Are Seis worth it?

[Alpha-Dave]

I'm not at all questioning the quality of these fantastic basses, and we can all accept the fact that like Overwater, and those companies that employ more than 1 person are going to be more expensive than those who don't. I'd estimate that a same-spec'd Sei/Overwater would be roughly £1000 more expensive than the respective Shuker/ACG/RIM etc.

However due to their popularity, Sei are adding an extra 20% to their list prices and now have a 10-12 month build time:

[url="http://www.seibass.com/seinews.html"]http://www.seibass.com/seinews.html[/url]

I'm just wondering if this will loose them the 'gigging' bassist market and more them fully into the hobbiest/affluent market of those who tend to commission Ritters or if they'll still be worth it for general use?

Will this mean a 20% increase in the second hand market?

Discuss ...

[kjb]

I can only speak from personal experience.

My Sei is an equal to any bass that I've owned, this includes Wals, Status, Alembic etc.

My Sei is a fantastic instrument, it can produce pretty much any sound that I hear, and allows me to play how I want, it doesn't hold me back.



I'm also waiting for another bass to be finished, this was ordered in September last year, and will be ready in September this year, but I know it's going to be worth the wait.

Dealing with Martin is so great, he makes the whole build process easy, and will tell you if something isn't going to work.

[Kiwi]

Sometimes price rises can be as much about increasing percieved desirability - does anyone know how many he's selling a year? Perhaps Martin is trying to market to a different niche? Maybe he's pushing towards Fodera territory?

BTW, the link doesn't work for me

[Alpha-Dave]

If you go the the Sei web site, then the options page, then 'news' at the top.

[Kiwi]

its now working

[therealting]

Prices are about supply and demand. Martin is probably getting more orders than he can build and still keep up quality. He is also growing in reputation, and no doubt in his experience and skill as a luthier. I think it's only fair that given those conditions, he has the right to increase his rate.

As a gigging or session musician, if you start getting more offers of work than you can manage, you are well within your rights to increase your fee. There will be people who think it's too high, and they won't employ you, and others will think you are still worth it. Others may actually perceive you as a better player because you charge more! In any case, it helps you deal with the decision of which work to accept, since it gets filtered out for you. You get more money for the same amount of work.

May I also point out that someone like Martin (a WORLD class luthier) probably spends many many hours working on a bass. Once you subtract the overheads and materials costs, and then divide the remainder of the price by the number of hours he spends building, he probably doesn't get a much money per hour. Probably less than an average Joe gigging bassist.

[kjb]

[quote name='Crazykiwi' post='41536' date='Aug 5 2007, 11:47 AM']Sometimes price rises can be as much about increasing percieved desirability - does anyone know how many he's selling a year? Perhaps Martin is trying to market to a different niche? Maybe he's pushing towards Fodera territory?

BTW, the link doesn't work for me[/quote]

He did tell me last year how many he makes a year, I think it was 20 or 30, I can't really remember.

Don't forget that Fodera have a 3 or 4 year wait time at the moment.

[kjb]

[quote name='therealting' post='41549' date='Aug 5 2007, 12:20 PM']Prices are about supply and demand. Martin is probably getting more orders than he can build and still keep up quality. He is also growing in reputation, and no doubt in his experience and skill as a luthier. I think it's only fair that given those conditions, he has the right to increase his rate.

As a gigging or session musician, if you start getting more offers of work than you can manage, you are well within your rights to increase your fee. There will be people who think it's too high, and they won't employ you, and others will think you are still worth it. Others may actually perceive you as a better player because you charge more! In any case, it helps you deal with the decision of which work to accept, since it gets filtered out for you. You get more money for the same amount of work.

May I also point out that someone like Martin (a WORLD class luthier) probably spends many many hours working on a bass. Once you subtract the overheads and materials costs, and then divide the remainder of the price by the number of hours he spends building, he probably doesn't get a much money per hour. Probably less than an average Joe gigging bassist.[/quote]

It's about 100 hours or so per instrument.

[Kiwi]

[quote name='therealting' post='41549' date='Aug 5 2007, 12:20 PM']May I also point out that someone like Martin (a WORLD class luthier) probably spends many many hours working on a bass. Once you subtract the overheads and materials costs, and then divide the remainder of the price by the number of hours he spends building, he probably doesn't get a much money per hour. Probably less than an average Joe gigging bassist.[/quote]
He's spent a shedload on expanding the shop and I have no reason to believe that he isn't otherwise doing very nicely for himself at the moment.

[quote name='kjb' post='41555' date='Aug 5 2007, 12:23 PM']It's about 100 hours or so per instrument.[/quote]
So the cost of materials and parts is likely to be somewhere between £500 and £700 perhaps? Take that away from the cost of the bass and you'll be left with the labour. Divide that by 100 and you'll have an approximate hourly rate. In the construction industry the general rule of thumb is you charge double your costs. For the sake of interest, any Sei owners care to stick some numbers in that and see what works out?

[quote name='kjb' post='41551' date='Aug 5 2007, 12:21 PM']He did tell me last year how many he makes a year, I think it was 20 or 30, I can't really remember.[/quote]
Then multiply the figure by 20 or 30

[thumbo]

I'm sure that if he's gonna bring the prices if the basses up he'll push to make them even better, he's kind of lighting a fire under himself by charging more. Let's hope the price increase has positive benefits for the buyers and the builder(s?).

[Kiwi]

Warwick gradually pushed up the prices of their popular ranges over the years - if you can, check out the cost of a thumb in 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005. I'd put money on them outstripping the rate of inflation by a significant amount over a 10 year period.

What its about at the end of the day is PERCIEVED value and the influence of [i]branding[/i] on a consumers purchase decision.

Its not about margins on top of costs.

[ARGH]

A price increase? It happens...If the instrument worth it,judging by looks alone...Yes.

Everyone says good things about Sei's and the build quality is there so a 20% increase on an already top nick instrument isnt a suprise.

If you cant afford it,or think its wrong,go to a different luthier ACG,Shuker (as and when Jons stuff has dried out),RIM, or Jim Fleeting

[BigRedX]

As the person who may well be getting the last Sei bass at the old price I thought I'd share my views...

Firstly from the point of view of the price increase. How long have the old prices been in force? It may be simply that they're finally moving to be in line with price increase in materials/overheads and living once again. There's no easy way to do this; you either have lots of small price increases happening all the time, or you hold out for as long as possible and go with a larger increase. There's also the build times to take into account. They've been getting steadily longer as Sei becomes more popular. You'd think that a long build time would but people off. However for every person who thinks that the build time is too long there's at least one who views it as extra breathing space to save the money to pay for the instrument. I don't know all the ins and outs of the economics of instrument building and I would guess that every luthier's situation is going to be different, but if you need £X to cover your materials, expenses and make a living and you are physically only capable of completing Y number of basses per year something has to change. You need to be finishing instruments in order to earn money. So either you stop taking orders, never a good idea, or you put up the price: more money up front to keep you going through overall longer build times, and maybe you can take on someone else of sufficient quality to help out with the builds and complete a few more instrument each year.

So are Sei basses worth the new prices? Were they worth the old ones?

From my point of view if you go to a luthier with a good reputation once your instrument crosses the £1000+ mark, there are things that you can be guaranteed: great playability, wonderful tone and quality craftsmanship. So what do you get for extra money? For me it's finding someone who's ideas of what is possible and practical fit with your ideals of what you want from an instrument. There's a whole range of luthiers out there who's attitudes to builds range from having a small number of models where you can choose the number of stings (within reason) neck shape, and colour scheme, to those who clain to be able to build you absolutely anything you want. There's nothing wrong with either attitude, but on the whole I'd prefer to have an instrument that is based on design principles that my chosen luthier knows will work. That to me means something that shares its major design features with previous examples of their work. In the end when you know that 90% of the time the practical aspects of the instrument will be taken care of, the choice of luthier pretty much comes down to "Do I like the look of what they build?" and if so "will they build me what I want?"

When I started my quest to get the bass I'm currently having made by Sei, all I knew was that I wanted a quality 4 or 5-string fretless. I spent the first 6 months trying out every fretless bass I could get my hands on. The more I played, the more I could define exactly what I needed and liked and what I didn't. It became apparent to me that in order to get something that I liked simply from a tone and playability PoV I was looking at £2K+ price range for a new ready-made instrument. Unless I needed the instrument right now, and was prepared to put up with a couple of features that to me were less than ideal, I couldn't justify to myself paying that for an "Off the Shelf" bass, and since in my quest I'd bought acouple of cheaper fretless basses, that were almost but not quite what I was ultimately after, I was happy to wait for the right instrument.

The next stage was to methodically work my way through a couple of internet lists of custom luthiers. The result of this is over 100 bookmarks for companies or individuals for whom one day I would like to try an example or two of their work. Finally it was a question of working through the list and finding someone who was able to match up my ideas to one of the examples shown on their websites. It's at this point where Sei started to look like the favourites to build my bass. Some of those I contacted never even bothered to return my emails, others were currently not taking any new orders, and some had little interest in incorporating the changes I wanted into their existing designs. It was also at this point that I found out that to get what I wanted wasn't going to be cheap. Compared with some of the prices I was looking at my Sei is going to be very good value indeed.

What the whole process has shown me is that picking a luthier to build an instrument requires you to find someone who can take your ideas and flesh them out to a complete instrument. Sei had a design on their web site that looked as though it would be suitable as a starting point for what I wanted, and Martin was able to take my ideas for looks, sound and playability aids and fill in the missing details to give me a working specification that he was happy to build and put the Sei name to.

For what I was looking for in my bass, Sei weren't really in competition with the other UK luthiers mentioned at the begining of theis thread but with, Pagelli, Ritter, Spalt and Zon. I'm sure that it would be possible for Shuker or ACG to build me this bass, but there was nothing in the starting point designs on their web sites that spoke to me in the way that the Sei Flamboyant Offset did, and would they be prepared or willing to be making me an instrument that was pretty much based on the work of another luthier and I'd only picked them because they were cheaper? Somehow I don't think so.

I doubt everyone is quite as picky as I am when it comes to what they want out of their instruments, but I work in graphic design as my day job and have a finely honed sense of what I find aesthetically pleasing and for me that is just as important as how the instrument plays and sounds. I already own 4 custom instruments (2 guitars and 2 basses) from other manufacturers, and it's through having these made that I've learned that if you have ideas outside of the mainstream, the best results occur when the luthier you pick is already incorporating most of what you like into their existing instruments.

Sorry that this post is rather long and rambling. I'm sure someone more eloquent could have put the case in a briefer form. So what it boils down to is that I liked the look of what Sei were making, Martin was able to incorporate my ideas into something that was practical to build and fill in the blanks for me when I wasn't sure what was required. Also when compared to the other luthiers that appeared to offer instruments that would suit me, they were accomodating, accessible and even after the price increase still good value for money.

[whynot]

Good luck to him. It's nice to see a success story for someone who deserves it.
I bought my first SEI from Martin before the Gallery existed (Flamboyant 5, serial number 002). He was working from his flat.
It wasn't cheap then but was not overpriced compared to the high end competion in the early 90's.
The time spent on establishing the business and reputation in those early years has paid off and I think he can confidently price his products for what he thinks they are worth in the market.

[kjb]

How much were/are Fender selling the Pino precision bass for ?.

[therealting]

[quote name='therealting' post='41549' date='Aug 5 2007, 12:20 PM']May I also point out that someone like Martin (a WORLD class luthier) probably spends many many hours working on a bass. Once you subtract the overheads and materials costs, and then divide the remainder of the price by the number of hours he spends building, he probably doesn't get a much money per hour. Probably less than an average Joe gigging bassist.[/quote]
[quote name='Crazykiwi' post='41584' date='Aug 5 2007, 01:21 PM']He's spent a shedload on expanding the shop and I have no reason to believe that he isn't otherwise doing very nicely for himself at the moment.[/quote]
[quote name='kjb' post='41555' date='Aug 5 2007, 12:23 PM']It's about 100 hours or so per instrument.[/quote]
[quote name='Crazykiwi' post='41584' date='Aug 5 2007, 01:21 PM']So the cost of materials and parts is likely to be somewhere between £500 and £700 perhaps? Take that away from the cost of the bass and you'll be left with the labour. Divide that by 100 and you'll have an approximate hourly rate. In the construction industry the general rule of thumb is you charge double your costs. For the sake of interest, any Sei owners care to stick some numbers in that and see what works out?[/quote]

I don't own a Sei, but based on the prices on the website (standard prices range from £1700 to £2030), let's work with an example of say a £3000 Sei. Subtract £500 for costs of materials and parts and you are left with £2500 for labour.

If you assume it's 100 hours, that's £25 per hour.

That's certainly not a bad rate, but bearing in mind that a typical guitar teacher in London makes about that per hour, and someone in a typical rock covers band in these parts will make £80-100 for a two-hour set in a random bar. I still think it's a very reasonable rate of labour for someone who is among the very best in the world.

[quote name='kjb' post='41551' date='Aug 5 2007, 12:21 PM']He did tell me last year how many he makes a year, I think it was 20 or 30, I can't really remember.[/quote]
[quote name='Crazykiwi' post='41584' date='Aug 5 2007, 01:21 PM']Then multiply the figure by 20 or 30 [/quote]

Well, if you assume a typical £2500 profit per instrument, and multiply that by 20 instruments, that's £50,000 per year. 30 instruments makes it £75,000. Again, not a bad wage, but not as high as the typical earnings of the top achievers in most other fields / industries.

[chris_b]

[quote name='therealting' post='41759' date='Aug 6 2007, 12:57 AM']........ someone in a typical rock covers band in these parts will make £80-100 for a two-hour set in a random bar........[/quote]
So a typical 4 piece rock covers band makes £300-£400 for a gig in a random bar?

Where is this random bar? I want to play there, cos I don't see any bar bands earning that money anywhere in the south east!!

[bass_ferret]

Dont forget that unless they are working in a shed in the garden there are premises to pay for out of that money. Rent, rates, power, tools, plus a motor to run around in and petrol to run it. You dont think a woodstore comes ready made, the best bits of wood have to be tracked down and there is often competition for the very best bits of figured wood.

I know Bernie Goodfellow is also thinking of putting his prices up - they have been the same for years.

[Dood]

What a thoroughly interesting thread! I am in the 'totally for custom builds' camp and it is very interesting to see views on pricing vs value. Especially as the discussion has not *just* centred round one builder.

I know there are one or two builders out there who haven't changed their prices for years. I'll certainly be interested to see what the perception of a particular Luthier is as they push up their prices for whatever reason.

[therealting]

[quote name='chris_b' post='41914' date='Aug 6 2007, 12:40 PM']So a typical 4 piece rock covers band makes £300-£400 for a gig in a random bar?

Where is this random bar? I want to play there, cos I don't see any bar bands earning that money anywhere in the south east!![/quote]

The secret is to play as a 3-piece. The money can be even better as a duo.

[Alpha-Dave]

Great thread, I'm very pleased at the grown-up level of discussion, as I was concerned about mudslinging.

The biggest point for me is that people on BassChat aren't only saying 'Which Fender should I buy' but can see the good things coming out of the UK too.

Can anyone verify that they have actually paid the website prices anyway? Overwater for example list their prices, but they seem to have a 20% off sale every January/Summer/Bassday to control the flow of work and distribute it throughout the year. I guess Martin may have that problem solved though by having a full year's waiting time for each bass though.

I really wish I could just give £3k each to the dozen or so UK luthiers and see what they come up with for a similar yet basic specification.

Still no one has mentioned my other point: will this make second hand Seis more expensive? I think it may for the fancy-wood 4/5 strings but I suspect it's remain steady for the basic jazzes, and odd-ball instruments (headless, 6+ strings, buck-eye burl etc.) will always have either a high or low value depending on desirability.

[Kiwi]

[quote name='Alpha-Dave' post='41929' date='Aug 6 2007, 01:01 PM']Still no one has mentioned my other point: will this make second hand Seis more expensive? I think it may for the fancy-wood 4/5 strings but I suspect it's remain steady for the basic jazzes, and odd-ball instruments (headless, 6+ strings, buck-eye burl etc.) will always have either a high or low value depending on desirability.[/quote]
Sei basses don't seem to hold their secondhand value any better than any other UK luthier from what I can see - apart from Wal perhaps. I think that's as much as desirability and (as mentioned earlier) perception of value as anything else.

[quote name='therealting' post='41759' date='Aug 6 2007, 12:57 AM']Well, if you assume a typical £2500 profit per instrument, and multiply that by 20 instruments, that's £50,000 per year. 30 instruments makes it £75,000. Again, not a bad wage, but not as high as the typical earnings of the top achievers in most other fields / industries.[/quote]
Don't forget that this income is supplemented by sales of instruments in the shop and also from repair work.

[Johngh]

I've had Status basses for years and was about to have another one made when Dood got me onto Shukers. If I had gone ahead with the Status build it would have been a pretty much stock sounding instrument, sure, I would have chosen the woods, but apart from that it would have been stock.
This is in no way knocking Status, I've had 3 basses off them from new direct from the factory and Rob and Dawn are fantasic.
With my Shuker, I have picked everything including pups, electrics, woods, finishes etc, and its come in a lot cheaper than the Status would have been.
The beauty of Shukers, Sei etc is that you get what YOU want, rather than an expensive off the shelf item. My Shuker up to yet is turning out exactly as I asked Jon to make it.
I always wanted a Sei and maybe will have one some day, they are stunning, but I'm not prepared to wait a year for a bass to be made, its a simple as that.

Regards
John
(Full Back - Shuker F.C.)

[Toasted]

Everyone is happily chucking around these figures without deducting VAT and Coroporation Tax.

You can tell few of you (Dave) run your own businesses.

[chris_b]

[quote name='therealting' post='41925' date='Aug 6 2007, 12:59 PM']The secret is to play as a 3-piece. The money can be even better as a duo.[/quote]
My Rock/Pop covers bands are mostly 4 and 5 piece, the Blues/Rock bands are all trios, but, £300-£400 for a bar/pub? I also play in a duo, but in my experience promoters won't pay the same for a duo as a band.