The Whole Relic Thing

Rory Gallagher and his real weathered Strat

I've noticed that the vast majority of instruments coming out of the Gibson and Fender Custom Shops are delivered with fake aging. This is probably true for other makers as well, but it is these two that I have been thinking about a lot lately.

I have learned from Lee Anderton of Anderton's Music in Guildford, Surrey that when they order custom shop instruments on spec for sale through their retail shop or their wide reaching web store, that they are pretty much guaranteed to sell out if these instruments are what the industry likes refer to has having a relic treatment. Different levels of this aging are available from something as gentle as NOS (new old stock) such as one would encounter in a guitar that spent its entire life in a case in an environmentally controlled environment to the "heavy relic" where the instrument looks like it spent the last half century being played behind chicken wire while an audience of drunks and fools threw beer, food and bottles at it, and then the player casually dropped it several times a week.

I have seen these relic instruments, and also the real thing, the real thing being an instrument well played by a musician or musicians for decades, not with intent to damage but where actual wear and tear has worn through finishes, where there are dings and dents and perhaps the odd beverage or dozen has hit it accidentally. I have played and handled instruments from the fifties and sixties, played regularly through their lives and with rare exception, none of them are in truly execrable shape.

This happens with parts as well. I bought a second set of Seymour Duncan Antiquity pickups for a reissue 1963 SG because I like the sound of the set installed in my 1971 Les Paul (a Norlin era Deluxe, modified by the original owner to take humbuckers). When the pickups arrived, they sounded great, but the covers looked like they had been dug out of a collapsed basement bar. I really hate that look.

I recently saw an interview of the blues great Walter Trout. He's an amazing man, with a wonderful attitude who still plays his original 1973 Stratocaster. He loves the guitar. It looks like warmed over shit, and to some extent has probably aged the way it has because it's a proper CBS era Strat from when quality control were two words that never went together. Sidebar, anyone who tells you that they have a "vintage" 70s Fender is putting lipstick on a decade of instruments where vintage means old guitar that was crap from its build day. I was there then. There is nothing vintage about a late CBS instrument or a Norlin era Gibson for that matter.

Mr. Trout believes, and so do I, that a guitar, like a person, earns its scars through real life, not through makeup and prosthetics. I have argued on multiple special orders with Gibson that if they dared VOS (vintage old stock) my order, I would refuse it. Many times it took months to resolve even though the fakery should have taken more time and cost them more. Gibson in the early 2000s was a very customer disoriented company, and may be getting better although their constant babble about authentic and iconic sets my bullshit meter to breaking.

So I am one of those people who isn't interested in a relic instrument. I will buy and have bought old instruments that have suffered their aging. The ones I paid for, I determined had earned their stripes. Others were just old junk, and I expect someone else bought them.

This fake aging foolishness came about during the first boom in "vintage" guitars, a marketing term to attempt to assert that anything old was more like unobtainium than just an old guitar. Norm Harris of Norm's Rare Guitars actually brought awareness of the facility of older instruments very much to the forefront. Nothing wrong there. If you want to pay through the nose for an old instrument not necessarily built better than one from the current excellent options, that is entirely your business. Mr. Harris does have some truly lovely vintage pieces, albeit at prices that will forever be outside my range and return on value.

When the boom started a lot of people who were not musicians started buying old guitars not to play but as investments or pieces of art. The strings were not touched, the instruments went into display cases and were hung on walls. As happened with old motorcycles, a bunch of people with money but no true passion drove prices up by making these things collectable.

The makers were troubled to see all this money changing hands and none of it going through their own hands. So they built guitars and started fake aging them to give the buyer the illusion that he (mostly he) was getting an instrument that had been through the wars. Did this make the buyer feel that he got a better instrument? Perhaps, although the reality is more likely that it served to puff a deflated ego. I have encountered the vintage owner more than once who alluded to owning a really old guitar, when it was only a new guitar made to look old. I understand a love of older, simpler things, such as old cars, or old motorcycles or old instruments. Most of these are used by the owner to drive personal pleasure from them, not to play show off to a bunch of other show-offs, although that is not uncommon. Some may like the idea of collecting up 1950s vintage furniture of real wood and interesting design, but the market for yellowed and cracked 1950s vintage linoleum has not broken out yet. So why would you buy a perfectly good instrument and then pay extra to have someone abuse the finish with acids, hit the body with chains to dent it and rub charcoal into a fretboard after sanding the finish off? Does the instrument play better?

There are some who say that an aged instrument is popular because buyers are afraid of damaging a new pristine instrument and are more comfortable with something is already broken in. Please sign me up for when the same people want a new car that looks broken in. I will be happy to help them out to make their new vehicle look like it survived a tour in a war zone. Said this way, it sounds really stupid, and that's because it is stupid.

I have old amplifiers where the Tolex is worn and torn at the corners from having people bang the cabinets into stuff, likely too narrow doorways of too many clubs. One old Marshall head has duct tape on the back plate to remind the owner of the impedance settings because the original lettering was long gone. It plays well, although it is a bit noisy and like most real old Marshalls, needs to be cranked to the point of deafening and police summoning to breathe well. Thank goodness for the Universal Audio OX, I just wish it had two speaker cabinet outs...Marshall 100 watt heads are meant to sit on top of two 4x12 cabinets. Just saying...

This nuttiness even exists in pedals. The original ToneBender was popular in the 60s with players who wanted something different. The componentry in it might have a value of about six bucks, although new old stock germanium transistors, that I call roulette transistors because they are not predictable, are getting harder to find.

I cannot imagine that if Jimi Hendrix were still alive he would still be playing his old Fuzzface. He showed innovation all the time, so it is unlikely that fifty years later he would still be using those old effects. That Jimmy Page used an old ToneBender in It Might Get Loud, is not an indicator that this is the only tool he still uses.

Do you need to go buy a vintage (aka old) tube amp to get a good tone? Of course not. Collector extraordinaire Joe Bonamassa, who actually owns the amps that people aspire to, will tell you that you don't have to have tubes to get a good tone. If you like the feel of tubes, good for you, but there is little rationale to spend twice as much for tubes over solid state if you cannot tell the difference over YouTube (and no, the limitations of bandwidth mean you cannot actually hear a difference). Otherwise why would so many players be skipping amps entirely to go direct to the board with amp emulators and speaker IRs? Why is the seemingly most popular amp these days the Boss Katana? In full disclosure, I own the lunchbox version and while I have issues with the user interface and the need for a bluetooth connected smart phone to actually leverage the capability, and the idiocy of using AA batteries instead of a lithium power pack, it's a pretty awesome little practice amp with incredible versatility when connected to a smart device and wonderful tone for its size.

I very much like guitars built today to the specifications of their aged predecessors. I own a number of reissue Les Paul guitars that are built like they were in the year that the reissue is meant to exemplify. They are all different, and I went through a number of iterations of a specific reissue to find one that felt right on many occasions. I very recently played five different Gibson Custom Shop 1960 Les Pauls with the v2 neck profile to find one that I could bond with. How fortunate for me, that any age fakery was minimal because that guitar sits in a stand beside other guitars and gets played regularly. Yes it was stupid money and while I do not think it is necessarily a better guitar than a modern Les Paul, I bought it specifically because I was born in 1960 and will never afford an actual 1960 Les Paul.

Some makers are taking this rebuilding old instruments pretty far. I can now go into a guitar shop (thank goodness the Internet has not killed actual guitar shops) and pick up a reissue 1970s Fender, with bullet truss rod and three bolt neck. I can only hope that the buyer does not get an accurate 1970s CBS Fender replica for their dollar. Perhaps Gibson will remake early Norlin era Les Pauls with the resonance killing sandwich body and bursts sprayed by those legally blind. Or perhaps they already did so. I do see a lot of 1970s era Les Paul Customs (painted because there was no figure to the tops and the paint conceals the horrible sandwich bodies) on Reverb for ridiculous money. The original Les Pauls from this time were really horrible, why would you want to pay six times what it cost new for a what was a pretty lousy guitar? Oh yes, so you can have a "vintage" guitar.

I have another idea. Go try out a bunch of guitars. Find one that feels right under your fingers, that appeals to you and that suits what you like to play. Forget what the marketers and the advertisers and the YouTubers say. You can do it. They aren't helping. Then buy it and let it get old along with you. That's how you get a real aged instrument. As you see at the top, it worked for Rory Gallagher.