General Music Chat

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Musical-Ins ... 1600050002

The Horror!

Just what we need, more high-volume junk music stores.
Gibson's QC will never recover for sure.

I miss my local circuit of music shops.

my thoughts are along the lines of:

well they carry the same fenders and gibsons, same prices.. and can their cust service get much worse than sam ash??

Although, GC has always been a good cust svc experience. The mom and pop shops were always iffy on service, and high priced, so why not have BB competeing with SA and GC? Maybe for once the customer will benefit? I heard something about GC and SA getting sued for price-fixing anyways.

I know a lot of the employees at our local GC and they have been very helpful to me. Maybe its just because I know them and they like me. On the other hand some of the mom and pop type stores have not been as friendly to me over the past couple of years.

The local Best Buy had some good prices but the guys working there didnt seem to know anything about what they were selling.

Ive had great results price wise on CL and E-Bay, my last couple of guitars came off these places.

I think you should research what you want to buy and know what is a deal and what is not a good deal before you go buying gear. GC has a pretty extensive collection of guitars, amps and effects pedals to try. I like GCs policy of allowing you to return used pedals for full price for 14 days. This has allowed me to try a wide variety of pedals before I settled on one.

yeah, my experiences with GC have always been pretty positive. Sam Ash treats me like a jerk all the time though, and sadly the GC is a lot further away. So having a BB instead of sam ash close by is a good thing to me.


I do agree, that I prefer to buy from a place that allows me to try out all the gear, and return it within a reasonable amount of time if it doesn't work. I have no idea what BB's policy is, but I'm guessing a lot of the gear is online only

I prefer the smaller local shop experience to the sterile big box store.

The guitar marts by me don't really care if they make me happy, where else am I going to go? Everyone else is out of business.

There were 2 stores in Atlanta that did this prior to the big box take over.
One would buy up all the Marshall product available for our region, the other did the same for Mesa Boogie.

They didn't care if you felt warm and fuzzy when you shopped there for your new Marshall gear or Mesa gear as there was nobody else in the state that could sell it to you new or order it for you.

LOL - one is now a Guitar Center.....new name...same old game.

I will say that Sam Ash is the only one of the guitar marts around me that gives you a fair shake on used gear when you trade in but still not like my old shops used too.

Now Best Buy is going to be even louder and more annoying than it already is.
Yet another place I'm going to hear a squealing crap amp maxed out with some emo looking kid bending the E string over and over while chunking overly detuned strings or butchering Metallica riffs (if I'm lucky)


I must be getting old.

Fender & Gibson have flooked up the small music store, to a degree.

Fender requires you to spend $30,000 on your 1st order, & Gibson demands $50,000....or they did just 12 years ago. They also have yearly quotas that the store must keep on buying. Dddonnie couldn't even sell them cuzza this. They also require certain humidity & temp ranges.

While I can understand the latter requirements, the high cost of starting up doing business with these co's makes things very hard on a guy just starting out. You gotta be successful before you can start being successful with these products.

Dddonnie bought his F & G stuff from Musicians Friend & resold them.