CLICK HERE FOR PART 2/3
Probably if you are looking in
this price range you are searching for used guitars. Used guitars are
extremly tricky by some point of view. We must consider two types of
used guitar: the vintage and the more recent ones, because either way
we are going to lose something.
Vintage guitars:
Vintage doesn’t necessarily
mean good. Old Gibsons are famous for their warm sound and incredible
manufacture but they cost three times what you want to spend.
If you are searching for a
vintage guitar for 500$ or less you must look at some strange and
rare brand that really few know. Especially in Japan from mid 70s to
mid 80s a lot of brand were born. The economic boom of the Japanese
industry hit also the instrument market, so you can easly find labels
as Cimar,
Tokay,
Greco,
Aria
and Vantage
on the online shops, selled by other people. What makes this guitars
so special? Some of these brands were produced in the same factories
used by Gibson and Fender to produce their models in that era in
Japan so the same hands that have built a Les Paul Custom probably
have built also an Aria Guitar or a Greco one. If you are lucky
enough to find and know exactly that the guitar was produced in one
of these factories you can be pretty sure that the manufacturing and
production are great, and most of the times it equals to the most
prestigous ones.
Wood can easly be extremely
better than any wood you can find now on guitars of the same price,
for the reasons I wrote above in the article. What you have to
sacrifice? Sometimes details and PU, but there are models with good
stuff even at this price range. There are just two big
counterindications: the first one is the resale value and the second
one the overall condition of the guitar.
For the first one you can’t do
much, it’s really hard to sell a guitar with an anonymous brand for
most of the guitarists, you can explain with the best words how good
it is but that damn logo will be your curse. If you are going to sell
one of these you’ll probably spend years to find a buyer interested
and probably you will have to lower the price a couple of times.
For the second point you must
pay attation to details as fret condition, scratches, repairs etc,
because it’s easy to buy a fourth hand instrument with a lot of
damages caused by the years, and sometimes it can be just an
aesthetic problem, in others it can make your new instrument almost
unplayable.
Last but not least! You must know
where it was built, in what year, the overall condition and all the
features. Sometimes catalogs are available, sometimes not, it’s a
big risk to buy an instrument without knowing if it’s the exact
model the seller is saying is it. You must know by what wood were
made and how, what PU it holds etc. This makes finding a good vintage
guitar for this amount of money a real journey through websites from
all over the world to compare prices, search for catalogs and
opinions of owners, but if you are not in a rush eventually you will
find the right guitar.
More recent used guitar:
Here we have to distinguish 90s,
first 00s and post 2006 guitars. For the first kind we can apply the
same rules of the vintage ones, but you must be more careful about
the unknown brands because after the 80s most of them started
declining and producing cheaper guitars with all the
counterindications we know.
On the other hand you can find
really awesome pieces by the most known brands as Ibanez,
Yamaha, Epiphone etc
which still have a good manufacture and production. Maybe it’s
better to buy a 90’s Epiphone
than a newer one, also until 2006 they didn’t use tone chambers to
make the guitar lighter.
“Post 2006 used guitars” is
the category I generally don’t advice to you, just only in few
cases. If you have read all the article you know what you have to
sacrifice here, since
we’re talking about almost the same kind of problematics of the new
ones. A 450$ used guitar maybe as new was sold for around
600 or 700$, and that
assures you a decent quality of wood and features, probably
with a pick up upgrade the guitar could become really solid.
Even for 700$ you can’t be sure the manifacture is good and the
production can be located in Indonesia, Vietnam or Korea and crafted
in chain with all the problems you know. The drama is that the only
two things you can’t
change on a guitar is the way it was assembled and what types of wood
they used. For the first thing you are literally jumping in the dark,
for the wood you can be lucky to find a nice piece, anyway a recent
used guitar can become a nightmare if you pay a nice amount of money
and you receive a guitar with a knot in the wood, so it will sound
“dead”.
Used guitars made in recent years
probably are in a better condition than the old ones and it’s one
of few “upsides”
of this category.
In my opinion there are just two
case where to buy a recent used guitar for 500$ or less it’s a real
deal: when you find a fool or when you find a desperate one.
“The Fool” is someone who
doesn’t know what is selling and maybe it’s dropping the price
drastically as someone who is selling a Gibson SG for 400$ just
because he wants to buy a different model fast.
The other case is easy to
recognize because sometimes you can read that the announcement is
online for more than a year, which means that they are dropping the
price to sell more easily.
In any case pay attetion to the
fakes! Nowdays
it’s easy to find a fake copy made in Indonesia of Gibson SG or LP
and the only way to check the production is the serial number on the
back of the head. If you find a Gibson LP custom for 500$ probably
it’s made in Indonesia.
The guide is yours, now you have
the tools to choose correctly your new axe!
CLICK HERE FOR PART 1/3
No comments:
Post a Comment