The Blog

How much does a good acoustic guitar cost and what goes into a guitar to make it worth its price? In other words "How can a musician figure out the "real" price of an acoustic guitar? Tough questions? Not really. We know the answer. We'll share it with you and tell you how we came up with the number. Firstly we want to establish what constitutes a "good" guitar. For our yardstick we're going with the following:

• an all solid wood body - no laminated tops backs or sides. "Laminated" is nothing more than the industry's way of saying "plywood" - kind of like "The parrot is only resting" 
• quality hardware. (e.g tuning machines that stay in tune, and bone or Tusq rather than plastic nuts and saddles)

Next we need to consider how those materials are cared for and assembled. Proper drying, honest grading and carefull storage of wood all have a huge effect on the final product. It may be tempting to cut costs by using wood too soon (think Orson Wells) or save on real estate by not having enough dry rooms but the results show. The third component of our "good" guitar is the actual assembly. 21st century technology such as CNC machines are fine for tasks like carving neck blanks but can't compete with skilled hand work for setting those necks - especially if you want a guitar with more than ho-hum sound. 

So our baseline is an all solid wood guitar made from dry selected woods and put together with skilled human hands. How much does that guitar cost? That depends. In addition to the cost of the actual materials and workmanship you need to factor in the cost of getting the guitar from the factory to your eager little (sorry Donald) hands.

The industry term for that trip is "distribution". It's one of the messy secrets of the music business that - from factory to brand to distributor to regional distributor to dealer - it can add as much as 60% to the final price. That's right - as much as 60%. Each step involves not just shipping and warehousing but credit departments, sales departments, accounting departments etc....hundreds or thousands of people. Guess who pays their salaries.

We're going to suggest that the real price of a guitar is the lowest price paid by anyone in that distribution chanel. If a factory sells a guitar to a disributor for $800 and through multiple markups that guitar eventually sits on a dealers wall with a $2,000 sticker price is the real price the original $800 or the final $2,000? We'll go with $800. When so much of the final price has little or nothing to do with the materials and workmanship its time to rethink how guitars are sold. This is the 21st century. There's no reason to pay prices based on a creaky distribution system that dates back to the launch of the Titanic.   

Every year since we began crafting guitars we've made incrimental improvements to each production run. For 2015 the changes go far beyond "incrimental".  From milling and drying our own raw wood to adding a new side bending system, we've revamped almost every step of our guitar making. Here's a link to some of the things we've changed.

All the sound you cannot see

We've started tracking how many guitars we send out each year as gifts -who buys them and who receives them. The results may surprise you.

We used a scale from 0 to 100 to represent the number (not the dollar value) of guitars we could clearly identify as gifts. We went back to the start of 2014 so this graph takes into account birthdays, graduation, anniversaries Christmas etc. There's a couple of days left in this Holiday season's buying binge but based on our findings so far and our experiece in past years here's what we think is solid (semi or non -scientific) evidence of who is giving and getting and who is not.

When it comes to guitars as gifts wives are astoundingly generous. Husbands not so much. There isn't a month that goes by that we don't get requests from wives to help them pick out a guitar for a special occasion. There's a  lot of very lucky husbands in this country.

Wives may be great givers but when it comes to guitars they they're not so lucky. Either there are very few married female guitarists or husbands are spending way too much time in Victoria Secrets. If you're a husband looking for a guitar for your wife we'd suggest takng a very good look (and listen) to our new Opeongo.

Parents giving guitars to their kids tend to break down into two groups -by far the most common is the father getting a Dreadnought for a son to stop the boy from taking his own MacKenzie & Marr guitar. The other (very surprising) parent buyer  is one who call us in November or December to buy a guitar for each of their children. That sort of call is not an everyday occurance but we never say no to supplying family with matching MacKenzie & Marr guitars.

Kids - almost always adults - picking a guitar as a gift for a parent is usually accompanied by a touching story of love and respect. We treasure those stories - perhaps because we're at the age where our own children are grown - learning to make their way in the world and developing new and wonderful ways of relating to us.

Finally there's one group of guitar givers not represented by this graph. Regardless of who is the end recipient of each MacKenzie & Marr guitar we remain grateful for the purchaser's faith in our company and our instruments. To us that's a gift we treasure. We want to thank you and to wish you and your's the best of the Holiday Season.

Occasionally we get a bit goofy and offer a one hour or one day sale on one of our guitar models.
The only way to catch theses deals is to "like" MacKenzie & Marr on Facebook because that's where we announce them so why not click here, hit the "Like" button and be prepared to save some loot?

Fair warning to Keith Richards (Mr. Clapton pay attention too). I hooked my iPhone to my MacKenzie & Marr Ian Tyson Limited Edition with a gizmo called an iRig, fired up "Satisfaction" in the associated program and played along. In all humility I was astoundingly good - better (again with humility) than Keith himself. In fact Keith was doing such a fine job on rhythm I added my own embellishments to the tune. Later Willie Nelson backed me up on "Pancho and Lefty". I outdid myself. You'll have to take my word for it since no one else was around to judge. The electric sound was also delivered to my earbuds so only I could hear it.

Jonathan Mackenzie, the other founding partner in MacKenzie & Marr Guitars prefers acoustic folk with a bit of Celtic flavour. He has little love for electric guitars. I, on the other hand gravitate towards acoustic blues with built-in raunch. Truth be told I am a secret rock n' roller at heart. Hanging my head is shame, I'll also admit to being a bit of an Apple fanboy so when I saw the iRig I couldn't resist. It's not much more than a cylinder that connects an electric guitar to an iPhone or iPad and headphones or powered speakers. Coupled with a free app the iRig allows multiple guitar effects and an infinite number of settings for tweaking the sound. I had my Ian Tyson Ltd fuzzing and buzzing, reverbing and wah-wahing. At one point I hit the "Heavy Metal" setting and - no word of a lie - the guitar sounded like a Kirk Hammett rehearsal. Cranking out full-on rock 'n roll from a solid wood acoustic guitar with a built in pickup blew me away. Doing it through headphones will no doubt make my wife ecstatic. She already labours under the misapprehension that I lack any real guitar playing skill.

In addition to all the cool effects the app offers the ability to load and play along with a tune from the device's iTunes library. The song can be slowed down without changing the pitch - a great way to learn. If you're intrigued by the idea of your amplified acoustic guitar doing double (or triple etc.) duty as a full electric axe and you own an iPhone, iPod or iPad here are some links you may want to check out:

The iRig -available at most Apple Stores for $40.

Amplitube iPhone App - the free app from the same people as the iRig. There are multiple add-ons that can be purchased

iShred App - another free app that works with the iRig. I found the pre-sets to be a bit more interesting than those supplied with Amplitube

Taylor EQ App - If you're just looking for acoustic amplification through the iPhone and headphones this does the trick. The maker claims the various EQ presets duplicte the unique sound of different Taylor guitars but to me they all sounded the same. No effects

Have fun....oh and if you see Mr. Richards, don't tell him how good I think I am. He's already got one high maintenance ego to worry about. He doesn't need another.

Here's the original text from our pre-launch of Tofino back in January of 2010.

Tune in CBC on January 13 at 8 PM to see Jonathan and I pitch our business to five savvy investors on Dragon's Den. We know we have a winner in both our Tofino acoustic guitar and our business model. Selling high end acoustic guitars direct from the factory to musicians over the Internet means huge savings compared to retail. Will the Dragons recognize either our cedar top guitar or our business plan as worthy of an investment or will they tell us our "valuation is nuts, we're being greedy an/or there's no business here". We're betting they love the guitar and see the savings to consumers as a winner. Think we're wrong? Leave a comment or visit our Facebook page to add your input to the Dragons Den poll.

This morning we started shooting photos of the MacKenzie and Marr cedar top "Tofino"acoustic guitar. The back and sides are crafted from Indonesian Mahogany. The top is western Canadian red cedar. Combining the warmth of cedar with the crisp projection of Mahogany gives the MacKenzie and Marr guitar a distinct full voice.