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Value of the most expensive guitar you own?


Most expensive guitar you own?  

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In which price range is your most expensive guitar?

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The most expensive guitar I've ever bought was my pedal steel, I foolishly bought it brand new, at $2,800. I should have never bought new. Next most expensive is my Boucher acoustic, which I also bought new, but I really love that guitar, so I don't feel bad for having paid $2,300.

The electrics I've bought have all been around the $800-1000 range.

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My most expensive classical guitar cost me $12K, but those are sort of another world. I don't have any expensive classicals anymore.

These days I have convinced myself that $1500 used will always acquire something really nice, and that seems to work for me. Most electrics I've purchased hang in around $1200. The '68RI Les Paul Custom was $2K, which I think is the most I've paid for an electric.

Today I'm at a $1500 instrument.

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My most expensive classical guitar cost me $12K, but those are sort of another world. I don't have any expensive classicals anymore.

These days I have convinced myself that $1500 used will always acquire something really nice, and that seems to work for me. Most electrics I've purchased hang in around $1200. The '68RI Les Paul Custom was $2K, which I think is the most I've paid for an electric.

Today I'm at a $1500 instrument.

This seems like a good rule of thumb for electrics....$1500 will get you a great electric for sure. Acoustics are a whole other ball game. I'm not saying you can't get a nice one for $1500, but when I was shopping for acoustics, the prices knocked me out.

It seems from what Feynman is saying that the classical guitar world is kind of similar. I don't know too much about classical guitars, but I do have a buddy who has one that he spent $3000 on and he considered that a super good deal.

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With classicals the price is in the craftsmanship. Cheap tonewoods and cookie-cutter sweatshop builds don't cut it for discriminating classical players like they do for us mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging electric players.

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I've fought off my "good archtop" longings for a long time now. Newports and Monacos have held that at bay, but it's always there, latent perhaps. I remind myself that I don't sound very good on even the stuff I have, and a five-digit-archtop won't be changing that.

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Well I've paid more for the Standard, but think the Tally could beat it on resale value. The Bo Diddley Red Special could be in the race for its exclusiveness. All three and the Newport are fantastic playing and sounding guitars and remain no-sellers for me.

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With classicals the price is in the craftsmanship. Cheap tonewoods and cookie-cutter sweatshop builds don't cut it for discriminating classical players like they do for us mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging electric players.

Good point for sure. The other thing for electric, of course you need a decent guitar to start with, but lately I've been kind of thinking that the amp is the really crucial link.

(Not that the guitar isn't important of course, but a good amp will make a lot of guitars sound nice, whereas a great guitar through a so-so amp, not as much)

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None of your fucking business. :lol:

*edited to add that my most expensive ax is not even in the top 3 of those most valuable to me.

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Amps are the most important link in the chain?


Crap, that's going to set me off on a new GAS tangent.

Anyway, since I've bought used most of the time, they are all worth pretty much what I paid.

Right now, the most valuable guitar I have is the Blueburst that I bought for $1100 or so, and I'd probably get that if I sold it.

Prior to that, I have a Vandy Custom that I bought for $1450 that hit the right person at the right time with the right amount of cash and he jumped at $2000 BIN. So it might have been worth slightly more if I'd had a straight auction, and that would make it the most valuable guitar I'd ever touched, much less owned.

So it is kind of ironic that the only real way to find out what your most valuable guitar is really worth is to no longer have the most valuable guitar.

Now, my two favorite guitars cost me $250 and $495, for a plywood Westone Challenger (despite being plywood, it has great tone and looks/feels like I imagine an 80s USA Charvel does) and a neck-thru Yamaha RGX 1212.


Both have great tone, great action, and the trem stays in tune for months. What more could you want?

And I have another dozen guitars that are only infinitestimally behind those two, including the aforementioned blueburst Centaura and the rest of my Hamers. I just got a 1st Generation Slammer Series Daytona that has strat tones so beautiful that they will make you cry...with a boost switch! But the trem is blocked so I haven't tried the trem yet.

So I'm selling off a bunch of decent guitars...I am ecstatic about my collection lately. There is now not even a single guitar I am not excited to pick up and play, not one I am ever not in the mood to play.

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With classicals the price is in the craftsmanship. Cheap tonewoods and cookie-cutter sweatshop builds don't cut it for discriminating classical players like they do for us mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging electric players.

Good point for sure. The other thing for electric, of course you need a decent guitar to start with, but lately I've been kind of thinking that the amp is the really crucial link.

(Not that the guitar isn't important of course, but a good amp will make a lot of guitars sound nice, whereas a great guitar through a so-so amp, not as much)

Ha! Funny, I have the opposite opinion. I can get a decent guitar to sound good through most (but not all) amps, but even a great amp can't make a lousy guitar sound good.

I'm not a tone hound who looks for any particular sound, so I can usually find at least one sound that any amp does well. But a bad guitar will sound bad through anything. I should also note that I don't use high gain settings, so I suppose that if you use the amp to layer on thick distortion, it doesn't matter much what the input signal is.

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A crap guitar with a great pickup in it can sound great. So in terms of quality affecting sound, for me it's pickup, then amp, then guitar.

Hmm. A crap guitar that can't be tuned, or buzzes, or has dead spots, or is a tone suck in general won't be helped by a good pickup.

I'd order them 1. guitar, 2. amp, 3. pickup.

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A crap guitar with a great pickup in it can sound great. So in terms of quality affecting sound, for me it's pickup, then amp, then guitar.

Hmm. A crap guitar that can't be tuned, or buzzes, or has dead spots, or is a tone suck in general won't be helped by a good pickup.

I'd order them 1. guitar, 2. amp, 3. pickup.

Hmmm...interesting points from everyone.

I'm not really sure exactly what the most important thing is. One thing I know:

Shopping for amps is harder for me than guitars, no contest. You can try it in the store all you like, but you don't really know what it will sound like when you play it with your band, does it have enough headroom, too loud, too hard to dial in, mesh well with the other players etc....

Sometimes what sounds great by itself is not the way to go. This is what is frustrating me the last year or so, finding an amp that has enough headroom to stay clean with a drummer, but at the same time isn't so loud that it's overkill.

I've got a line on an amp that I'm going to check out tonight, so hopefully it's "the one" and the quest is finally complete!

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Hmm. A crap guitar that can't be tuned, or buzzes, or has dead spots, or is a tone suck in general won't be helped by a good pickup.

I was talking about the quality of wood mostly. A $200 Squier with none of the issues you mention can sound great with a great pickup.

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To me (might as well run with the thread swerve), building guitars has something in common with building B-17s back in WWII. The Memphis Belle was reportedly almost a magic aircraft, easy to fly, no problems...the description is that everything just came together right.

Sometimes a cheap guitar just comes together right. The wood is cut and/or glued so the wood fibers align, the holes are drilled cleanly and in the right place, the builder doesn't slip while polishing the frets, the angle for the tuners is right, and the pickups that go in it just happened to get wound just right.

So you end up with an awesome guitar for cheap. But it would be a mistake to assume that all cheap guitars can be that good.

WWII bomber analogy exhausted, the biggest difference between a cheap guitar and an expensive guitar is the consistency and tolerance for deviation. Great guitars are built with great materials using great tools by someone whose worst day is still extremely close to his best performance. You get consistent performance. If they go the extra mile and use quality prepped materials, you get a guitar where you can buy it without playing and be confident you are getting a good guitar, i.e. USA Hamer.

That doesn't mean an inexpensive guitar can't be good.

The worst wood can still be pretty good (especially since the difference between best and worst wood is often just the cosmetic appearance). Pickups are just wires wound around a bobbin, so cheap ones can sound good, too. Workers at a cheap guitar factory improve with experience and get better at making and putting the guitars together.


But the same machine that puts out a dozen nice sounding pickups will also produce hundreds of crappy ones. The same guy that puts together a guitar really nicely doesn't care if the next 100 he makes aren't aligned quite right. The quality control guy just cares if the guitar makes a sound, not if it plays well.

the point is...I've got no point. I'm just talking.

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Always an interesting discussion. Electric guitars are useless without an amp so in that sense I consider the amp part of the instrument. Some of my guitars mate much better with some amps than others though with the proper amp they all are capable of great tones. I don't happen to own any crappy guitars or amps. My Ultimate is my most expensive guitar but I have no idea what the market value of that is.

ArnieZ

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