Regarding renaming guitars as "Duplicate"...

Happy Monday everyone :)

I wanted to bring up something regarding making edits to items. Some of you more experienced Equipboard members have been trying to solve the issues of having a lot of variations of the same base item on the site, particularly guitars. One solution has been to change the name of certain guitars by adding "Duplicate" to the end of the name - for example, a Fender 1966 Stratocaster is renamed to Fender 1966 Stratocaster Duplicate because the notion is it belongs under the umbrella of a single Fender Stratocaster. I want to discuss why this is not a great solution at the moment.

You see, items on Equipboard don't stand alone. When they have pro artists and community members associated with them, you edit the name as it appears on those Equipboards. We've had a few users write in upset that Josh Klinghoffer is shown as using a Fender 1966 Stratocaster Duplicate, which makes no sense to someone coming across the page for the first time.

It's not as simple as just merging EVERY SINGLE Fender Strat into a single item. When it comes to artists, it's important to know the little details, like year, color, and special appointments. I do agree that having seven versions of a Fender Telecaster Deluxe is not a great idea, but as of now, it's better than getting rid of color and year detail for the artists that use it.

This is an issue that we have to solve together as a community long term, and will probably require some coding and structure changes by the Equipboard staff. :)

TL;DR: Don't just stick the word "Duplicate" to the end of item names to mark them as duplicates - that confuses lots of users!

I know people are doing that and it still annoys me.... its annoying we have a ton of duplicate instruments and its annoying that people are trying to impose their own solution that ruins pro pages that otherwise would be great standalone pages when people are googling that artist.... I think you guys are going to have to resolve all this jackassery with some coding that gets everything unified.... this will entail just making decisions that make sense to YOU the proprietors from an internet-wide perspective without consulting the regulars.

Or leave well-enough alone.... its only a gear site.

To be clear, I think it's a valiant effort! I love it when community members are vocal and really make it known they want something changed. It definitely influences the road map on our side of the house. We want to make Equipboard to serve the best interest of you guys & gals, after all :)

I just think sometimes things might have unintended bad side effects, that's all. I want to point out that we might be seeing a bad side effect now w the "duplicate" marked guitars.

Also would love to hear ideas on how we could solve this issue more long-term. I agree that there needs to be some way to consolidate variations of the same item under an umbrella of some sort... but it's a tricky thing to solve! :)

you're in the position of the American healthcare system... you are so far down a confusing and inconsistent path that any small corrections have unforeseen consequences. A major overhaul may be best in the longrun, but its a major undertaking that threatens to really mess things up while its being implemented.

Maybe the solution would be to have one (let's take an example: Fender Stratocastrer) guitar, named "Fender Stratocaster" which can be used, if the year is unknown. If the year is known it's okay to use an instrument (or even compile an new one) with matching year in its name, such as "Fender Stratocaster 1976". To prevent having duplicates it may be a good idea to just have one of every year of an instrument (especially like guitars), but to delete duplicates (duplicates, like "Fender Stratocaster 1996"; "1996 Fender Stratocaster"). I'd do that as long as MAYBE (I don't want to decide if the programmers of this site will do it or not) a new programming code gets written to make subcategories, such as "year", "color", and so on to give further information on any instrument, rather than having 50 types of "Fender Stratocaster" for nearly every year ever made. Anyways. Just a suggestion.

well you wouldn't have 50 for every year.... Fender didn't originally offer more than a few colors, even custom orders had a pretty limited palette... I blame modern marketing for all these problems. There are just too many sub-models from the big 2.

No, don't get me wrong. Color isn't THAT necessary. I'd only write the year in the title, because that tells something about how they sound, what the specifics are, etc. Color would only be a cool add-on, just to see musicians taste, but that could wait until the update I talked about happened (Only my point of view). And I also know that Fender has made the Stratocaster for more than for 50 years. It was just a number I dropped.

I was just kidding around.

Ohh, now I get it :D

I am seldom being completely serious. This is a musical instruments site. As much as my inner-teen loves everything this site glorifies its a little silly too and I can't help but have a laugh at myself every time I make a reply. I think a lot of people miss half the humor and when I get overt about it they take me wrong and get offended... oh well.

Its hard not to poke fun at yourself when you're saying thigns Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap would say about his guitar collection.... LOL

OK, as the sole reason for this thread, and seeing that there is an answer, I'd like to apologize, for the "Duplicate" thing, but Jim is right. We need an overhaul to fix all the duplicates.

However, Walrus also made a point about vintage instruments. A Fender Stratocaster from 1962 will sound nothing like that of a modern-day Strat, so that's something to consider when the overhaul occurs.

Okay, get ready for the blasphemy.... a new classic 60s strat, MIM? doesn't sound THAT different from a real 60s strat. And fender's custom shop makes fabulous copies of vintage spec isntruments. They cost too much, but they sound and feel dead on. I wouldn't blanket all the strats together though. The specs changed every couple years in the vintage era and since the 80s they have released a gazillion variations.... the whole thing is irritating. My strat for instance started life as a stock jimmy Vaughan strat, but its never been on a recording in completely stock form. If I ahd a pro page you would really need to document the many mods done to my strat in roder to help people understand where all ym sounds came from.... most pros are in the same situation. Even pinpointing a year for a model doesn't mean their vintage guitar is bone stock. This all sounds nuttier and nuttier the more I talk about it.... argh!

My whole life is a lie...

man, there is hardly anything stock about Jimmy Page's #1 Zep LP.... hardly any of the parts are original nor have they been since the mid 70s. A lot of the classic Zep bridge PAF sounds are really a 70s T-Top for instance. The original bridge PAF died and in an age where there were only like 3 rewinders out there Page sent it back to Gibson and they just sent him a brand new Gibson Humbucker and chucked the original PAF. Go figure. Then he decided he wanted more output than the original PAF had so he ahd Duncan rewind the T-Top into the 1st "whole lotta humbucker".... his #1 is pretty much just original body wood and possibly the original neck pickup....

Clapton's "blackie" strat? 3 different strats of different eras mutted together!