Should You Boycott Harley Benton?

 So some guys on YouTube say you should boycott Harley Benton because the guitar at the top is a rip off of the guitar below it:

Harley Benton Nylon NT

Taylor TZ

  At least, I think these are the 2 guitars in question?

 Which is the gist of my post here: they are similar, but not exact - despite hyperbole.

 Many differences: knobs, fingerboard extension, sound holes are different, body size/geometry different, bridge different.  They look similar (unless I've got the wrong guitars?), but it's variations on a theme.

 A theme that Taylor didn't invent.  The first thing I think of when I see both is a combination of the following:

Godin MultiAc

..and:

Ovation Adamas

Rickenbacker 360

 The aesthetic is a combination of established elements.   From a design intellectual property standpoint, there is nothing new.  From a functional standpoint there isn't, either.

 Nobody is buying the $400 guitar thinking it's a Taylor.  But more importantly - and this is the real point - Taylor isn't losing any customers for it's $2,200 guitar.

 Nobody is walking into a Taylor dealership, thinking they want the Taylor and then settling for the Harley Benton.  Nobody.  Just like nobody walks into a Fender dealership wanting to order a Custom Shop Stratocaster, and then settles for a Harley Benton strat.  

 Which is a whole lot closer aesthetically and functionally than the Harley Benton and the Taylor.

  Unless one wants to restart the stratocaster clone wars and go off on a jihad against everybody that makes a strat style guitar, the Taylor vs. Harley Benton issue is a non-issue in my opinion.   The guys in the Youtube video sells both Fender and PRS: do they want you to boycott PRS Silversky models.......?  

 

Chip is Short... Yeah, but.. No, the Chip Shortage

  A student told me original Boss DS-1 pedals are going for hundreds of dollars on Reverb.  

 So I had to look, it seems ridiculous.  The DS-1 is probably the most ubiquitous, generic distortion pedal there is, at one point I received one as a bonus for buying something else that was only a couple hundred dollars itself; I never used it, but now I've got to go rummage around in the shed to see if I still have it.

 The chip shortage is having a knock-on effect on other things in the guitar gear realm.  The chip in the original DS-1 has gone out of production, and it has nothing to do with the headline news story about the actual "chip shortage".  A lot of integrated chips have gone out of production before the situation occurred with the factory fire + global shut down "chip shortage", but wasn't the cause of any run on pedals except with the Ibanez TS-808 Tube Screamer variants.

  The subtlety of the 4558 variations that were used in Tube Screamers (and clones) are ultra-cork sniffery.  I've got .... 4 Tube Screamers/variations with one inside, and there would be no way I could tell if the chip was a "vintage" one or not, there are too many ancillary things going on with them in the circuit design.  People compare what they say is "identical" pedals, but they haven't examined the resistor values, the input impedance, what things have drifted out of spec within a "vintage" pedal.  It's not actually empirical, and yet, it's still so close that nobody will hear the difference except the cork sniffer doing the A/B test.  

  I guess I need to go see if I can find the pedal.  I think they're ok, good all-purpose distortion pedals that will get someone by in just about any stylistic situation if need be.  They tend to make everything sound similar, which could be a good or bad thing.  For me, the nature of the way they compress combined with the eq makes me play things I start hearing as "Steve Vai", so I don't use them.  That very thing makes them good for "fast technical playing" IMO for that reason, they help you out so to speak, in that they even out your single note playing really well while maintaining articulation.  But to my ears it's Steve's sound, so I look elsewhere.

 "Chip, in the 21st century a USED Boss DS-1 will sell for hundreds of dollars" - I don't know if I would have believed that 30 years ago!