibrato, retractable headstocks… Dalporto did say “crazy” but this might not have been what he meant.
There are all kinds of legal caveats surrounding the ideas; they must be original, yours alone, and by submitting these ideas you’re transferring the rights to these ideas to Guitar Center to do with as they please – i.e. make a guitar based on some of these suggestions. This is where much of the aforementioned negativity is coming from.
@guitarcenter It’s time to throw out the rule book and build a new guitar with no constraints, and you’re the designer! Follow @ gdalporto on Instagram to stay tuned in the guitar building journey, and join the subthread, r/GuitarLab, on Reddit to see the whole conversation unfold—link in bio. ——— By submitting your idea, design, suggestion or feedback (collectively, “Idea”), you affirm that your Idea is your original creation, and that any Idea submitted by you is wholly original and owned by you, and cleared for use by Guitar Center, Inc. (“Guitar Center”) without the need for additional licensing. By submitting your Idea, you assign, transfer, give and relinquish to Guitar Center all right, title and interest in and to the Idea or any material based upon or derived therefrom for no consideration. Guitar Center may use and exploit, without any payment or attribution obligation of any kind, any Idea you provide to Guitar Center. You waive any moral and similar rights you may have in such Idea. If requested by Guitar Center, you agree to execute and deliver all documents needed to confirm the assignment and transfer of your Idea to Guitar Center.
♬ original sound - Guitar Center
But is this the kind of endeavour that can give Guitar Center a competitive advantage in a well-established market? That is the big question.
Like many other retailers, it carries exclusive lines that are effectively own-brand guitars, a portfolio of “private label brands” made under license overseas, such as the Mitchell brand of beginner guitars which has been sold exclusively through Guitar Center since 1986.
Setting aside the crowdsourcing, this move suggests a new game plan that, on the face of it, is not too dissimilar to what Thomann is doing with its Harley Benton guitars.
But time will tell how it will all shake out, and whether or not we will see a four-pickup guitar with dual vibratos and retractable headstocks. Let’s hope it comes in Sea Foam Green.
You can direct such suggestions and more to Guitar Center's GuitarLab sub-Reddit.
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