The Price of Good
Alternative titles for this post I came up with included “What is premium?” and the exceedingly clever “Premium and the art of good enough”.
This post was written about guitars while dying in my garage after some deadlifts. If you see applicability to anything or anyone else, that’s nice, but it was written solely with guitars in mind.
The main question I ask is “at what point does premium become only marginally better than the exponentially cheaper option?”
Spoiler; I do not answer this, I just complain for hundreds of words.
After an exceptionally good soup at our local soup shop, me my hacking homie decided to paroose the wares at the only music shop in town.
Similar to toots, it actually is located next to a gigantic booze warehouse.
It has a pretty good line up. Fantastic, really. Signature Gibsons, made in Japan premier line ibanezs, custom shop telecasters, an SG with active pickups and coil splitting(!!!) and all sorts of other crazy shit. Premium guitars for the premium connoisseur.
So you can imagine my disappointment when playing these things that when totalled, cost more than both our cars, and not being blown the fuck away.
I have owned some shit guitars in my time, ironically some were by cort, the brand that is now trying to reinvent itself as a mid shelf player instead of the garbage it used to be, but thats another thought for never. Like come on man, I remember you used to sell nothing except shithouse squire clones to schools. I have and continue to own some pretty banging gear; a made crafted in Japan tele (theres a difference re the shop that did it between made in Japan and crafted in Japan, thats a whole another autistic rant i wont bother with today), USA made Jacksons, and a whole bunch of other things.
Now why is it, that these upper mid level guitars of mine, each of which was 2500 at the MOST, are not being shat on from a great height by these six, seven thousand Gibson’s? Why is my made in INDONESIA 8 string Ibanez a COMPLETLEY COMPARABLE unit to a premiere Japanese 8 string, despite being a literal THIRD of the price?
What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. The democratisation of good is what happened. What the fuck does that mean you ask? Well I am glad to tell you. As the tide came in, not all boats rised. the bottom feeding GARBAGE guitars coming out of Chinese, Indonesian, Korean factories overnight got good. The availability of CNC mills and the proliferation of knowledge meant everyone was capable of making good gear. And make good gear they did (and still do).
I have a 300$ bottom of the barrel Ibanez gio I bought in 2020 to occupy myself while at the other side of the country away from my actual gear (you can vaguely infer more about that saga in this post on a Street Fighter playing Neural Network); it is no worse than some of the things I played that were 10x the price.
This is clearly a problem. If the bottom shelf is just as good as the premium gear, what is the point of premium? How did we get to the point where premium mediocre has invaded this corner of the universe? I wish I could take credit for that phrase, but it comes from another article I read many years ago and it made me very angry that I could relate to it while trying my best to eject like a fucking astronaut in his space ship into another social class by trading literal man months of my life at a contracting gig. It can be read here
But the only line I really needed from that article to transplant here is this: “Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes.”
What does that have to do with this? Check it again webhead: Premium mediocre is guitars that Instagrams better than it plays. Signature series, bullshit quadruple A flame tops, a fender painted with some paint so fucked up it had a California cancer warning label hanging off the tag (I am not making this one up), distressed or reliced or whatever they are calling it today where you pay extra to have it look like a fucking tank drove over it (someone likes it, that shit isn’t going away despite my laughing at it for the past 15 years), vintage style tuning pegs that can barely handle 5 minutes of abuse before going WILDLY out of tune, but have been artificially aged juuuuust the right amount you’d believe they were actually harvested from Jimmy Pages own 60s era les paul.
Premium mediocre is my Indonesian Ibanez feeling no worse than a Japanese premiere Ibanez. It is a 7,000$ signature les paul playing no better than a sub thousand dollar Fernandes on the wall. Oh, you thought this was going to be me grandstanding about my own gear and had already dismissed this as a case of the fox and the grapes? lol gitgud.
This was a Chinese super strat, with hot as hell Seymour Duncans, and it was good. It was worth every little penny that I did not spend because I have special criteria I must hit before getting another guitar, and I would pick this little made in China unit every day of the week over that Gibson, because I could have gotten it and SIX OTHERS OF COMPARABLE QUALITY for the cost of that one fucking les paul; the one les paul that was simply just good.
This is it, this is the secret; there are no more shit guitars. So a guitar simply being good, is no longer enough. Your premium lines are good? Everyone’s guitars are good. What else do you bring to the table?
Premium mediocre is paying 2000$ for an offsec course that hasn’t seen any relevant updates in 3 years (OSEP), when 700$ for CRTO gets you lifetime access and a fresh little update every few months. In fact, in the 12 months since I took it and when I last revisited it, 20% of the course was new! Premium mediorce gets you a name (gibson/offsec) for a product that WAS best in class at the time, but has been eclipsed HARD by everyone else becoming good, and hasn’t kept up AT ALL (les pauls STILL CANNOT STAY IN TUNE/tRy hArDeR is NOT an acceptable argument for omitting course material wtf)
Oh, you thought I wasn’t going to bring this back to infosec?
“Did you really write all this just to bash offsec again?” No. The tide in infosec is rising. It is easier than ever for people to get good (not ironically gitgud, but actually get good) in this field. Which means you, dear reader, being good is no longer enough. A lot of people are good. Are you going to stay an overpriced gibson clinging to dear life through its name alone? Or will you actually become great? Because the price of premium demands a return above good.
I have said it before and I will say it again; there is nothing that comes as close to an education in how to (and how to NOT) navigate your career than Mad Men. The following quote is a sentiment that seems to upset people, but I have hedged my entire life on it. And its worked.
