An Obituary for the Era of Corporate Guitar

An Obituary for the Era of Corporate Guitar

By Forgemaster Ven

I. The Deceased

The names on the headstocks were shorthand for entire worlds once, not brands. The swamp, the garage, the roadhouse, the back porch. A guitar that left a factory in the 1950s carried the obsessions of people trying to solve a problem they loved, and you could feel those obsessions in the wood when you picked it up. The music that came out of those instruments was regional and raw and made without safety nets, and for a while the companies that made them understood that this was the source of everything. The danger, the specificity, the love were not incidental to the product. They were the product.

The guitars from those years are mostly out of reach now. Auctioned. Locked in collections. Insured and vaulted, brought out for a single song by the few players famous enough to own one and careful enough to keep it. Because the wood held. Because the decisions made by the people on that factory floor held. Because nothing the same company has produced since has come close enough to make those instruments worth any less. In the rare event you are allowed to pick one up, you can still feel it, and you don't need anyone to explain it.

We are not writing this out of nostalgia. We are writing this because it's gone, and because the way it ended matters more than most people have been willing to say out loud.

II. Cause of Death

In 1965, Leo Fender sold his company to CBS for thirteen million dollars. Twenty years later CBS sold it back, to a management group led by Fender's own president, for twelve and a half million, almost exactly what they had paid. But the sale did not include the patents, the machinery, or the Fullerton factory where every American Fender had been built. CBS kept all of that. What the new owners got was the name. Just the name.

The logo had become worth more than everything that made it. More than the tooling, the craftspeople, the knowledge of how to build the instrument correctly, all of it combined. That is what twenty years of one logic does. If the logo moves the units, the instrument only has to be good enough not to cause a return. That was the business model, and everyone downstream watched and learned.

The logic arrived in the instrument one decision at a time, and it did not happen overnight. For a few years the guitars stayed good. Then the cost-cutting worked its way in. The bodies got heavier and less consistent, multi-piece and poorly matched, the careful wood selection gone. The hardware got cheaper, bridges and saddles swapped for heavier castings. The nitro finish gave way to polyester, faster to spray and thick enough on some guitars to feel like the wood had been sealed in plastic. In 1971 the four-bolt neck became a three-bolt neck, trading a joint that had been rock-solid for twenty years for one that could work loose. The people who knew what the instruments were supposed to be retired or were let go, the templates sat unused, and quality came down to who was working the line that day and what kind of mood they were in. By the time the result was undeniable, no one inside the building was responsible for remembering what the standard had been. Each decision was defensible on its own. The sum was a different instrument from the one the name still promised.

There was a way out, and it came from the place the industry wrote off as background noise until they couldn't ignore it anymore. Kanda Shokai's Greco line, built by Fujigen, came from people who had spent the better part of a decade studying the original instruments with a precision that bordered on obsession, going past the surface to what made them work. Greco built entire ranges where the model number told you the price in yen, a transparency so complete that you always knew exactly where you stood. The budget models had budget hardware, but it was good hardware, and the quality stayed honest at every tier. The craft coming out of those Japanese shops in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by most honest accounts, exceeded what the American factories were producing at the same moment. The instruments dismissed as copies were not inferior the way the cheap Japanese guitars of the 1960s and early 1970s had been. In many cases they were better than the real thing.

Most people know them by a different name: lawsuit era guitars. That one is mostly a story. The only real case came in 1977, when Gibson's parent company went after Ibanez's US distributor over the shape of a headstock, not the guitars, and settled out of court before it reached trial. None of the other makers were ever sued, and inside the MIJ community the word lawsuit on a listing gets an eye roll, the tell of a seller padding the price.

Fender's response in 1982 was not a lawsuit. It was a partnership. They formed Fender Japan with Fujigen and Kanda Shokai, whose Greco copies had been embarrassing them. The people making the best copies became the people making the sanctioned product. The JV series that came out of that arrangement is now among the most collectible Fenders ever made, and it was something else too: the first great reissue. The era had been handed a blueprint for how to do it right, a tiered, honest, quality-first approach that told players exactly what they were getting at every price point. But the machine looked at the blueprint and saw only the reissue. It had been shown how to build the future, and it discovered, instead, that it could sell the past.

And sell the past it did, for the next forty years, because by then the past was the only thing left with enough cultural weight to move. None of it started cynical. The first reissues, in 1982, were faithful and honest, built for players who wanted the old specs back, collectible now for the same reasons the originals are. The first signature models, in 1988, were real collaborations, the artist in the room arguing about neck shapes. Even the first relics, in the mid-1990s, came from genuine craft. But every idea that worked got run until it broke. The faithful reissue became the same body shape sold again and again with a certificate of authenticity. The relic became a program: pay extra and a new guitar would be distressed to look like it had survived something it hadn't. The signature became a SKU, released often enough that some share of an artist's fans would buy the association whether the instrument earned it or not. The lineup split into tier after tier, the same components reorganized just enough to look like a development program. And at the far end, the guitar became a fashion drop, the headstock pressed against a luxury label or a streetwear brand or a cartoon and sold by scarcity to people who were never going to plug it in.

They did it to their own history, too. The faithful reissue, the one honest thing the catalog was ever built on, became the most expensive thing in it, sold through the Custom Shop in limited runs at collector prices. And what they locked behind the glass was the craft. The attention to detail. The reason the name meant anything in the first place. The company that built itself putting great instruments in working players' hands spent forty years moving that craft up and out of reach, until the care it was founded on was the one thing an ordinary player could no longer afford. They sold the player everything else. The signature, the relic, the logo, the tier. Everything but the thing the brand was supposed to be.

And none of it would have reached a player without somewhere to sell it. The big-box store was the maker's most faithful partner in the whole arrangement, running the same logic from the other side of the counter. Not quality drift. Routing. The floor placement paid for by the manufacturer whose product appears first. The financing program that turns an instrument into a monthly obligation. The staff incentive that rewards transaction size over player fit. The lesson program that keeps the player inside the store's ecosystem. The used gear bought at a fraction of value and resold at near-new prices, margin captured on both ends. The insurance upsell offered at the moment of maximum excitement. None of it about the instrument, all of it about the transaction.

Every one of those tactics, the quality drift, the reissue machine, the retail routing, the artificial scarcity, the tier proliferation, came from the same decision. The love for music was the asset. The guitar was just the vehicle. That is the cause of death, and it was neither incompetence nor ordinary greed. A specific decision to live permanently in the gap between what a player feels about music and what a product delivers, and to keep that gap open for as long as the love held out.

III. The Distraction

Play one recording for two guitar players and you will get two verdicts, opposite and absolute, with nothing between them to settle it. One has never heard anything better. The other hears thin and dead. Both are certain, and certainty is all either of them will ever have, because there is no fact at the bottom of it. This is the argument that never ends.

It is the argument about tone, and it has been running underneath everything you have read so far. The hollowed-out instrument. The name worth more than the thing. The quality sliding year after year while the catalog only grew. None of it was hidden. We watched it happen and did not stop it, because we were too busy arguing about how it all sounded. Tone was the distraction, and it still is.

The reason it works as a distraction is the same reason it can never be settled. There is no way to measure it. No meter, no test, no receipt to bring it back with. A word about tone can never be wrong, which is exactly why the words never stop coming. Somebody decided a tone could be chewy, a word for caramel, and it stuck, because nobody can call it wrong when nobody can call anything wrong.

The industry recognized the gift immediately. A word that cannot be wrong is not a description. It is a lever. The language people had built out of real listening went through a marketing department and came back as copy. Vintage-voiced. Harmonically rich. Organically responsive. A guitar could be built to a number, finished in a hurry, the care cut wherever the buyer was unlikely to look, and the same vocabulary that once described real things could tell the player that it was not cheaper but sophisticated. The word did the work the instrument had stopped doing.

With nothing at the bottom to check against, the verdict gets made some other way. Everyone is certain they have the best tone, all of them at once, which is the first sign that certainty here is worthless. A respected player puts out a record and the fanbase calls the tone perfect, and one reply down somebody calls it lifeless, and the disagreement goes nowhere because there is nowhere for it to go. Stack enough comments one way and an ordinary tone becomes a grail. Stack them the other way and a great one becomes garbage. The sound never moved. And the moment a listener finds out what made the sound, the boutique amp, the guitar worth more than the car in the driveway, the brand they already resent, the bias arrives and does the listening for them. The sound was never the thing being judged, because it is the one thing no one can check.

So everyone finds a way to live with the not-knowing, and every way turns into its own bottle of the same medicine. Some buy up, chasing the sound through the most expensive thing in the room, sure enough money gets them there. Some run the other way, cheap and used and off the wall, sure the tone was always in the hands and the gear never mattered. Some stop buying and start building, sure the sound they are after was never going to come from anyone else. And some hunt vintage, the museum-piece grail and the pawnshop sleeper alike, sure the tone they are after was built decades ago and never again. None of them can prove they are right, which is the only reason none of them ever stop. The prescription never changes anyway. Buy something else. There is no better, only the next promise that this is the answer.

Every tribe believes it is protecting something real. What it is protecting is a standard, and a standard applied to art is how you miss what matters next. Distortion was a malfunction before it was a revolution. Fuzz was a broken amplifier before it was Jimi Hendrix. Every sound that ever defined an era arrived sounding wrong, too much or too dirty or not musical enough. The processed, polished sounds that got called fake in their day turned up later on the records that sold by the millions. The same thing is happening now to a sound and the gear behind it, already on the boards of players who swore they never would. That is what the consensus always does, right up until the day it decides it was listening all along.

We were the mark in all of this, not the villain. Every one of us was reaching for something real, the sound in our heads, the reason we picked up the instrument at all, and we were handed a rigged language as the only way to talk about it. But the argument was never really about sound, and underneath it most of us have always known that. It was about identity, built on a vocabulary none of us invented and enforced against an art that has always moved faster than the words chasing it.

None of it is going to stop. The words will outlive all of us, and there is something sillier than chewy already on the way. That was never the thing to beat. The vocabulary was honest once, back when it was just people reaching for something they could feel and couldn't name. The lie was never the words. The lie was that any of them could be a verdict, a ranking, a reason to buy, a reason to look down. We will use these words for the rest of our lives. We do not have to believe them. We can stop letting a thing no one can measure tell us what is good, what to spend, and who to dismiss. And we can refuse to hand the fight down to the next person who plugs in, not because we won it, but because there was never anything in it to win.

IV. The Accomplices

Nobody coordinated. The word conspiracy implies intention, and intention implies that someone somewhere made a decision to do harm. Nobody did. The system made certain behaviors cheap and certain behaviors expensive, and everyone involved made the reasonable choice.

The large retailers and the large manufacturers needed each other the way organs do. Remove one and the other stops functioning. Everything on the floor, the placement, the financing, the person paid to talk to you when you walked in looking for guidance, was one system moving the same products toward the same margin. The review went the same way, a relationship wearing the clothes of journalism, because once the gear arrives free and the next package depends on the last video, honesty stops being a decision and becomes a line item nobody can afford. The one question that mattered, would you buy this with your own money, stopped getting asked the moment the answer started affecting the next package at the door. And the independent voices, the people we trusted because they stood outside the system, ended up inside it too, slowly, and almost none of them ever decided to.

And then there was us. The gear we already wanted had already been reviewed favorably before we searched for the review. We watched the unboxing with the conclusion already in place. We called it research. The love for the instrument, for the music, for the culture was genuine, and that genuine love was also what made us useful. You cannot run this kind of system on people who don't care. The caring was the fuel. We were not victims of the machine. We were its most essential component.

Different groups. Different sets of reasons. The same direction. The system did not require a designer. It only required participants, and participants were never in short supply.

V. Everyone Knew. Nobody Left.

Go find a guitar forum thread from 2009. Search for any major brand, any flagship model, any instrument that was selling well that year. Scroll past the first few posts. The complaints are there. The quality had dropped. The frets were uneven and the ends were sharp. The finish was either too thin or too thick. The hardware felt like it belonged on a different instrument from the one the price tag suggested. These were not fringe opinions. They were the majority position in rooms full of people who had bought the instrument and were now living with it, and they had been the majority position for long enough that nobody was surprised to find them. Everybody knew.

Nobody left.

The guitar, the pedalboard, the amp, the whole elaborate obsession that had organized itself around the music was woven into who people were in a way that made walking away feel like losing something more fundamental than an argument about quality. So they complained in the thread and bought the next model anyway. They knew what was happening and they kept participating because the music was not optional and the gear was attached to the music and the brands were attached to the gear and leaving felt like pulling a thread that unraveled something they were not willing to lose. The industry understood this. It did not need to say so out loud. The player's love for music was unconditional enough to survive almost any amount of neglect, and the pricing strategy of the entire era was built on that fact.

We did not fail the industry. The industry failed the player and the player kept showing up, for decades, because the music was worth more than the argument. That is what loving something looks like. But loving something does not obligate you to keep funding the people who are hollowing it out. Knowing the difference is the whole job now.

VI. Taking Brands to Prom

You go to prom because the culture decided, before you were old enough to weigh in, that you would. The music world had its own version, and every creator who built an audience around gear was expected to attend. The invitation from a major brand was the corsage. The sponsored content was the slow dance. Nobody designed the ritual to exploit anyone. It was just what success was supposed to look like, and the culture had been saying so for fifty years before any of these creators were born.

Some of them were the real thing. That matters to say before anything else, because the easiest version of this story makes everyone who ended up inside the machine a cynic who knew exactly what they were doing. Most of them were not. Most of them built their audiences the same way the original craftspeople built their reputations, through years of honest work and genuine knowledge. The audiences that found them did so because the alternative, which was the brand representative and the retailer and the always-positive review, had already failed them. These were the people the disillusioned player turned to when the official channels stopped telling the truth. That is exactly why they were valuable to the era's machinery.

But before the machine came calling, there was the reality of the month. Content about music does not pay enough to live on with any consistency. Virality is unpredictable and does not compound. A channel with a hundred thousand subscribers and real influence over what people buy generates a fraction of what that influence is worth to the companies whose products it moves, and everyone involved knows it. A major brand calling carried the same weight a record deal once did. Picking up that call was the path the culture had built and blessed, and the brands had helped build it, knowing exactly where it led.

So the access arrived the same way the quality decline arrived, gradually enough that no single moment felt like a crossing. A guitar came in the mail with a note. Then an invitation to an event. Then a formal relationship with a title: sponsored artist, affiliate, ambassador. At no point did anyone explain what the arrangement would eventually require because arrangements like this do not require explanation. The critical video that might have damaged the relationship did not get made. Once. Then again. The habit of not making it became indistinguishable from the habit of having nothing critical to say, and the channel that had existed specifically because the official channels had stopped telling the truth was now, functionally, an official channel. The era had not replaced the independent voice. It had recruited it, using the culture's own definition of success as the instrument of recruitment.

The player who had abandoned the brand review and the retailer recommendation and the magazine feature because all three had stopped being honest now watched a trusted voice describe every instrument in the same register, with the same words, toward the same conclusion the brand needed reached. The last honest room in the house had been rented out, and the landlord had kept the key. Those creators are the machine's most important asset right now, because the machine's own words carry nothing anymore. Its promises have been questioned too many times. The undercurrent of disenchantment that has been building for a decade is held in place in large part by the people who got absorbed and became, without deciding to, the era's most effective buffer against the reckoning it has earned. The audience's trust went into those arrangements with them and was spent there, and the audience never had a voice in how.

VII. Divided We Spend

The player who saved most of a paycheck to buy a used pedal for eighty-nine dollars did not disappear from the market. That player just became invisible to it. The influencer economy ran on people who could show up every week with something new worth several hundred to several thousand dollars, because those were the people generating content, and content was what the brands had decided was the same thing as cultural relevance. The player who made one guitar do everything, filed the fret ends by hand, and modded it to taste did not register in anyone's analytics. The brands looked at the content, called it data, and built their next product cycle around the customer who could keep performing enthusiasm on camera. Everyone else became a number too small to affect the model.

The market that resulted came down to two options. A beginner instrument built to a price point that communicated exactly what it thought of the person buying it, and a flagship instrument priced for the collector who already owned three of them. The working player, the serious hobbyist, the person who needed something honest at a price that did not require a financing conversation, landed in a gap that got wider every year. And the whole time the gap widened, the tone argument kept everyone's eyes pointed at each other instead of at it.

The most devastating action available to a customer is also the most ordinary. It is walking past. It is buying the same thing somewhere else, or deciding it was never necessary to begin with. No committee, no coordinating body, no strategy document. Just people, separately, deciding that what a company stands for is no longer worth the transaction.

The industry has always known this and counted on players forgetting it: the system runs on participation and nothing else.

This is not a political problem. Political problems live in systems we inhabit whether we choose to or not. We pay taxes inside them. We need other people to fight on our behalf before anything changes. The guitar industry is not that. Nobody is required to buy a new instrument from a company that has spent twenty years treating the player as a resource to be extracted rather than a person to be served. The decision is individual, reversible, and available right now without leaving the house.

Buy used. The instrument already exists. The company that made it already has the money. A guitar bought from another player puts nothing in the quarterly report of the company that built it and puts a good instrument in your hands. Buy from the builder who answers when you call, who tells you exactly what the instrument is made of, who has a reason beyond margin to care whether you are satisfied. Buy nothing, when nothing being offered has earned the purchase. The absence of a transaction is a complete and coherent response to a product that does not deserve one.

Boutique builders do not need the machine's permission to exist and do not need your defense. They need your business. There is a meaningful difference between defending them and buying from them. We were trained to perform the first, because it costs nothing and produces nothing. The second changes the numbers.

Every dollar spent is a legible statement about what deserves to continue existing. The system reads those statements with more attention and accuracy than it reads anything else, because those statements are the only language it was built to understand. We have been fluent in that language the whole time. We were just too divided to spend it in the same direction.

VIII. The Confession

Then the CEO of the country's largest guitar retailer got on TikTok. Not a trade publication. Not an earnings call. TikTok. And standing there, on the platform of fifteen-second trends and algorithm-chased attention, reaching for relevance in a room he clearly didn't recognize, he said it out loud: guitars haven't changed that much in the last fifty years. He meant it as the setup for a revolution. It was instead the most unintentional confession the corporate guitar era has ever produced. Every forum thread was right. Every player whose hands knew the difference and who couldn't prove it to someone who wasn't already holding the guitar was right. Every complaint absorbed without response, every criticism dismissed as nostalgia, all of it confirmed. Not by a critic. Not by a competitor. By the industry's own representative, on camera, voluntarily, trying to seem like someone who understood where the culture was going, accidentally proving he had no idea where it had been.

At roughly the same moment, Fender, which has repeatedly reached for legal protection of a body shape older than most of the people who play it, won a default judgment against a Chinese copyist who never showed up to contest it, then used that ruling to send cease-and-desist letters to small builders, demanding they halt production, recall what they had sold, and destroy what remained. From where the player stood, the offense was making something people wanted. The shape itself had not been improved in any meaningful way under its current owners; it was defended because the name still carries enough recognition to be worth protecting, which is another way of saying the name is worth more than anything being done with it. The math that became visible in 1985 was still running in 2026.

Two confessions from the same era, arriving at the same time. One announced proudly on a social media platform. One sent by lawyers. Both saying the same thing: we have nothing left but the past, and we will spend whatever it takes to keep you from moving on without us.

But the Guitar Center confession didn't stop there. The revolution being announced would be built by crowdsourcing ideas from the players, the same players the industry had spent decades ignoring, and then, in the fine print, requiring those players to permanently sign away every right to anything they submitted. The ideas would belong to Guitar Center. The execution would belong to Guitar Center. The player would get the privilege of having contributed to the best guitar ever made. The best guitar ever made. As if the instrument that has spent a century resisting every attempt to define it, every body shape preference, every wood debate, every pickup argument that has ever consumed a forum thread at two in the morning, had a singular best, and the largest retailer in the country was about to build it, using your ideas, which are now their ideas, for no consideration, with no attribution, waiving any moral rights you might have thought you had to your own creative work.

The revolution turned out to be the same extraction it always was. This time they just asked you to participate in it willingly and sign the paperwork.

What he could not see, from inside the cave, was the audience he was performing for. He stepped onto that platform expecting the crowd he remembered: captive, grateful, waiting to be told what the next great thing was so they could line up for it. He had been gone too long to know that crowd had thinned out and started to wake up, that the people still paying attention had begun to notice, quietly and then less quietly, that what was being sold and what they loved were no longer the same. So the revolution did not land as a revolution. It landed like a man stumbling out of a cave into daylight, blinking, sure he was bringing news, into a room that had already moved on without him. The reaction he never saw coming was the one that mattered. What are you talking about. Where have you been.

IX. The New Guard

While all of that was happening, other things were happening in places nobody was sending press releases about.

A builder was finishing an instrument with a pickup system that snaps in and out magnetically. No tools, no solder. The entire tonal configuration of the guitar reconfigurable in seconds, on stage, between songs. Another was machining guitar bodies and necks from aluminum and steel, materials that age differently from wood, sustain differently, respond differently, and exist in an instrument because someone decided that the seventy-year-old assumption about what a guitar is made from was worth questioning out loud. Another was rethinking the frets themselves, some set into microtonal positions, some built to slide, some made to pull out entirely, all of it reaching for intervals the standard Western scale doesn't have names for. Another was designing components in free software and printing them in a garage, iterating weekly, sharing the files openly, refining them with input from anyone in the world who had a printer and an opinion.

None of these builders needed a press release. None of them needed a co-sign from a brand that had spent the last two decades failing the player. They needed a player who was paying attention, and those players were not hard to find because the era had spent years ignoring them.

The guitar was supposed to be the impossible category. The capital requirements alone should have ended the conversation before it started, the tooling, the wood sourcing, the years of skill required before a builder could produce something worth putting a price on, all of it compounded by competing against names that had been on players' walls since before most of the new builders were born. And yet shops running out of spaces smaller than most corporate conference rooms developed waitlists measured in years. Builders working alone or in pairs produced instruments that players who had owned every major brand name put at the top of their collections and kept there. The work spread the way honest work always spreads in a community that has been lied to for long enough, person to person, instrument to instrument, without a publicist or a launch event or an endcap at a national retailer. The legacy names had the history. The new builders had the player's attention, and in the long run those are not equivalent assets.

And there is a way to tell which asset is winning, one the era handed over without meaning to. You do not send lawyers after people who are not taking anything from you. The cease-and-desist letters were never a show of strength. They were a tell. When the best instrument at a given price stopped wearing the famous name, the famous name reached for a courtroom instead of a workbench, because the workbench was no longer winning. There are better options now at the prices that once belonged to the legacy brands alone, the players have noticed, and the legal threats are just the sound a company makes when it looks up and finds the room half empty.

The pedal world ran the same experiment and got the same result at every scale it tried. A single builder with a soldering iron and a waiting list grown from players who plugged in and heard the difference. No national retail account. No endorsement. No marketing budget. The work found its audience because the work was honest, and honest work moves through this community faster than anything the industry ever paid to place in front of people. Then that model scaled. Independent companies built real operations, designed their own circuits, maintained their own identities, and found manufacturing partners who exist to serve builders like them, a supply chain that grew outside the machine because the people building it had stopped waiting for the machine to build it for them. Those companies found the independently owned shops, the ones that had survived by knowing their customers, and those shops carried them, and distribution assembled itself without a corporate account or anyone's permission. It runs today. It is on the pedalboard of working players in every city, available at stores where someone will talk to you about what you are trying to do and whether what they are selling will help you do it.

Guitars and pedals are different businesses, with different capital, different timelines, and a different relationship between maker and player. The result was identical. When the era stopped paying attention to anyone who couldn't afford to be visible, the people who cared about the work stepped into that gap and built something in it. This is not a coincidence. It is what happens when the work is honest and the player can tell the difference, and the player can always tell the difference.

The argument about where things are made has always been a distraction from the argument that matters, which is whether the person who made it had a reason beyond margin to care how it turned out. Craft as intention, not geography. The Japanese builders of that era understood the instruments they were replicating more carefully than the companies being replicated had understood them in years, and the vintage market has been saying so with its prices for four decades. Quality was never a nationality. The collectors know it, and so do the numbers.

This is not only happening to guitars. From clothing to furniture to the things people use every day, the same shift is underway, people choosing the thing built to last over the thing built to be replaced, the object made by someone with a reason to care over the one made to a number. The era sold the future and delivered disposable. What is replacing it is the older value underneath: the thing should be what it claims to be, and the person selling it should be able to look you in the eye saying so.

The list of the new guard is still being written, and it stays open to anyone doing the work.

X. The Ground Is Already Moving

The names on the headstocks still mean something. Not the same thing they meant in 1954. What they mean now is being decided in the small shops and the spare bedrooms and the independent stores that survived by caring, by the builders working in the spaces the era left empty and the players choosing where to put their money and their attention.

Something is already growing in the ground they thought they owned. It doesn't have a name yet that the press would recognize, and it doesn't need one.

Survived By

This piece may reach people who work inside the companies its reasoning describes. Some of them have spent careers trying to fix from the inside what the outside finally had to say out loud. This is not written against those people.

It is written for the player who spent a lifetime loving this instrument and felt, without always being able to name it, that something had been taken, the way things get taken when nobody is watching and the taking is small enough each time to seem like nothing.

The obituary is for the era. Not the instrument. Not the music. Not the people who loved both enough to spend their lives inside them.

The craft that started the old era is back. It is in different hands now, ones worth trusting with the future, but it is the same work that made those first instruments worth keeping.

Pick up a guitar that was built by someone with a reason to care. Feel what the wood holds when the decision-making is still in it. Your hands already know the difference, you always did.

Forgemaster Ven

RiverWire Cable Co.

Massachusetts

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