Tokai have been making musical instruments in Japan since 1947! In the late 1970s, Tokai began making copies of Gibson's Les Paul. They were so good that they were forced to stop using the Les Paul trade mark after lawsuits from Gibson.
Now we have the Love Rock guitars - they look a lot like Les Pauls, a lot - which are of excellent quality and have the feel and sound of earlier Gibson models. The craftsmanship is superb and the best quality materials are used throughout the guitars' construction.
Prices are also much lower than you might expect for such quality, about half the price of Amercan made guitars of equivalent quality. Tokai also have Chinese factories making excellent, lower-priced guitars. We think they are better than most other budget brands. The pickups are high output humbuckers, the neck profiles are more like the really expensive American guitars - particularly on the UES60 semi-acoustic - than that other, better-known brand.
So if you're after a top quality Les Paul-style guitar this Christmas, come and try our Tokais. Japanese models from £999 and Chinese from £359.
We’re all instinctively quite lazy! For our ancestors, hunter-gatherers, the balance between energy expended catching something to eat and the energy gained from the lunch they just caught was a matter of survival.
So whenever we (humans) want or need something, we have a tendency to get it in the least energy-costly way. The INTERNET is a great example of how we approach getting the stuff we want as cheaply as we can with regard to energy expenditure.
Retailers with bricks-and-mortar shops have had a hard time competing with internet retailers because they are at a disadvantage when it comes to the effort their customers need to make in order to get the thing that they want.
Of course, we all know the advantages of buying in a shop – we get to see the thing, try it out, compare it to other things and have somewhere to take it back to if there’s a problem - especially important if the thing is a guitar!. But we still get lazy and buy gadgets and accessories on-line a lot of the time. This doesn’t help keep high street stores open for those occasions when we really wish we could get some advice and have a look at something before we buy it. We just can’t get the service level we expect from an on-line retailer, in spite of the rights we have to return goods.
So remember that if you can get the thing you need locally, then you should go to your high street and buy it there. Help keep your local shops open, because when they’re gone, they’re gone!
