My contrarian views:
  • I think tone is more important to the player than the audience. 90% of people I play to only notice huge differences in tone, so I ballpark it -- as long as I'm happy, I'm pretty sure they're happy.
  • I am lazy and like stuff that's light and easy to carry. My dream is to have everything on my board (this includes the amp), though I'll still need a cab.
  • I also like simple stuff; I think people over-complicate things in the interest of being self-important. That's why there's a certain allure of teles for me.
  • For me, it's much more impressive to see someone really tear it up on a $100 Squier than to wow me by flashing high-end gear.
  • Though I'm only about 2.5 years into the electric game, my goal is not to pay over $500 for a guitar. As someone said, 6 strings and I'm happy. I have my preferences, but people have recorded incredible stuff on all manner of guitars.
  • It's worth much more for me to give away a nice guitar than it is to hoard it. My primary goal is to spread the joy of guitars and make some nice noises along the way, not to be worshipped.
  • If you play the right notes at the right time and with the right phrasing and emotion, nobody's going to care about the brand of your delay pedal except to say "wow, that sounded awesome -- what do you use?"
  • Right now, I'm all about Korean-made guitars, but it's a bang-for-the-buck issue.

I suppose that could all be summed up by saying that I want to constantly push myself to use things I don't think will cut it, just to know where the line is. I don't care about wood, pickups, tubes, or anything until I absolutely, definitively know that my performance will suffer. I want to push my own limits and see what I can get by with.

Due to my inexperience, I won't be surprised if some of these opinions change drastically, but I hope I don't become more pretentious along the way. I maintain that you can have discriminating tastes and be educated without becoming a snob/cork-sniffer (almost wrote "coke-sniffer!").