Hardware Pricing

*October 21, 2023

Not too long ago while I was price shopping for some more tuning machines, I managed to come across an article about the pricing difference on Gotoh tuning machines.

If you go on any vendor site and look for tuning machines, you will a lot of different pricing. In general, brands will have their cheaper and more expensive models. It makes sense because most of us don’t want to or can’t spend big dollars on tuning machines. Especially if those tuning machines could cost more than the guitar we would be putting it on. *Only exception would be it is a great guitar in terms of sound, feel and playability – probably modified and/or is a show performing guitar.

There are factors to those prices such as design, material and even the buttons. Some can get fancy with engraving of the housings or buttons or the use of Mother of Pearl buttons or Black Mother of Pearl buttons. Some, even have carbon fiber parts.

Again, I am going to throw in the China factor here. There are going to be many Chinese brands or knock offs out there or even brand names made in China – I can only give Wilkinsons as the example here. I did talk about Wilkinsons’ products in another article so I won’t get into all of it in this one. It just comes down to quality control regardless of where anything is made.

Back to Gotoh’s products, the article stated that the lower end stuff is made with a looser tolerance. This means slack which results in lesser tuning stability. I have seen that slack in some of the Gotoh and non Gotoh tuning machines that I have put on some guitars. This would be more obvious on open gear tuning machines where you can see what is going on. You turn the knob, you see the gear turn but it takes a bit for the worm gear to turn. There have been times were I have turned the knob and none of the gears turn at all.

The high end stuff at Gotoh are made with stricter tolerance parts and put together by a master tech – kind of like Nissan GT-R engines. I am not sure if there would be any material difference in the parts through the grades of tuning machines but it is a possible factor. Only 7 of these premium sets are finished in a day and with the more precise parts being used, there would be less slack in the tuning machine which in the end means better tuning stability.

Now, I am not saying that we all need to jump the gun and buy some really expensive tuning machines. The sets in the $300+/- range should suffice enough. But I will say that some people do just fine with tuning machines in around the $100 range.