The Steel Guitar Forum

on eBay : $ 886 plus $ 65 frieght for one of those things!?

Fools and money are soon parted…so it has been told to me...

Dave, one of the Starter packages, used, just went for around $900 + shipping here on the forum. That's a bit much for that also. It's junk in my opinion.

Well It's simply a sign of the rapidly decreasing value of the dollar.

The real shame of it is that a potential picker will get ahold of an overpriced guitar and will probably soon become frustrated that he/she can't set it up or tune it, will quickly realize that he paid too much for a pc of crap, and will give up and never learn to play. It could have also been bought as a gift for someone and the purchaser didn't really know what they were purchasing.It has been said that a fair price is what ever is agreeable to both, but I think asking a ridiculous high price for an item is also somewhat dishonest to a point. Yes...everyone should do their homework and price shopping, however we brag over and over that we are one big happy family here and no one would try and gouge another. There is always ONE who will do whatever it takes to get your money, no matter what. And they sleep perfectly well at night, telling themselves "it's only business"....

The value of something is what another person is willing to pay for it. Get over it.

Someone on eBay just paid $51.10 for a used copy of my "C6 Texas Style, Vol.1" course, plus $4.00 shipping. He could have purchased it from me for $29.00 postage paid, or from the Forum catalog for a similar price.

Go figure.

BTW, the opening bid price was $6.00. It wasn't gouging by the seller.

Herb, some people have poor impulse control. Or maybe they just went "Ga Ga" when they saw your name?

It was probably a little of both, Fred

You should feel flattered, Herb. But the bottom line is, if he would have bought from you or the forum, it would have put some profit in your pocket where it belongs.

Another way to look at this is that for $900. plus a basic book, a new world can open up for the purchaser of this guitar. If it clicks the return for the $900. spent will be huge.

I learned on a Market-Rite which cost $150. in 1976. It was in kit form to boot. It was the worst imaginable instrument ever and the best $150. I ever spent. With the current value of the dollar I probably spent more on the Market-Rite than the Ebay $900. Carter Starter.

The Starter will get someone going pretty well if they know how to fix the problems we keep hearing about. But $900 for one is hilarious. For just a couple hundred more he could have gotten a BRAND NEW Stage One or a Simmons (my first pick for a starter guitar these days).

People overpaying for their first pedal steel guitar. Very common. It is, IMHO, a form of temporary insanity. Every now and then normally healthy, rational people are bitten by the pedal steel bug and in a matter of days they are so hopelessly smitten by the allure of the instrument that they must have one....immediately. Their faint, almost totally absent knowledge of the instrument is eclipsed by their burning lust to have one. Tentative, impatient inquiries are made. A new one costs HOW MUCH!!?? That's NUTS!! These days the next step is to vault onto eBay to scoop up one of the many " bargains" with caution thrown to the wind.
In a way I've been there and done that, except that there was no Internet when I came down with the fever. I had gotten wind of one from a guy. One phone call and I jumped in my car and tore off on an eight hour drive into neighboring New Brunswick. And although I didn't pay all THAT much for the guitar I bought, it was a very poor choice for a starter guitar. Mine was a '68 or '69 Sho~Bud S10 with six pedals and no knee levers whatsoever. And about half of the pull rods were missing and most of the remaining barrel adjusters were stripped. I was roughly a thousand miles from the nearest guy who worked on them or sold parts. Good move Bill. It did get me started in a fashion, but I lost a lot of time dealing with the shortcomings of that old guitar.

I have seen this phenomenon before on Ebay: as a sailor, I have routinely seen used boat equipment sell on Ebay for more than I could buy it for new from a reputable discount dealer. I sometimes check out the listings for for pedal steels, and almost always find the known brands are priced significantly higher than equivalent ones sold on the Forum.... I can only thank those who are realistic in their price expectations and post here on the forum since they could probably make more on Ebay for the recognized brands of instruments.

I also find Ebay's search function a bit irritating. When I search "pedal steel guitar", click for "musical instrument" and "guitar", I still get more posts for instruction books, finger picks, bars, etc than for what I am looking for. But then, all I am doing is looking at the moment.

Cheers,

Doug

New buyers have a difficult time, for sure. Truly objective opinions are very scarce, even here on the forum. Everyone wants something for nothing, and they expect it in today's "import laden" retail scene. Let's not forget that a Fender 400 (with 8 strings, 4 pedals, and no knee levers) was $500 in 1964, and anything by Sho~Bud or Emmons would have been even more. So, for about 4 times the price of that Fender, you could have gotten...a new Mustang!

Now, let's say this Carter was new, and maybe priced even higher. So, we'll say it was $1500, and now...at 4 times that price, what kind of new car would you be buying...hmmmm?

If somebody purchases an item that is overpriced or more than market value, it's considered by some/many that the buyer got ripped off and the seller is a crook/money grubbing monger......basically an unfair transaction.....

If somebody buys an item that is placed way under it's market value (usually by an ill informed seller)....many feel that they buyer is a hero.....and the transaction was fair.....


Hypocrisy knows no bounds.....

at least they have something for their money. ask me how much i have in my blue ldg i recovered from four years at coops. they prob dont even know about the forum. it takes time to learn when you know nothing at all about the steel guitar. i sure have made this same mistake , more than once. but yes, its costly you are right.

Tony Williamson wrote:at least they have something for their money. ask me how much i have in my blue ldg i recovered from four years at coops. they prob dont even know about the forum. it takes time to learn when you know nothing at all about the steel guitar. i sure have made this same mistake , more than once. but yes, its costly you are right.

My dad used to say "nobody ever gets a free education. You either pay for it in school, or in experience."

IOWs, there are winners, and there are learners. That's the way of the world, I guess.

My point is that for about the same money a buyer could get an MSA, Dekley, BMI, Marlen or some other quality professional guitar with 3 & 4 and far better quality, tone and overall value if they did some research before hitting the "enter" key.

... and we always learn much more from our failures than we learn from our successes.

As much as I love my Carter D10, I can't say the same for the Starter. A friend bought one on eBay was having trouble figuring how to play out of the Winston book. Next time I was in LA, I stopped by and found that his Starter was in the Day setup. I thought I could change it around, but it would have been a huge drag. I showed him how to interpret the tab for his setup, and off he went. IMHO, the Starters are pretty flimsy.

There were many nights that I went to bed wishing I'd had something as good as a Carter Starter to play. Nobody ever said it was a real good guitar, but it could be played and enjoyed. I'd put the value of one at around $500-$600, but considering that you could have spent $800+ for a new one a couple of years ago, the buyer didn't really get hosed that bad.

I wish Bobbe would put his video back up of Terry Crisp playing the Starter!

Donny Hinson said it best. It is called a Carter "Starter" for a reason. It was affordable, came with 3&4., it was light, and most people who say the tone was bad have probably never heard one or played one. There was nothing wrong with the tone and Terry Crisp proved it. It was my first guitar this go round and it did exactly what it was supposed to do. Was it a road gigging guitar? No. At the time it was 500.00 new and there was nothing comparable on the forum or elsewhere to compare to what it offered. No you can't stand on the pedals or slam the lkl into next week but it was extremely playable, stayed in tune, and sounded good.
At 5-600 bucks it's a bargain and still a better value than some of the 30 year old boat anchors being offered at that time for more money. Finally there are some new affordable guitars on the market today like Stage one and a few others. The starter is a great guitar for "getting started". If anyone had trouble with one then they either bought it with a problem or they just can't play. Let's recap:
It's a starter!

I got my carter starter in 2001 slightly used for about $550. At that time they were around $700 new. It served me well and I played many gigs with it. It was light weight, easy to modify, didn't break strings like the old Fender did, and stayed in tune with some hard playing. I could have payed a few hundred more for it and still would have got my money's worth out of it for getting me into bands and learning how to play a complex instrument.

Yep. The problem is not that he ended up with a Starter -- it's that he paid more for a used one than they cost new back in the day.

If he had spent market for a used one (Aaron says $550), he would have bought the best guitar that $550 can buy, which was the point of creating that guitar in the first place: it got people with a very limited budget hooked on PSG. Everyone likes to point out that almost any other guitar built since the 70's would be better quality -- well yeah, but they usually fail to acknowledge that every guitar costs far more. Yep, it turns out that a steel that costs one-third as much as Carter's pro model is somewhat flimsy. And still folks complain that it isn't up to professional snuff.

The Starter is cheap. But that's because it's inexpensive