Vintage Guitars

Rare / low production guitars are holding firm, but not sure they are going up much anymore. I just sold an James Olson 12 String I bought 4 years ago, and made $750 on the sale. Broker I bought it from was selling it to another client. There were only 11 of them built, and it brought $16k. New in 2005 it was probably $8-10k.

The above $5k range takes longer to sell.

 

Got to see/hear a few nice vintage pieces up close Monday evening...
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Joe definitely has an incredible vintage guitar collection! Thanks for sharing pics mate, even though I am 3 years late to the party.

 

I sold my last James Olson Small Jumbo guitar last year, and even though I'm not playing as much at 71 as I used to, I just couldn't quit looking for another.

Was able to buy a 1995 Olson SJ that is fairly basic, without a lot of the bling that runs up the prices. Plays and sounds as good as the others I have owned in the past. Such a long bell like sustain. It's a true finger picker's guitar, but hold up to my flat picking as well.

If you ever want to buy a good one, Dream Guitars out of North Carolina are the largest sellers of Olson guitars out there. I ordered it on a Monday, and they overnighted it to me to help beat the Dallas heat right now.

Here she is.
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I had forgotten about this thread until I was notified of the previous post.

I found a Gittler 2 in Europe at Yeah Man, which sits beside my '84 Steinberger GL2T.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gittler_guitar
When I was at the Guitar Institute SW a guy had an original. Now basically priceless. Wanted
one ever since. Got this one back in 2020. It's a second generation example made in Israel.

 

My Hendrix Woodstock strat. Not exact as this is a 1974, but otherwise similar.

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Very similar to mine! I have the original sales bill from Jan 1974, bought it from UK blues great Aynsley Lister earlier this year.


Onno
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Absolutely gorgeous. I bet it sounds stunning as well, almost 30 years old.

Onno

 

Very nice!

A previous owner had already removed the original 1970s saddles from my guitar so I went ahead and installed 1960s saddles like the original Hendrix guitar.
Thought, if I did have the original saddles, I'd probably have left them in place like yours.

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I had the third MESA/Boogie amp in San Antonio back in 1977. The three of us discovered M/B's through Carlos Santana and ordered them at the same time. Jim got the first one, Elmo got the second, and I got the third. I've had over a dozen Boogies since then.

 

Cool story G. Pepper! And I love a good Deluxe Reverb.

 

The original Boogies were hotrod Fender Princeton amps. Most have forgotten this.

 

I do have a Princeton and a Mesa Lone Star Special. Love them both. I am, however, totally smitten by my Two Rock Traditional Clean 40W combo. My method for guitar tones is to use my TR TC to provide the platform and use pedals (Gladio, Carl Martin, etc) to add the basic amp universe (Dumble, Marshall, AC, etc), and then Klon, TS, Bluesbreaker etc for the overdrive.

I find this to work best at home. Cranking tube amps is fallacy, even though I have a luxury set up with the neighbours 50m away and the walls being up to 3 ft thick (I live in an old manor house/chateaux). So a good clean platform (and the Two Rock is to die for) at reasonable output (about 95 dB) and then you work your guitar volume into the pedals to basically operate it as people used to do 50 years ago. I am happy with this approach, although it will never be a cranked Marshall substitute of course. But the tones are pretty darn good and organic.

 

Cool guitars boys.

 

Hey everyone, hope you are well. I'm really interested in high-end guitars, collectibles like our beautiful cars....But it seems I'm a bit late to the party! Can you show me your most expensive and high end items?!

 

My son has had a Mesa Lonestar Special for about a decade. It sounds amazing, especially for clean jazz tones. We have not found it to be that robust though (had to go into service a few times to have some circuit boards replaced), it's also very heavy, and don't like that tube bias isn't adjustable (so you need to be careful on tube selection). Excellent amp, but between the weight and fragility (in our case), it no longer gets get played out.

We will probably replace it with a vintage Princeton Reverb (lighter, hand-wired robustness, etc). A couple of months ago they they happened to have a vintage Princeton Reverb for sale when we stopped by a local Sam Ash. He played it for a long time and it sounded great. Not as good for jazz tones as the LSS, but excellent as an overall amp, and much easier to carry around.

Sam Ash also had a vintage PolyTone for sale. We've been wanting to play on a Polytone for a decade because we knew it to be the solid state amp George Benson used on Breezin', but never had the chance to. Plugged it in and (despite not being the exact same model) it was pretty much instant George Benson tone. We're a fan of George's music, but not necessarily his tone (it sounds solid state), so we weren't inclined to buy it -- but very cool to play around with.

 

Lots of Polytone players among the straight ahead jazz guys back in the day. The tone was good enough and they were not heavy, like tube amps can be. I had a Boogie with a separate head and 1 12 cab because the weight was such a pain.

 

We've found that inexpensive solid state Roland Cubes that makes surprisingly good jazz tones among solid state (close to tube like), though they aren't good for distortion. He uses a 10-year-old Roland cube to play out for jazz.

Seems like Polytone wanted a different edgier electronic sound rather than trying to match tube clarity.

 

I don't really "specialize" in vintage guitars - but have nearly 100 total and a few vintage have slipped in.

My favorite that fits that description is my 68 Tele - which was mutilated sometime between "birth" and when I acquired it in 78...

Somewhere in that 10 year span, it had been CRUDELY changed to left-hand (additional cut-out with a band saw and body routed to move the controls).

Since it was already hacked up - and I was a YUGE fan of Steve Morse and his mutilated Tele (the reason I bought this one) - I went ahead and routed it for two DiMarzio humbuckers. This was in the time before "high output" pickups - but since I had the bridge humbucker so far from the bridge there was a lot more "string travel" than expected and it WAS a high output pickup before it's time!

Of course this guitar went out of favor in my stable for a few decades, but it's been my favorite gigging guitar for about the last 10 years as when I whip this battle-scarred axe out, everybody knows I mean business when it's time to play "Smoking Whiskey and Drinking Cocaine"!!!

Kevin


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Great pics in this thread!
I'll add mine here. 1955 Gibson Super 400.
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Bumping this thread since I need some advice. My brother's birthday is coming up and he has been eyeing a reissue 1957 Gibson Les Paul Junior Sunburst, specifically the years 2006-2017 (something about the newer ones having a black back, he prefers the earlier brown). I have been searching for used ones but I don't know anything about guitars and don't know how to pick a good one. Anyone willing to help me search?

 

mchas - first try the website reverb.com. If there’s none there, then call my buddy George at Gruhn’s Guitars. He can find ANYTHING!

Kevin

 

I was looking on there earlier actually, and there are quite a few. My problem is I can’t tell the differences and don’t know how to pick.

I also went down the rabbit hole of looking at original vintage ones. Totally beautiful but even harder for me to tell what’s good.

 

I had a pair of 1959 Gibson jazz guitars. An L-5 and a Birdland. Not too many serial numbers apart.

Both tobacco. I'd give my eye teeth to have those back!

Early MESA/Boogie amps give great clean jazz sounds. The first Simul-Class Boogies were the best ever.

 

Not any real differences between them as there’s no “options”…

https://reverb.com/marketplace?query=reissue%201957%20Gibson%20Les%20Paul%20Junior%20Sunburst

I see 6 of them - identical except a couple are claimed to be “brand new” - no bad choice there.

Kevin