In the last years I have confronted with a lot of trends: did not found stuff to do it myself, found poor quality products for hobbyists, found overpriced hobby products but at a good quality and at the moment watching how diy gets overpriced and at the worst quality.
I like to build things on my own, helps me to cope with stress and keeps my creativity sharp. This does not mean I do not purchase ready made things but from time to time do my own because I want to have a feature that you can't find on the ready made products or you can't modify the ready made product to fit my vision or other various reasons when a "do it yourself" attitude is more fit to the job.
Today I will talk guitars, electric guitars! I know that for some is a hobby, and hobbies should be expensive, for some is a way of life, for some is to collect as many rare models as possible, for some is a job and for some they do not mean anything.
Well, I started when I had a very beaten old second-third-fourth-tenth-hand guitar, but it was the first electric guitar I have bought in high-school with my own money. It was completely messed up, someone painted over the original color with a thick layer of nitro, was dented, chipped paint, the mechanics were with two decades over the end of life - missing teeth, the sound was not the best, the nut needed replacement, the bridge looked like a piece of metal from junkyard, fret wood was dry like a desert and dirty form the years of abuse, there was a big space in the neck-pocket and the fret wires were eaten.
At this point, normally, a guitar in this condition would have ended in the trash because to revive such a mess would have costed me like 1000 EUR without too much high end stuff on it. So, to make long story short (I will write a post about how I did and what - with pictures too) I managed to repair most of the issues, repainted it, and now it has a new life, where I like to play it and look at it.
After this I said ... "what the hell, I do my own guitars" and here is where the pain starts. Since I do not have the space, the situation (I am not a company so some products I can't purchase straight from the factory), and the money to go and buy CNC machines, special wood and so on and so forth I have to rely on DIY kits.
In Germany there is a cheap Chinese "brand" sold here as Rocktile, they have let's say honestly fair ready made products, cheap but somehow well made. The main distributor (maybe he is the one who came with the branding anyways) sells also DIY kits. While you are expecting that a kit costs maybe just a bit under the finished products here comes the surprise:
Single cut model - Kit 119 EUR - Finished product 92 EUR - Cheapest Epiphone LP 99 EUR
Strat style - Kit 79.99 EUR - Finished 82.99 EUR - Cheapest Fender Squier around 120 EUR
So at least the ST style is fitting the bill, you would say, but hell no, I have seen the cheapest ST from Rocktile because I have one and looks 2 times better made than the kit. I would not blame the Chinese producer but I think that the nice German businessman looked around and said "why not!?!?" take the crappiest kits since well ... you have to work on them and sell them almost at the same price or even higher than the finished products.
Then there are some other companies that sell kits - like ML-Factory. The difference is that they also got some other wood options but at twice the price and looks like the producer is the same Chinese guy when you look at the models (some have some extra models) which you can buy ready made cheap Chinese and the bodies you can buy from the diy business.
ML goes even more pervert, I can buy a mahogany body kit at 359 EUR where at those money I can buy a good Epiphone with finished body, better electronics and same wood used for build, hell I can buy same wood even cheaper and ready to rock.
Still in guitar area: buy a ready made brand tube amp and purchase a diy tube amp kit with all the parts hanging in a bag ready for you to work next days .... guess which one is cheaper and sometimes better quality.
Buy wood to make your own furniture for garage or whatever?!?! Find better one and ready made at Ikea.
It looks like everything that you can do on your own gets expensive, I get it, the industry wants me to buy from them and if not pay the premium price. But let's face it, we turn into the iciocracy world anyways. People do not change their own lights switches anymore, power outlet!?!?! God forbid to mess up with the wires. My grandparents lived in a world where they rebuild the houses themselves, paint the fence, build their things on their own, my parents could do some of this stuff but not so much, the biggest thing was to do small repairs on the car on your own .... today you don't change a light bulb on your own. We are idiots so why the fear that 5 people will do stuff on their own?
Before, the hobby stuff was expensive because well, who had time for hobby had money too, but the materials were high quality, because he who pays has some standards and expectations.
Today is all expensive and of bad quality, or you have to pay for a bare wood the price I would usually give for a premium product.
Wonder where will go the policy of DIY pricing.
When the internet becomes a source of everyone's opinion and less reliable
It's me again with my tongue in cheek attitude!
Don't get me wrong, the internet is full of information, and I mean good quality information, which is unfortunately buried under a huge pile of dung. You need to get dirty to find a good piece of information.
Like the old guys are usually saying, "when I was young the world was better", I start to dream at the "golden era of internet information" and see the decay of quality in our days.
Of course, back then you had to put some work in having a website, not all idiots had the money to pay for a internet connection and when they did they searched for boobs anyways. There was less information but of somehow better quality.
Today is different, you find everything and nothing, thousands of idiot-proof website building software took care of this, social media raised "opinion leaders", YouTube raised "superstars", every huge company has a forum, then are other thousands of individual forums covering the same products / companies. There is at least a discussion board for each subject you could think of, there are hundred of thousands of search results for each question you could think to type on the search field of any given search engine. You could say that this is awesome, you do not need any specialists at all, just ask Google and you can get your answers. While partly this is true, at the same time is so false, yes you get your answers but, man, you get so much junk answers as it becomes a hard job to go through all the answers and find the good one. And all of this is harder because you do not know the answer, that's why you ask / search.
I know that opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and always the other ones stink, but it becomes everything a "knowledge" based on opinions. I have my opinion too, I use the easy to use blogger, I bash the others on my blog, but I keep it as a blog and not going to the direction of creating pseudo-scientific articles or post my vision of the future or do some perverse paid advertising. I have my opinion and advertise it to be taken with a pinch of salt.
1. Search for more than one source
Along motorcycles passion (I bashed here anyways the adventure scene, and I will continue to do it but not today) I also build stuff - guitars, arduino based gadgets, raspberry-pi thingies and other home made improvements. Well, from practice I know that there is always more than one way to do something so why stop at the first search result, look into others as well even if you are satisfied with the first answer, maybe is another way available, maybe fits better, maybe not but just look on the next one.
2. Using the brain power to understand different opinions
For example, if you search for which type of potentiometer (link to Wikipedia) to use in a guitar you end up nowhere if you do not use your brain too. One option is to use logarithmic potentiometers or linear ones. Historically the logarithmic ones are called audio tapers because the human hearing is logarithmic and not linear. From this point on you get people fighting which one is better and who is smarter and so on. But here is what I do ....
I get that our hearing is logarithmic if we think from a certain perspective, at the same time I also do notice a linear change in sound. And at least for me a small logarithmic pot depending on the application offers a more on/off effect, while the linear one offers a more linear feel.
Now you can mix and match depending on the application need and the information you gathered from the net. You need a very fine control go for linear, you need a signal that you can heavily modify at the extremities go for logarithmic. I use mainly linear for volume to get a finer overall control and logarithmic for the tone and sometimes linear at the tone, depending on the guitar I build.
3. Use common sense to filter junk
Especially when you search for some medical issues you end up with the stupidest answers although you find people swear by all gods that they do work or whatever. I know that there is some traditional healing science tested for thousands of years, which somehow died when the medicine became available for people. There are some "grandma treatments" who work sometimes better than medicine but... a lot of bullshit is flying around as "grandma knowledge" but it is not. More disturbing is that those people could hurt others by recommending crazy things.
The hardest stupidity I was reading is that you can completely change the color of your eyes. No shit!?!? Yes I know that depending on some stress factors, light and so on the eyes ca be a bit more clouded or change a bit the shade of your color .... but turning your eyes green from black .... hmmm. And the funny thing is that they recommended some stuff to take. Here is where the common sense should kick in!
Or cure cancer with some herb when you are in need of urgent surgery because is already too late ... use common sense.
4. Keep in mind that one man's garbage may be another man's gold / your realistic needs
Of course this does not mean you need to live out of the trash bin, and since we are talking internet is not possible anyways ... but ... if someone says that some device is garbage because bla bla maybe it fits my bill because I have different expectations.
Returning to my guitars example - is full of people who say that if is not finished with any nitro based laquer then is garbage. I would say maybe nitro is not available for the consumers in my country because is considered toxic, maybe I do not have the tools for nitro, maybe I just like the feel of other finish since I will hold the guitar in hand anyways. So what is for those guys garbage, is for me the tool to work with.
Now you find reviews and "vs." between all you can imagine that you want to compare. That graphic card vs the other graphic card and so on. I will touch the reviews subject later but now let's stick with the simple part of "x product is junk". I got an Marshall Code combo for my guitar, and for fun, although the internet was full of "oh is junk, I got whatever $2000 combo .... it sounds better" Duh ... you pay under $200 and you expect it to sound like a $2000 one?!?!? Are you a retard or what!?!?
Ok maybe some products which are in hype costs too much - like iPhones, the real price is way smaller, and now everyone who tries to get to the status of quality ups the prices, as long as there are idiots who will pay that 1000 for a damn phone.... but let's return to the Marshall example.
At the beginning I was amazed by the YouTube videos and wanted to buy it on the spot, then I got scared from what I was reading on internet. At some point I was convinced it sucks and looked for other options, but they had the same awesome videos and shit comments.
So here is the mental list I made for the "garbage" that is Marshall Code:
Price - 177
Price of all emulated cabs, amps, effects - I presume is over 20.000 (more than 100 times the price of the Code)
Do I use it on a stage - No
Do I want to have a multitude of sounds with one device - Yes
Do I have space for many amps - No
Do I have the money to buy one of the emulated amps - No
Do I care if it sounds good - Yes but not expecting god like tones.
Do I have high expectations from a low end product - Not quite, but to keep a good value for money ratio
Where I use it - small apartment with a lot of neighbors.
After this small assessment I went for Marshall Code 25, Although I would have liked to feel a rockstar having the Code 100 or ... even better Code 100 Head plus a 4x12" sound cabinet behind me when I make noise. Even a Code 50 would have been an option like the lowest of them all, but I went for the 25.
This is not a review of Marshall code - maybe I will do one later, but I ended up having the garbage which became gold for my need. Is louder than I am allowed to disturb my neighbors, sounds a bit better because I can crank it up more than I could do with a 50 or 100, costed way less, gives me options to explore.
5. Watch out for paid reviews
How many products are declared to be the awesome thing that is missing from your house? How many of them are actually ending in the trash or just gather dust? How many you purchased because of that cool review but you can't seem to get the same quality.
Unfortunately there are so many paid reviewers out there that becomes harder and harder to point them out. I got the thing when I purchased the second generation of GoPro, all the reviews were like there is the one and only camera I would need and is missing from my gear. I purchased it ... I was disappointed. I mean I am able to do color grading and basic color correction, but man it was noisy, washed out, bad contrast and the list can continue. I mean it was overpriced for the quality it offered. Then I looked what do all those reviews had in common.... a certain type of weather and a certain type of landscape and way of filming. When you review a product you need to show also the bad parts not only the good ones, except if you do advertising. In this case, using the GoPro as a motorbike driver with different weather, with different colors, turned out to be not so good for the camera so I ended up using a Garmin Virb which was bashed on all forums by the hoards of GoPro followers, and was way better for the type of usage I needed.
6. Think "balance" when you read bad comments / reviews about a product
Usually when we have something which works as expected we do not "advertise" the product, only if a friends asks us about that specific product maybe we say a bit more than "is ok, I had no problems with it". And usually we tend to hang on the "problems" side, maybe because we learned to do so.
Now, imagine you buy a product from amazon, it does not work as expected, or even worse is a lemon and needs to be changed - you immediately give a bad rating. The product works as expected .... you forget about the rating. This is valid for any type of products, you find only "Ford Focus problems", "Audi q3 issues" or "X product improvements" type of comments, websites, forum topics.
I have never seen things like "Ford Focus Strong points" and even when is a reliability topic is still on "how reliable and when/what should I expect to fail" way of seeing things.
So, for each issue out there there are other happy users who did not had it and maybe will never have that issue, but will get another one about which will complain.
7. Keep an open mind
Even if you do a thing in a certain way there is someone who does it a bit different with the same results. As long as we live we learn and is good to keep an open mind instead of becoming a Grinch and bash an all forums people who do a thing a bit different and/or have a different need than yours.
Keep in mind that there are always more paths to the same destination.
Well, this is a short excerpt of how I try to get the most out of an over saturated internet, from an ocean of ideas and opinions and to select what I consider is helpful for me.
Happy surfing!
Don't get me wrong, the internet is full of information, and I mean good quality information, which is unfortunately buried under a huge pile of dung. You need to get dirty to find a good piece of information.
Like the old guys are usually saying, "when I was young the world was better", I start to dream at the "golden era of internet information" and see the decay of quality in our days.
Of course, back then you had to put some work in having a website, not all idiots had the money to pay for a internet connection and when they did they searched for boobs anyways. There was less information but of somehow better quality.
Today is different, you find everything and nothing, thousands of idiot-proof website building software took care of this, social media raised "opinion leaders", YouTube raised "superstars", every huge company has a forum, then are other thousands of individual forums covering the same products / companies. There is at least a discussion board for each subject you could think of, there are hundred of thousands of search results for each question you could think to type on the search field of any given search engine. You could say that this is awesome, you do not need any specialists at all, just ask Google and you can get your answers. While partly this is true, at the same time is so false, yes you get your answers but, man, you get so much junk answers as it becomes a hard job to go through all the answers and find the good one. And all of this is harder because you do not know the answer, that's why you ask / search.
I know that opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and always the other ones stink, but it becomes everything a "knowledge" based on opinions. I have my opinion too, I use the easy to use blogger, I bash the others on my blog, but I keep it as a blog and not going to the direction of creating pseudo-scientific articles or post my vision of the future or do some perverse paid advertising. I have my opinion and advertise it to be taken with a pinch of salt.
My take on selecting the information:
1. Search for more than one source
Along motorcycles passion (I bashed here anyways the adventure scene, and I will continue to do it but not today) I also build stuff - guitars, arduino based gadgets, raspberry-pi thingies and other home made improvements. Well, from practice I know that there is always more than one way to do something so why stop at the first search result, look into others as well even if you are satisfied with the first answer, maybe is another way available, maybe fits better, maybe not but just look on the next one.
2. Using the brain power to understand different opinions
For example, if you search for which type of potentiometer (link to Wikipedia) to use in a guitar you end up nowhere if you do not use your brain too. One option is to use logarithmic potentiometers or linear ones. Historically the logarithmic ones are called audio tapers because the human hearing is logarithmic and not linear. From this point on you get people fighting which one is better and who is smarter and so on. But here is what I do ....
I get that our hearing is logarithmic if we think from a certain perspective, at the same time I also do notice a linear change in sound. And at least for me a small logarithmic pot depending on the application offers a more on/off effect, while the linear one offers a more linear feel.
Now you can mix and match depending on the application need and the information you gathered from the net. You need a very fine control go for linear, you need a signal that you can heavily modify at the extremities go for logarithmic. I use mainly linear for volume to get a finer overall control and logarithmic for the tone and sometimes linear at the tone, depending on the guitar I build.
3. Use common sense to filter junk
Especially when you search for some medical issues you end up with the stupidest answers although you find people swear by all gods that they do work or whatever. I know that there is some traditional healing science tested for thousands of years, which somehow died when the medicine became available for people. There are some "grandma treatments" who work sometimes better than medicine but... a lot of bullshit is flying around as "grandma knowledge" but it is not. More disturbing is that those people could hurt others by recommending crazy things.
The hardest stupidity I was reading is that you can completely change the color of your eyes. No shit!?!? Yes I know that depending on some stress factors, light and so on the eyes ca be a bit more clouded or change a bit the shade of your color .... but turning your eyes green from black .... hmmm. And the funny thing is that they recommended some stuff to take. Here is where the common sense should kick in!
Or cure cancer with some herb when you are in need of urgent surgery because is already too late ... use common sense.
4. Keep in mind that one man's garbage may be another man's gold / your realistic needs
Of course this does not mean you need to live out of the trash bin, and since we are talking internet is not possible anyways ... but ... if someone says that some device is garbage because bla bla maybe it fits my bill because I have different expectations.
Returning to my guitars example - is full of people who say that if is not finished with any nitro based laquer then is garbage. I would say maybe nitro is not available for the consumers in my country because is considered toxic, maybe I do not have the tools for nitro, maybe I just like the feel of other finish since I will hold the guitar in hand anyways. So what is for those guys garbage, is for me the tool to work with.
Now you find reviews and "vs." between all you can imagine that you want to compare. That graphic card vs the other graphic card and so on. I will touch the reviews subject later but now let's stick with the simple part of "x product is junk". I got an Marshall Code combo for my guitar, and for fun, although the internet was full of "oh is junk, I got whatever $2000 combo .... it sounds better" Duh ... you pay under $200 and you expect it to sound like a $2000 one?!?!? Are you a retard or what!?!?
Ok maybe some products which are in hype costs too much - like iPhones, the real price is way smaller, and now everyone who tries to get to the status of quality ups the prices, as long as there are idiots who will pay that 1000 for a damn phone.... but let's return to the Marshall example.
At the beginning I was amazed by the YouTube videos and wanted to buy it on the spot, then I got scared from what I was reading on internet. At some point I was convinced it sucks and looked for other options, but they had the same awesome videos and shit comments.
So here is the mental list I made for the "garbage" that is Marshall Code:
Price - 177
Price of all emulated cabs, amps, effects - I presume is over 20.000 (more than 100 times the price of the Code)
Do I use it on a stage - No
Do I want to have a multitude of sounds with one device - Yes
Do I have space for many amps - No
Do I have the money to buy one of the emulated amps - No
Do I care if it sounds good - Yes but not expecting god like tones.
Do I have high expectations from a low end product - Not quite, but to keep a good value for money ratio
Where I use it - small apartment with a lot of neighbors.
After this small assessment I went for Marshall Code 25, Although I would have liked to feel a rockstar having the Code 100 or ... even better Code 100 Head plus a 4x12" sound cabinet behind me when I make noise. Even a Code 50 would have been an option like the lowest of them all, but I went for the 25.
This is not a review of Marshall code - maybe I will do one later, but I ended up having the garbage which became gold for my need. Is louder than I am allowed to disturb my neighbors, sounds a bit better because I can crank it up more than I could do with a 50 or 100, costed way less, gives me options to explore.
5. Watch out for paid reviews
How many products are declared to be the awesome thing that is missing from your house? How many of them are actually ending in the trash or just gather dust? How many you purchased because of that cool review but you can't seem to get the same quality.
Unfortunately there are so many paid reviewers out there that becomes harder and harder to point them out. I got the thing when I purchased the second generation of GoPro, all the reviews were like there is the one and only camera I would need and is missing from my gear. I purchased it ... I was disappointed. I mean I am able to do color grading and basic color correction, but man it was noisy, washed out, bad contrast and the list can continue. I mean it was overpriced for the quality it offered. Then I looked what do all those reviews had in common.... a certain type of weather and a certain type of landscape and way of filming. When you review a product you need to show also the bad parts not only the good ones, except if you do advertising. In this case, using the GoPro as a motorbike driver with different weather, with different colors, turned out to be not so good for the camera so I ended up using a Garmin Virb which was bashed on all forums by the hoards of GoPro followers, and was way better for the type of usage I needed.
6. Think "balance" when you read bad comments / reviews about a product
Usually when we have something which works as expected we do not "advertise" the product, only if a friends asks us about that specific product maybe we say a bit more than "is ok, I had no problems with it". And usually we tend to hang on the "problems" side, maybe because we learned to do so.
Now, imagine you buy a product from amazon, it does not work as expected, or even worse is a lemon and needs to be changed - you immediately give a bad rating. The product works as expected .... you forget about the rating. This is valid for any type of products, you find only "Ford Focus problems", "Audi q3 issues" or "X product improvements" type of comments, websites, forum topics.
I have never seen things like "Ford Focus Strong points" and even when is a reliability topic is still on "how reliable and when/what should I expect to fail" way of seeing things.
So, for each issue out there there are other happy users who did not had it and maybe will never have that issue, but will get another one about which will complain.
7. Keep an open mind
Even if you do a thing in a certain way there is someone who does it a bit different with the same results. As long as we live we learn and is good to keep an open mind instead of becoming a Grinch and bash an all forums people who do a thing a bit different and/or have a different need than yours.
Keep in mind that there are always more paths to the same destination.
Well, this is a short excerpt of how I try to get the most out of an over saturated internet, from an ocean of ideas and opinions and to select what I consider is helpful for me.
Happy surfing!
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