You can love a guitar and play it and not ding it up.

A guitar might be pretty enough to be an art piece, but it wasn't created and intended to be one.

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2006 Fender AVRI 70s Stratocaster: Natural Ash | Sovtek MIG 60 & A No Name Cabinet | Pedals & Junk

Oops. Most of your name got cut off in the thread review box below the reply form. Sorry, NS.

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2006 Fender AVRI 70s Stratocaster: Natural Ash | Sovtek MIG 60 & A No Name Cabinet | Pedals & Junk

I kind of like NS!!

Well,having grown up playing Fender Strats and Gibson Les Pauls in the '60s,and watching my uncle and his friends play them in the late '50s....yeah,there were good ones and not so good ones,but you could afford to play many of them and buy the one that was the best.
Now you can't touch one unless you're just about rich...I mean,I will not pay $35,000 for a Strat that might play and sound good, when my modern ones play and sound so good.
I just wish I had bought as many as I could when they were going for $200....but who knew that people were going to go nuts over them?
Man,we would have never thought about making a new guitar look like it had been dragged behind a wagon...just to look OLD!

The reason for collecting "old stuff" is that as it gets older, there are fewer examples of it around. It's not that they are better than the product produced today (often times they are inferior) it's a rarity thing. If there were 10,000 '57 Stratocasters out there, they wouldn't be rare and therefore wouldn't cost much.

Yes I tend to think it's silly, but to each his own.

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"Life is like eating jalapenos. What you do today may burn your arse tomorrow"

Japan and Most of Europe is a significant enough market to sustain vintage instruments though. You can't see them following our suit but bottom line is the vintage market will never just be undesirable. Prices will adjust in the market before it just dries up and people just lose interest altogether. Even if we start making stuff here again (and that wont be in our lifetimes if at all) those newly made guitars will never have the value or desirability that true vintage instruments do.

I respectfully disagree but respect your opinion on this topic.

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Blues with a feeling.

GUILD GUITARS: MADE TO BE PLAYED!

If that's the case, then the vintage market really makes no sense.

"Vaporware" ... that word comes to mind.



My last "vintage" purchase was my Airline amp, and that was the last reason why I bought it. I took it home because a.) it's a Valco-built amp and I really dig the tone, b.) it was only $120 bucks, c.) it was in great shape (except for two nicks in the old cheap thin tolex-wannabe covering and some yellowing in the grille cloth), d.) I liked it over a new Champion 600 which would have been more expensive in the long run, and e.) it's a no nonsense one-knob amp that's very good for testing out guitars and pedals with. I never run anything piece of gear I buy new into the Super 112 without running it into the Airline first.

If the cabinet were falling apart and it sounded terrible, I would have passed on it without looking back.



I blame the collectors. When they couldn't buy anymore pre-CBS stuff cheap, they had to think up some BS to drive the prices on the stuff they had bought up.



I'd pass on them both.



If that's the case, my Superhawk should have brought well over a grand when I sold it. It was over 25 years old. It was technically vintage/antique. G&L didn't build a whole lot of them (because they didn't sell) and Leo Fender was around when it was built, even though he didn't actually build the guitar himself by hand.

No, instead I sold it for pretty much what I had in it because no one outside of a few very devoted Jerry Cantrell and G&L fans knew what it was. And because of that, no one knew if it was a decent guitar or not and passed on it. Those guitars will never have much of any value (which I'm more than okay with; the more of them I find that I can buy cheap, the better).



Oh, we'll see more US production during our lifetime, that I'm sure of. China is demanding better wages and better working conditions. Slowly but surely their manufacturing strength will diminish to the point where it'll be too expensive to make stuff for export cheaply. That's why Wham-o moved their production back home, the cost didn't justify the means anymore and the quality wasn't really there.

I will say this for Gibson: they've always made guitars somewhere in the U.S. and I think Fender should really follow suit here. Reintroduce the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic to take on the Melody Maker since Gibson is selling those again and building them here in the U.S. and only for $400 brand new to boot. The American Special guitars prove you can make a quality American instrument for under $1,000 and they're desirable. They obviously sell or else Fender would have ended production of them by now.

I will say Gibson is bad for wanting to over-reinvent the wheel, though. At least Fender hasn't built something as useless as the Robot-Series guitars or the Firebird X. They just have way too many variations on the same theme, IMHO.



History doesn't dictate tone. Not that I'm saying you said that, but still I thought I would throw that out there while I had that thought.

My Airline amp is a piece of history technically then. It's almost 50 years old. Yet it only cost me $120.

I bought a vintage Zippo from 1964 still in the case for only $15 bucks. It's a piece of history too.

History drives up value? That's not always the case and it shouldn't be.

There is an exception, though, like if someone wrote a hit single on it. But not a lot of instruments wear such a title around and some of those that do aren't vintage, either.

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2006 Fender AVRI 70s Stratocaster: Natural Ash | Sovtek MIG 60 & A No Name Cabinet | Pedals & Junk

I understand Phoenixs point however I don,t feel so strongly about it. I would never buy a vintage guitar to just put it away. If I ever get to buy a 62 strat I would play it until the neck looked like a tooth pick. But thats just me.

As an absolutely fanatical player and avid but smalltime(29)collector I love vintage instruments and have several from the 60s and one from the 70s. Granted there were dogs made back then too but I have been lucky enough to find exquisite instruments,my '65 Strat,Mustang and Jag being just 3.There is something about the tone of the early to mid 60s Fenders that sets them apart from all others,especially the L series Strats.If you are lucky enough to find a good example of an L series Strat you will immediately notice the difference in the tone.My '65 has a B neck and the first time I picked it up in 1974 it felt like it had been custom made to fit my hands-and I have small hands.Even though B necks were all the same width it seems that there were at least 2 different profiles-the C and the D- mine had the C low profile which made the world of difference.If I could find a decent '65 for 10 grand I'd jump at the chance-if I could afford 10 grand.

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'65 Strat,65 Mustang,65 Jaguar,4 more Strats,3 vintage Vox guitars,5 Vox amps,'69 Bassman with a '68 2-15 Bassman cab,36 guitars total-15asst'd amps total,2 vintage '60s Hammond organs & a myriad of effects-with a few rare vintage ones.

I like vintage gear. As long as I get ridiculously good deals on it... Only happened twice so far.

If that era had long since ended, things would make a lot more sense.

The electric bass guitar was groundbreaking ... and popular. We still have those because of that.

History doesn't justify 300 to 1,000 times inflation in price/value, I'm sorry. Not when it comes to guitars. Maybe if we're talking about Lincoln's tophat. That has universal historic significance. But a '65 Strat ... yeah, not so much.



You actually play your instruments. Really, I think you've just had a very bad case of GAS all these years.

You're not of the ilk who buys a vintage guitar and frames it like an original Van Gogh. It's those folks I really cannot stand at all. Your instruments are in good hands, IMHO. You've also kept them all these years to boot.

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2006 Fender AVRI 70s Stratocaster: Natural Ash | Sovtek MIG 60 & A No Name Cabinet | Pedals & Junk

Supply and demand "justifies" it. You are maybe perplexed because you do not feel that level of demand.




Bet Robert E. Lee's hat would get more on Ebay than Lincoln's.

OK, since you're "sure".

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Blues with a feeling.

GUILD GUITARS: MADE TO BE PLAYED!

I believe guitars are made to be played also,a guitar,or any musical instrument,in a case for looks just dies a slow death.
that's what gripes me about collectors who don't play what they can afford,it's an ego trip for most of them...imho.
Anyway,I think Nathan Bedford Forrest's 1836 Navy Colt pistol would bring more than Abe's and R.E.Lee's hats!

It's the nonplaying collectors that drive the price up.