The YouTube gods surfaced me a video of classical guitarist Brandon Acker comparing a $200 guitar, a $2,000 guitar, a $20,000 guitar, and a $200,000 guitar. As you step up in orders of magnitude in cost, you start to see what creates value: the materials, the resonance, the sustain, the ease of playability. I’ve played guitar all my life and I never even imagined $200,000 guitars existed. I won’t spoil which one is the best but the result is shocking! Every guitarist I’ve talked to that’s seen this video had the same reaction.

tl;dr- I would love to see someone do this with websites.

Bonus: Building a classical guitar from scratch

If you want a behind the scenes look at what goes into making a $20,000 guitar, musician and YouTuber Rob Scallon spends a week+ building a classical guitar with the same classical guitar luthier from the previous video, Marshall Bruné. It’s a two hour video and I gobbled up every minute. Planks of wood and chunks of bone transformed through bending, shaving, sanding, gluing, and polishing; a transfiguration into a masterpiece. Incredible.

As mentioned in other carpentry videos I’ve watched, I love the little glimpses into the bespoke tools experts create to do their job well; the benders, the shapers, the hole cutters. The processes too! The fretboards are aged a minimum of seven years in a humidity controlled environment! How would you even know to do that without centuries of institutional knowledge? It’s interesting to see where these masters of their craft draw the line on what to do bespoke (the body) and where to leverage prefabrication and modern machinery (the neck).

tl;dr- I would love to see someone do this with websites.