Built by passion, perfected by obsession. Each pedal was built to capture the best of the best, with more controls, a compact design and intuitive features. Designed and voiced for guitar players who demand the most from their effects, the PowerStage is the ultimate portable power solution. Throw on a Black Winter hoodie and a red pickup necklace or choose from an assortment of shirts for your next gig. As begins its inexorable stretch toward the warmer days of Spring, it feels right to talk of new things; of rebirth; of bare-limbed trees emerging with new growth, brown fields awakening with the green hues of renewal, and old guitars finding new purpose in the hands of eager players with open minds and eyes for a good deal.

The advent of internet culture has put those days squarely in the past, unlikely to return. We now have institutions like eBay and Craigslist , not to mention the p l e t h o r a of gear-related forum classified pages. The upside is that the number of used guitars available for purchase is now so vast that one could never play them all if they had their whole life to do it and they were going by one-by-one on a conveyor belt.

Consequently, the sale value of my current stable of guitars and amps actually exceeds my investment cost by several thousand dollars.

Patience is the key to finding a good deal on used gear. This is especially true when buying sight-unseen on the internet. Most of my used purchases were made before I could ever hold the guitar in my hands, but I tried each time to make sure I acquired them for a price that I could match or exceed if I decided to turn around and sell the guitar a month later. This way I got to try out a guitar for as long as I wanted and then pass it on to another player for whom it may be the perfect fit, while facing only minimal financial risk myself.

Keep in mind that this is a different tactic than buying nice Strats, disassembling them, and selling the parts on eBay for profit. I always intend them to be major players for me.

Doug Kauer on making a living building guitars — Sully Guitars

Nothing else will do! In those cases, practicing the aforementioned patience will usually pay off in the end. There are thousands and thousands of used guitars for sale at any one time, and any number of them could wind up hitting all the right buttons for me. It can be fascinating to see what kinds of guitars are available in your budget. This holds true for almost any price point, though the nature of a marketplace like eBay dictates that at much lower prices, the variety of the selection narrows considerably to consist almost entirely of a few conspicuous Chinese and Indonesian import brands which may or may not hold any interest for you.

Five Rules for Buying and Selling Guitars for Fun and Profit | Acoustic Pickers

For this reason I recommend also filtering your results to used instruments only. See here… in , they went to multi-piece fretboards. You should never buy a used guitar unless you already know the following information about it:. This info, for which it is perfectly acceptable to ask if not already listed, is enough for you to collect the rest of what you should know before purchase. You may need to visit several websites to find it all, including the website of the manufacturer, eBay to search for similar examples , and even relevant wikis and blogs, but it invariably pays off in the end.

From all this, you should have all the information you need to determine the two most important factors when it comes to buying any piece of used gear:. Here we see a bump in demand for AVRI Telecasters every time Bruce Springsteen sweats through a shirt.

For years, Gibson guitars in the Silverburst finish especially Les Paul Customs produced during the period in which Norlin owned the company were derided as some of the worst examples of the model they had ever made. This occurred for only one reason I can point to: Adam Jones of Tool and Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher of Mastodon were frequently seen and pictured playing them.

These long-dismissed offshoots of Norlin-era Gibson experimentation re-emerged as cool, desirable guitars simply because they were seen in the hands of cool people. This resulted in perhaps the worst time to try to buy and subsequently, the best time to sell them since their introduction in By not buying during upswings of market trends, you avoid paying a price for a guitar you will be unlikely to recoup if you sell it later after the market swings in a different direction as it invariably does.

Most places where used gear deals are listed and made have their own rules of conduct to which potential buyers and sellers must agree. Additionally, there are a number of unwritten rules or general guidelines that you should know and adhere to before you wade in.

The first of which is the ubiquitous and enduring caveat emptor , which is Latin for LET THE BUYER BEWARE. What this actually means is that the onus is on you — the buyer — to perform your due diligence and know what you are buying before you buy it. Providing the seller represented the guitar honestly and in good faith, once money changes hands and you take delivery, that guitar is yours. They are not a store. They are not beholden to any exchange or refund policy outside of those dictated by the stated conditions of sale usually by the website on which the instrument is listed.

If you buy a guitar from a guy at one price and see a similar guitar for a lot less a day later, tough cookies. Get OK with that. Answer emails and return phone calls. Let the seller know when the guitar arrives and whether it or not it was damaged in shipping.

Fifth, understand the intricacies of the responsibility hand-off that occurs when a guitar is shipped from seller to buyer. As a buyer, generally, the guitar is theirs until you have it — then its yours providing it arrives in the condition described. This shipping method is most likely going to result in a return to seller. The final bit of wisdom I will leave you with is this: Remember, there are many, many more people out there who regret buying something than there are those who regret not buying something.

Oh yeah, and that guitar up there in the main image at the top of this article? Other posts by Adam Gotch. This entry was posted in: The Player's Room and tagged adam jones , advice , Bill Kelliher , brent hinds , buying , Etiquette , guitar , Les Paul , les paul custom , mastodon , norlin , norlin-era , rules , selling , shipping damage , shopping , silverburst , tips , tool , travis bean , used , used guitar. I require all buyers to purchase shipping insurance.

I typicaly use the USPS or UPS. If there is a problem with an item broken during shippment, the onus is on the BUYER because 1. He has the item 2. He has the packaging 3. He has the shipping lablel.

Insurance companies require all of this info to process a claim. As all of it is in the hands of the BUYER, it is HE that should make the calim. It was HE that purchased the insurance. It is HIS policy. I also use tracking numbers on everything I buy or sell. If it gets lost during shipment, I can prove that the item was actually shipped. This is particularly important if you have accepted payment via PayPal. With PayPal, the SELLER is guilty until proven innocent.

Three weeks later I was still unable to buy or sell anything on eBay because my account was frozen. The amp finally was returned to me from Canadian Customs. Be advised, there are otherwise nice people out there that turn into flaming assholes when mishaps occur. If you ship a guitar wrap the headstock down to the nut with bubble wrap and take a few pictures of it in and out of the case from different angles.

Higher wattage amps often have speakers with very large magnets to handle all of those watts. Mesa Boogies are notorious for this and their baffles are made of cheap pressboard.

So, the speaker breaks free during shipment and destroys the amp. My advice is to remove the speakers and ship them separately. Yes this costs more, but its a lot cheaper than getting a cabinet and a chassis rebuilt and replacing a lot of broken tubes even if they were removed and wrapped in bubble wrap before you shipped the amp.

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