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Guitar shop or online?
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14-12-2010 11:35am#1
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KeanSeenan wrote: »I stumbled in there once and despite the place looking nice the first thing I heard was 3 teenagers singing along to a **** 3OH3 song so I never ventured into it again.
Give them a break !! That could happen in any shop
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Funnily enough I may have seen the same thing. Was it a G+L bass?PaintDoctor wrote: »If it's a case of a guitar here being anything up to 10/15% more here in a shop, I'll buy it here to support local, but I've see an Cork shop charging double for a bass than what you can buy it online for.
Me too (except for the xlr leads). All of my guitar purchases over the last few years have been online and that's unlikely to change in the future.PaintDoctor wrote:All I've bought recently in bricks and mortar stores are xlr leads, strings and plecs. Depressing really, as it's much nicer to walk in somewhere, try things out and go home satisfied with your purchase. I haven't been into Thomann's shop yet, but having been to every store in NYC, going to a huge music shop is an orgasmic experience.
See now I've got an image in my head of you doing terrible things to the innocent instruments. :mad:PaintDoctor wrote: »It's like being Joseph Fritzl locked into your own basement for Christmas.
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Funnily enough I may have seen the same thing. Was it a G+L bass?
A Cort, nice guitar too, but literally double the price.See now I've got an image in my head of you doing terrible things to the innocent instruments.
Heh, then you wouldn't have liked me taking a router to my Jem 2 hours after taking deliver of it. Power tools and expensive guitars generally do not a good combination make 0 -
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the only thing I'd have to say about them not throwing in a case is that they've already knocked down the price for you, and if they were to throw in a case they'd be making sweet feck all of a profit.
I did work experience in a store in town, and they do try to compete with thomann etc, but thomann buy in such bulk, and they don't have the huge overheads of a store just off one of the busiest streets in the country.
hell they even order some items FROM thomann.
many people get put off by the huge price tags they put on, but most of the time they're allowed give an 8 percent discount on the thing, you just have to worm them out of it
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Morning all.
Hope this is the right section. Looking to buy a new Bass. Been about 8 years since my last purchase. However I'm not finding the Dublin Instrument shops any help or fun at all. Zero interest from them. Now I'm not that old (30), but there would usually be a cash price? Bass I like is Euro349. Shop said Euro320 cash. No case with it though. Online for Euro295 with free delivery and choice of 5 colours. Would you be inclined to support local business or go online? If any of you have recent experience with a purchase let me know.
Many thanks.
Hi Alicano. Just read the thread and thought someone from our side should respond to you. Firstly, thank you for coming into the store and thank you for the kind words, pity we didn't have a bass that would suit
. If there is any way we can help, please don't hesitate to contact us again
On the subject of online or in-store, it is a pity that you can't find what you're looking for here, and you must understand that with a city centre location, most stores have a limit to what they can stock in terms of colours (trust me, we agonise every time we do an order with anyone). However, there is no excuse for bad customer service as this is one of the things that should seperate the bricks & mortar stores from websites. I can't speak for other stores, but all of our instruments are set up on arrival by a full time guitar tech. They are not sent out, he is employed by our company, if somebody would like a different setup, we do it before the instrument leaves. We also provide after sales in terms of advice (not necessarily needed by everyone) and in person backup in case of a warranty issue. These, as well as the cost of location and industry staff, are the reasons why we cannot price match on all items with sites who employ warehouse staff to send out cardboard boxes while knowing little or nothing about what's in them. We do our darndest to get as close as we can though, and in a lot of cases, prices in Irish stores are equal or better on a lot of product. I've dealt with almost every music store in Ireland, as well as a lot of the larger ones in the UK and they all have the same issues, and unfortunately it's led to things like stores being unwilling to buy in certain brands because they cost as much to buy from suppliers as they sell for online. That said, you as a customer should not have to tolerate bad service in any way. It is inexcusable and one of the main reasons why so many people have been driven to buy online. As i said above, if there's any way in which we can help, contact us. Happy bass huntingBefore you dismiss all Dublin shops, have you checked out Guitar Centre ( I think this is what it is called) on Exchequer St. It is on the opposite side to Music Maker and a few doors up towards Sth Gt Georges St., almost at the corner. I called in recently and instantly got friendly vibes from the place. I was actually noticed
and the lads there seemed genuinely interested in assisting in any way they could. A pleasent change indeed.
Thank you Rigsby! Much appreciated.KeanSeenan wrote: »I stumbled in there once and despite the place looking nice the first thing I heard was 3 teenagers singing along to a **** 3OH3 song so I never ventured into it again.
We are happy to take on board any constructive criticism, and we view forums like boards.ie as vital to this process, but, we're a music shop, and while we don't encourage mini concerts and we try to cut any singing out as soon as it starts, we all got the scoffs from music store employees when we were growing up and are not keen to dish them out here. Guitars are made to be played, they ain't museum pieces for our wall here. If that's the reason that you don't want to come into our store, fair enough. Stairway abu we say!0 -
Dublin Guitar wrote: »Thank you Rigsby! Much appreciated.
You are welcome.
Unfortunately you seem to be the exception to the general could n't-care-less attitude that seems to exist in most Dublin music stores. I agree 100% with Alicano.
The shop I visited before yours, is in the vicinity. I was looking for a bass cab with cash in hand. I asked an "assistant" for help. He said he would go and enquire. I waited for ten minutes, then followed him to the counter. He was doing something else. When I challanged him, he said he would be ready in a minute, in the most dismissive way. I abruptly took to my heels. One potential customer gone. Maybe they will cop on in time.0 -
To answer the OP's question about which is better. The answer is "it depends". If you're not sure what brands you like then the only way is to play them. You can look at pictures all day but you'll never find what's right for you. As an example I can't stand the feel of Gibson guitars. The neck feels too chunky and the bridge just feels wrong. I also find Schecter guitar necks too chunky. I would never have realised that without actually playing them. By the same token when I first played an Ibanez K7 (thanks Karl Hungus) I knew straight away I wanted one. It just felt right for me.
As for bricks and mortar shops, the last bass I bought was purchased in summer 2009 (I nearly said last summer) from a Guitar Center in Boston, USA. I went in there with the intention to just have a browse around for an hour or so. About three hours later I was still there 
. I played most of the high-end basses in the place and put each one through a bunch of different amps. Besides the fact that I had the time to kill, the staff were just so helpful it was unreal. My experience of Irish guitar shops has nearly always been negative from the point of view of just trying to get a hold of a member of staff and even when you do they seem bad-tempered or at the very least put out by a customer daring to interrupt them from whatever they were doing. Mono-syllabic, grunted answers are not what I'm looking for in music shop staff. American shops (well some of them anyway) seem to understand this though. Now maybe it's all an act and they're really just looking at each person as they walk in the door for how much commission they can screw out of them but I'd rather fake helpfulness than honest grumpiness.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I blew a large chunk of my holiday spending money on the Ibanez SR706 on the left of this pic. Would I have bought it without playing it first? Definitely not. I hadn't even given much thought to playing 6 string bass except maybe to throw on a low G under the low B. It was a different story once I started playing it. I think most people can relate to picking up a guitar and having it just click. I knew that if I left the shop I'd probably spend the foreseeable future thinking about the guitar and I'd end up buying it on EBay or Ishibashi for more than the price the shop was charging.
When I visited the shop it was pretty early in the morning so I didn't have any other people in the shop to try and hear myself over. I was able to dial in various tones in various amps and really hear them without having to contend with someone doing a distortion-saturated widdly widdly solo or someone demonstrating that a 300 watt amp turned up to 10 really does provide sufficient volume to do slap bass on :mad:.
So, the point of this rambling post is that I'd love to see the following in bricks and mortar music shops because they are things that online retailers can't provide.- Helpful shop assistants that actually know what they are talking about.
- An acceptance that if I'm spending €1,000 or more on an instrument I'm going to take my time over it.
- A selection of good quality amps and effects that can be used for various genres.
- Provide sound-proofed booths or headphones or something so that I can actually hear the instrument I'm playing without having to try to filter out other people's noise.
- Provide some stools so that people can sit reasonably comfortably while playing.
- While I appreciate there are plenty of issues with doing this, I'd love to be able to walk into an Irish shop and see a wider selection of higher-end brands available, not just the usual entry-level Encore, Squier, Epiphone etc brands. Basswise I'd love to see brands like Pedulla, Lakland, Zon or (higer end) Warwick. I would also like to see fretless and 5/6 string basses.
I can't be the only one wondering what a 3OH3 song is can I? My Leaving Cert chemistry education is telling me that you can't have 3 oxygen atoms bound to 3 hydrogen ones. It should be O2H6 :pac:KeanSeenan wrote: »the first thing I heard was 3 teenagers singing along to a **** 3OH3 song0 -
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