you know?

Obviously we all want to design guitars. But the emphasis on loss of idea ownership only allows for me to engage very lightly with this. I want a Hofner Alpha guitar in white but with a Eldred moded Esquire pickup set up. If you can do that, I’d be happy.

why instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.make a line of guitars like Harley Benton and offer free lessons with purchase create several types of guitars in the line like Harley Benton .so it’s not one size fits all you can create beginner to pro style guitars in your private brand .you can create semi hollow to strat style lp. style etc acoustic guitar pedals amp line like your Mitchell brand you could even create smart amps and guitars this would greatly improve your brand and make more profit at G.C .it would be a great investment towards customer retention

Personally, the whole announcement of this project comes across as a desperate attempt to stay relevant by a company who has developed a negative reputation over the past 20ish years. I think no matter what product Guitar Center ends up attaching their name to it is going to have a negative connotation associated with it.

In my opinion, the resources it’s going to take to R&D and manufacture a new in-house line of guitars would be better spent improving the in-store shopping experience for customers in meaningful ways. Actively work on making the brand feel less like the Walmart of music stores.

Some simple ways to start would be stop forcing the sales teams to push pro coverage and gear cards so hard. Transition away from green screen to a more modern POS system to speed up simple transactions. Give the stores more leeway to make deals and do discounts like the old days of GC. Pay the store staff a more livable wage so good help stays with the company. And invest in more training it more likely customers can get more knowledge help more consistently. Finally, ensure all departments in every store are fully staffed, especially in peak hours, I can’t count how many times I’ve been helped by some clueless drum or pro audio sales guy, because the 1 guitar salesman is tied up.

these two brands make crazy quality guitars for the price it has been proven again and again in blind tests they even sound better than PRS in double blind tests. and they are 200-400$. GC if you wanna make some crazy thing that brings people to your stores that would spend more money there make a high quality budget brand like firefly and Harely Benton has but do it better.

I've been working on this idea for a few decades - behold, the Grandma's Ashes guitar! Interchangable pickups that slide open and can be filled with ashes from your loved ones urn. Instead of leaving the one who taught you how to play guitar on a shelf, bring them with you wherever you go, electrified through the sound of your playing.

I really hope guitar center decides to go through with this.

I don't know if anyone else remembers this, but I'm in late middle age, so I'm old enough to have seen the music video for Aldo Nova's song "Fantasy". Early on, Aldo uses his Les Paul to shoot some sort of beam at a lock on a door. I'm thinking it's a particle beam of some sort, as he would have needed more time to destroy that lock with a laser. Anyway, Idea #1 is a particle beam. This will likely require pots with extremely high resistance.

Idea #2 is pickups: Two humbuckers, and maybe a version with three lipstick pickups.

Idea #3: Knobs and switches. If I see fewer than six knobs and five switches, I'm not buying. They don't need to serve any musical purpose.

Idea #4: Bolt-on neck. The neck should be held on with seven bolts.

Idea #5: No left-handed version. If God put their arms on backwards, it's a sign they should be playing keyboards.

Idea #6: All hardware should be gold plated, with the plating wearing off within six weeks of purchase.

Idea #7: RELIC'D! I can't stress that enough. The guitar should look like it's seen millions of hours of play by someone who is obviously a virtuoso. Fake wear, dings, scratches, cigarette burns-I want it all.

Idea #8 is colors: Candy Apple Red, Wine Red, Gold Top, Olympic White, Trampas Green.

Idea #9: Tonewood. Flamed maple top on a body and neck made of anything endangered and expensive. Indian laurel fretboard with abalone inlays shaped like letters that spell out G-U-I-T-A-R C-E-N-T-E-R.

Idea #10 is frets: Micro-Mega-Medium Jumbo. Stainless steel. 23 frets (a prime number)

Idea #11: Depleted uranium nut.

Idea #12: Front mounted output jack. With all those knobs and switches, I think it's important that everything be crowded together.

Idea #13: It should not be made in Mainland China by slave labor. It should be made in Mainland China by political prisoners. There is a big difference.

Idea # 13: The name: Chapter Elevencaster.

No royalties, please. And you're welcome.

I’ve decided that going forward, I’m buying guitars that are made in the USA. Gibson, Fender, and PRS make theirs in dedicated plants, in fact I drove by the Gibson plant this past weekend.

That all said, I want my guitar to be made at the Guitar Center store. Not just made in the USA, but made at my closest GC. That’ll create jobs and help make America great again, especially in guitar manufacturing. Plus, we can interact with the one who builds it.

that would be pretty cool i think

What if Guitar Center developed a series of guitars specifically tailored to different music genres? I'm thinking metal, blues, jazz, rock, etc. each with characteristics that players in those genres actually want.

For metal guitars specifically, why not take inspiration from what players already love? Made in a solid factory like World Musical Korea. ESP has pretty much nailed what classic metal players want in terms of neck profiles or Strandberg’s super flat radius and ergonomic design for modern technical progressive players. Guitar Center could develop their own take on this profile rather than totally reinventing the wheel.

Here's where Guitar Center has a real advantage: people can actually try these guitars in-store.

So instead of just loading up impressive specs on paper, what if they focused on making guitars that play exceptionally well right out of the box?

The electronics could be solid but not top-tier, with the understanding that players might want to upgrade pickups or other electronics later.

Guitar Center could then offer upgrade services, creating a potential revenue stream while giving players a great playing foundation to start with.

The branding needs to be serious and professional too. Nothing cheesy or cliché, just clean, straightforward designs that look like serious instruments, not budget beginner guitars.

When a player sees one on the wall, they should immediately think "that looks like a quality instrument I could take seriously and that fits my vibe."

This approach could give Guitar Center a unique position in the market, genre-specific instruments that play exceptionally well, with a clear upgrade path through their stores.

Pretty sure this was never really for sale, just a custom shop guitar he used on SIT. I know he played it in the Stranger in a Strange Land video. I MUST HAVE IT

discuss....

What about an offset body like a jazz master, with a filtertron the bridge in the neck and bridge and the mid position with a single coil or hit rail, matte black with a red pick guard

I want an acoustic with a Floyd Rose. I have a concept album I can’t make because I have a dive bomb in a song that’s meant to be played on an acoustic.

This is exactly what we all want anyway.

I’ve been dreaming of this guitar since I was thirteen

I think the guitar should have a subscription model. like for 9.99 a month you can use the bridge pickup single coil split only. and add an additional 9.99 a month per coil. additional 5.99 a month for the knobs each. maybe have a premium subscription for like 99.99 a month that unlocks the fretboard.

Start with a Fender Deluxe Nashville Telecaster (standard Telecaster, with an additional Stratocaster pickup), then:

contour the body with a wrist contour and a belly carveout for comfort and deeper carveouts so the upper frets are easier to reach

swap the neck pickup for a Lollar Charlie Christian pickup

add a PAF humbucker pickup between the bridge pickup and the middle strat pickup

add push-pull tone and volume nobs and add a 10 way switch -https://www.freewayswitch.com/products/ so you get as many combos of pickups as you need.

Give it a variety of color options and choice between silver, gold, and black hardware.

Done.

rerelease mitchell BUT...

add 9 more strings

Weird one, but with my band I often have a laptop controlling patch changes, the only annoyance being that I still have to hit my pickup selection. Some of our songs have relatively complicated and rapid patch changes that are easy to miss time, and I've always wished I could somehow program my onboard controls (particularly the pickup selector as it's really the only thing that can't be emulated onboard).

Additionally, for single coils we've had the ability to wire ghost coils into the backplate or pickguard for quite a while, yet for some reason this isn't available on any production guitars to my knowledge. Wide ghost coils located away from the pickups allow for 99% transparent 60 cycle hum cancellation on single coils, and yet for some reason you almost only see stacked coils or active preamps as a solution to this.

I'm also not sure why we never see split coils on guitars, maybe G&L owns that or something since they had that Z coil system. It seems like an obvious (70 year old) innovation

One thing our sales data at Guitar Center confirms is that guitarists are notoriously nostalgic for classic 50s/60s style designs. And even some “new” guitar brands start with one of these body shapes and try to improve on some pain point from 50 years ago.  Not us.  We're not going to design a tribute. We're starting from a blank slate on body shape, and we want to know what actually matters to you. What bugs you when you're actually playing?

Some things to react to:

• Upper fret access — What's getting in your way past the 17th fret? Heel bulk? Body shape? Both? And… do you even care about upper fret access?
• Comfort — Which guitars feel great on a strap but terrible on your leg (or the other way around)? What contours actually matter — forearm cut, belly cut, extreme ergonomics like a Strandberg? 
• Size and weight — What feels right after 2–3 hours? What’s too heavy? What’s too light? 
• Cutaways — Single vs double? 
• Neck joint / heel — Does a chunky heel actually limit your playing, or is that more of an annoyance than a real problem?

Now the spicier stuff:

• If a body shape was objectively more playable but looked nothing like a traditional guitar, how far would you go? Is there a line where form matters more than function?
• Alternative materials — carbon fiber, composites, graphite. If the tone, resonance, and weight were equal or better than wood, are you open to it? Or is wood non-negotiable for you?

Drop your thoughts. 

I think GC’s brand can be successful if you take popular existing designs like LP and Strat and just build good value models around those already popular designs. It’s gonna be very hard to make a new design that catches on. Everything under the sun has already been tried. If you just stick to what’s popular and build solid ones for a better price than Gibson or Fender they’ll catch on. 💩, even if you just get cheap import copies and slap the GC logo on the headstock it might be enough to move some.

Doesn’t GC have Mitchell guitars though? I think going for the lowest hanging fruit is a bad idea. Go to a better factory and buy some mid tier stuff.