Will Vintage Guitars Be Worthless When Boomers Are Gone?

all right rolling it's good to have a dog and a shot rolling here okay so today we're doing something quite a bit different uh first of all i've never had this many people in this room before this is this is the first there you go and uh i've got some heavy hitters here to talk about a subject now before we do introductions i have to say that we're downstairs uh eating dinner fantastic thank you yes yes and we got into this conversation that we've been having kind of independently of one another for months at this point and it came up at dinner and we just decided stop we have to turn the camera on and film this but before we get into that keith five wide world who's coming up on 200 000 subscribers by the way so i'll have his channel linked down below as quickly as i need to if you're not subscribed to five watt world go uh go follow him down there uh dave honorado dojo guitar repair i'll have his instagram linked down below and then to complete the three amigos rick biatto was the topic of our uh argument discussion both discussion rick insighted yeah excited to discuss invoked the conversation yet again aggressive discussion yeah will vintage electric guitars be worth anything when the older generation who currently basically thank you people you guys the guy yeah yeah when when the baby boomer generation is gone our vintage guitar values specifically bursts early stretch things like that i think 50s yeah are they going to be worth anything right no right no do you want to get right out in front of this oh i just want to say i don't i don't think that they will i think that that the interest in electric guitar music and and groups of that era will be passed and people the only people that will be trading these things are people that trade guitars now that are collectors if you put a guitar out on reverb now a burst it would sell for a quarter of what it would sell between collectors maybe even less than that and to me that's the real value of the guitar is like what would people pay for it i mean guitars worth what you know whatever anybody's going to pay for it but it's like elvis memorabilia once the people are gone that care about that it's not worth anything there's kind of two angles that i tend to come back to on this that make it feel like that might not be true okay and those are um musicians are still going to be trading these things and collect that's one thing i totally agree with you that musicians might not feel it the same way but i'm going to come back to that but collectors always have a vested interest in keeping prices up so they're always going to be doing everything they can to try to keep the numbers high and the final thing is i worked in higher education for 35 years one of my favorite things to do was to stop and ask a work study student what are you listening to and i got to tell you that that has never really has never waned in all of those 35 years the number of people that said led zeppelin really never changed and so if their people are still you know watching video of jimmy page play if they're still listening to that music and that's still vital then i think that actually could continue to influence demand going forward dave that's my yes my take on it is if they're not going to be worth any money then why do we have so many reissues of these guitars and why it is like why do we all own reissues of these guitars you know if we do that's but that's the point though we own reissues because they're essentially made in a very similar way no no no it's strictly it's strictly because of money it's not because the i mean if you could buy a real one for the same price as as the original you're not going to tell me not by the original right well that's the supply and demand and it's i now what we'll we'll be waning with these guitars is yes your generation who had a real affinity for these guitars because you saw your heroes playing them right that will wane slightly right but they will always be worth the money i mean who were the people that bought a lot of these guitars paul allen people like that are no longer the collector collectors that had the money to pay for we were just down at the table talking about how some of these guitars are so expensive that multiple people own the guitars together right yeah they're they're investment properties which that is becoming more popular in in other areas of investment right you can buy shares of a home or shares of real estate for example and i think we will see that with it with instruments to me when you're talking about a burst les paul 58 to 60 you're talking about the electric guitar equivalent of a stradivarius violin and if you look at those values of those instruments they are higher than they've ever been despite classical music and music that features those instruments not being in the popular public sphere for 70 years i'm not sure how much the prices of those violins have changed over the years i don't know if they're increasing like they were if you adjust for inflation i don't think stradivarius has have become i might be wrong about that but i don't think that they've become more valuable well the interesting thing is i'm sorry you're smirking because i had a conversation with george groon when i made my burst video the history of the burst 58 to 60. and i called and i got on the phone with george cruz famous vintage he's been doing it long as long as anybody he made the same argument but in reverse he basically said that a burst is just a plank of wood compared to a martin you know a pre-war d45 or a stradivarius that was his exact words to me on the telephone and i said wait are you telling me that you don't think that the same level of skill went into this i mean i was goading for sacrilege here like you mean the same level of skill didn't exist in the late 50s no it absolutely did not that's not what those are and i was like uh can i yes you can quote me you know well he's he's right to a point in some of the fact especially with the martin and building an acoustic guitar it is completely different and it's it's a lot of variables so um but as far as you know it's less what's what's the joke dave about oh that's about bursts they oh that yeah uh well there was only there was only a thousand seven what yeah exactly right yeah that's that's the classic joke and that that joke was around um you know reproductions yeah and dave was in the thick of it because his dad was a dealer and the whole thing about well and i own a bunch of replicas high-end replicas i mean you know i've got a max explorer that is 99 right the same as a real one basically and you know exactly right and i said in a video i was holding it in a video and i said something about this is dave's explorer and dave calls me right up he's like people gonna think i own a real explorer yeah no well and that's the thing but i mean i didn't know there was 18 or 21 of them yeah i had no idea that's the thing but here's the thing even the even the replicas of that quality i mean we're that's still a five-figure guitar oh yeah yeah i mean it's not you know we're not talking like i can get one of those for five or six grand i mean right that's a whole nother level and there's the guys who buy those are collectors who can't get the real ones right they want the next best thing and that's why they well and then there's that whole you could we could do it i mean slash alone has you know half his life does he have any real no yeah he definitely does but he's definitely got a lot of replicas in their amazing replicas sure and that's why he wants them because he appreciates how well they are well what i was going to say about your explorer is that once you and i got on the phone and i said well i didn't tell anybody where you live yeah most importantly but the kicker is you went on to tell me that like the all the hardware and the paf's the actual pickups yeah i came out of like a 58 yeah it's all 355 that was demolished right right yeah that was the pickup's kind of a 345 yeah thank you yeah so yeah well i think there's two sides of the discussion though because right now we're focusing on sort of the holy grail of the electric guitar market the burst right uh and i think there's a couple other guitars that exist in that category right so you know late mid to late 50s strats for example early 60s strats small numbers as well blackguard tellys no casters things like that the early early stuff um and then outside of that pre-war and war era martins maybe some banner era gibson's yeah things like that 50s grudges there's a there's a few others but yeah my my hunch is that those guitars will always hold their value because of their significance in not just music history but pop culture history of the 60s and the 70s and the players that played them and the music that was made with them but outside of that you know all of the other vintage guitars uh like cbs air offenders for example which right now are insanely expensive right that are not particularly rare they're not particularly you know well known with a few ex exceptions to that i think those will drop in value okay so i i look at my assistant billy billy's 27 or so he plays he has one six string guitar that he just got recently but he plays a lot of extended range guitars which all of his friends are into and friends of mine like tosan abbasi play extended ranged guitars those are guitars that are in today they're not playing les paul replicas or anything not playing less balls at all well they weren't playing less paul replicas in the 80s either everyone was playing super strats with floyd roses but they don't and then uh if the music is not in vogue the type of music that the heroes i mean why do people want 59 les pauls because of the people that play it's like you can't separate the great players from the mythos that is that guitar type i said in one of my earliest videos if you're holding a white stratocaster jimi hendrix is in the room i mean if you're half a player but the reality is you can't separate that's your argument you cannot separate those players from the myth of those guitars right yeah and i would i would give you that that i would concede that point doesn't necessarily mean that the prices are going to drop back down i actually think you raised a really interesting point about because i i included in my videos i show what adjusted prices are for inflation and people love to say well this is my inheritance this is this is my retirement fund oh really do the numbers on that yeah because economically speaking it doesn't hold up you're lucky if you meet go with inflation the only time you make real money is if it's an artist attached thing right that's the only type of numbers and there are so few artists that actually and dave will will test this how many artists really make a difference that they owned owned it we can count them on two hands oh yeah it wouldn't be it wouldn't be that many no right well then you have you have nowadays you know things like the get back documentary where you'll have these sort of pop culture things that happen sort of randomly that'll cause a blip in the market right when i bought my casino right you couldn't find casinos because get back had just come out and everyone wanted it yeah oh ebb and flow right and i think there is part of that but i just you know for the cream of the crop things that were made in low numbers that have a ton of of uh prominence providence providence providence providence uh they have a ton of providence around them i think that stuff will hold its value now as an investment i think you're right you're not going to see 10 12 15 percent return per year on that car sadly you can still do better in the market yeah yeah right right but most people that are buying bursts early strats they're not necessarily buying them as investment pieces they're collectors and they want them for sentimental reasons or you know collectibility reasons or whatever but um yeah i mean if you look at what bonnamas has done for the vintage market i mean i would i would dare to say he's probably half the reason that the verse they're still where they are and there's a whole bunch of young players that love him that follow him and their whole thing is like i gotta have that guitar so i mean it's i i think it's it's it is a generational thing and it's um but there's always the cool factor too you can't put a dollar factor on the cool factor it's like you know if somebody wants something bad enough because they think it's going to make them that much better because they own it they're going to buy it you know and to your point keith earlier people are always going to be listening to zeppelin they're always going to listen to the beatles they're always going to listen to you know whoever yeah but they can buy reissues they can buy reissues but there's so when we were at dinner i brought up the uh the example there's a few tick tock accounts i i follow that are book collectors document collectors you want to talk about a niche thing like people that are collecting leafs of the the uh was it the gutenberg bible the first printed document ever like these are things that in the pop culture sphere don't even move the needles at all like right but in that community those things still hold massive amounts of value because of the rarity because of the the story behind it because the history and the older the further you get away in time from when that thing was printed or when that les paul was made it's going to become more rare more sought after because yeah which and like anything condition is everything too like you know if you're going to buy a vintage piece i always tell somebody don't buy anything that's modded or refinished if you can help it because down the road when you do sell it it's a no stories guitar it is what it is you can't it's not like well this has been changed in this and you can just go this is completely 100 original and people go wow you know yeah that sg i bought that sg from the second owner from lindsay down at maple street guitars and dave went through it no it's 100 legit and that's the way you want it you know if you are buying a vintage instrument that's you know i mean that's what you want you didn't want anything really your only vintage that's my only vintage instrument and in the in the the sort of hierarchy of vintage guitars that's not anywhere correct 65. so let's so let's drill back down through what was your motivation your thinking that no but that guitar ticks all my boxes like i there's not a player associated with that guitar for me right but it's slab mahogany gibson single p90 all original super lightweight i mean it ticks all the boxes and the minute you picked it up you're like this is it yeah my my wife tilly who's holding that camera right now i sat and played three sgs that day and she said that's the one that's the one you need you play you play better on that guitar which is the other hidden aspect of vintage guitars where people go are they really that much different if they make you feel like you're playing better then that's how what is that worth right i mean well and i'm not saying every vintage guitar is is amazing because they're not but if it does what you know that's my critique too when i go in and buy or vintage or i'm looking for something if if i pick it up and i go i know this is it you just know it it's just weird how that happened i have played a handful of bursts um and i'd say i think i've played three or four and only one of them really like shook me yeah i spoke to you uh and it was one that i played in a video on my channel though what is the les paul sound the burst sound the one i played at carter that one was and i remember this feeling that i had holding it that guitar wasn't famous it wasn't owned by a by anybody famous it was a nice topic it was a nice nice top 59 burst but i remember holding that guitar and the way i felt playing it was there was this sort of weight to the uh how do i describe it with it being its age and being a real burst it changed my relationship with how i was playing it now that doesn't happen with all vintage guitars in fact a lot of vintage guitars are dogs like i said they're not always good there's a reason they're still around because they didn't get played because they weren't great guitars the reason i asked you to drill down your own thought process with this guitar is that actually you didn't include any of the things that we're concerned about lowering value in the long run right and i knew that from your video yeah that this guitar just spoke to you and and i will say there is no more honduran mahogany like this so there might be again some day but not for 150 years right there's not going to be wood like the wood that's in this guitar okay so dave correct me if i'm wrong though the long the further we get away from 1959 or whatever 58 the harder it is to authenticate instruments um i would say recently yes and that's where like in the counter who you're buying so good and yeah i mean there are some phenomenal forgeries right so doesn't that in some way affect if the things are worth anything or not or how much it helps the real ones it helps the real ones because it proves that they're worth being copied at that level yeah and you're talking about another digit guitar yeah and i mean i look at the replicas i'm talking about are not just like you know you walk into guitar center by reissue these are another level of you know i look at them as artwork honestly because they are because they're the guys who are putting these guitars together are using the same woods and they're using the same exact techniques to build it down to the glue down to everything and so that's that to me that is a whole nother level art artistry because they're trying to make it as good as the original and that's going to get harder and harder and that there's a hand i can name three people on this earth that i consider in that realm so it's okay so if you were to say we talked about this a little bit earlier who are the people whose guitars are really worth a lot of money from their name jimmy page david gilbert david gilmour mary carlton joe pass joe pass yeah so this came up with the beatles we have to cover this so during the evening today rick got all excited and it's amazing that this is not googleable that's a thing right yeah my dad loved joe pass there we go and i love joe pass my dad's favorite musician was joe pass and i said to dave or keith i was like where is that guitar did he play the guitar virtuoso yeah which came out in 1973 and they say d'angelico where is that guitar now who has that guitar does it exist it has to exist somewhere we tried to google it and it did not come up right away so the whole group is working on this now yeah yeah so i think it's in your eye somewhere but just but does does a guitar that's owned by joe pass really increase the value though oh that's a very small list that's where you're going i was just going to say that's a very small list very very small but to the guys who would collect high-end jazz box guitars yeah i mean that that would be the equivalent of having uh hendrix's strat sure one of his strategies well i and i started making a series of videos called the guitars of and we've i've talked to all you guys about who's on this list yeah it doesn't fill two hands right now you can't make a video that enough people were recognized as a guitar hero and then you know me i'm always very interested in the back stories of the guitars themselves so that's a very small list of people and it's only those people whose guitars would then demand top down and then you look at someone like brian may brian may has one guitar right yeah yeah well like that see to me that guitar would be in a class by itself because there is no other one there is no other one so that's almost like a smithsonian kind of piece where it's priceless and you just you know it's priceless a lot of these originals i think are are smithsonian pieces um pages yeah well even even things like you know at uh at songbirds museum a few years ago they had a women of rock and roll exhibit they had um elizabeth cotton's martin they had one of carol kay's bases right and i remember having a discussion with because we had played a show there and we got in the van after the at the show and me and the guys in the band were having this sort of just almost moral discussion of those guitars i don't think should be in a private collection those guitars deserve to be in a public museum like the smithsonian because they've had such a massive impact on pop culture and sort of the course of our nation's history you know that anyone should be able to go and see that and learn the story of those issues and more importantly the story of the people that played those instruments and made the music that shifted the course i mean especially if we're talking about music in the 60s in the vietnam war and the protest era i mean right these instruments had a massive impact on world events and the cool thing about songbirds is that they have musicians in to play them yeah that's a very very cool thing about the mission of songbirds yeah they have this huge educational thing they have this whole instrument branch where they're raising money for that um that's an amazing organization and i'm thrilled i've heard that they're they're open again yeah they've opened again which is good fantastic yeah if you're in chattanooga tennessee absolutely stop by songbirds it's worth it it's worth the time but i think your point's really interesting that that is a very short list but it's a it's a deeply influential list so the reason that it's influential to people that are of that generation it's it remains to be seen what groups are famous well actually making that prediction we can nerd out a little in a youtube kind of way um you and i both know the analytics of my channel so people that want to know the stories of these you know lauded guitars everybody's i think when i built the channel at the assumption was that it's going to be guys my age you know watching these videos it's not it's not my channel is the same number i have the same number of people at 25 years old that i have at 55 and 65 years old and so to me that's actually an interesting statistic around what values might hold on to or what how people see the value of the whether they're actually in the game of being able to afford those guitars as a completely other thing they might be wishing for an r9 i just don't hear young people and i know a lot of young guitar players other than rat that are talking about these vintage guitars they're they all play new guitars they do well it's because none of us can afford them i mean you this gets into the sort of generation they don't even talk about it though they don't but i wish i could because the way the way the market is at this moment it's it's so una who's got half a million dollars to drop on a guitar it's not right but because beyond the murphy lab then the next step is you know yeah but those guitars are excellent guitars and you can just you can if you can afford those guitars people will buy them that's why i don't think that those those guitars eventually will lose their value i don't know i just i think that there's just so much inventory out there now of these see i i think i i it's the opposite because like what you were saying so the fact that gibson has invested so much money into things like murphy lab right getting you as close as humanly possible to the real thing while spending you know less than a tenth of the price and people are buying them i mean they're they're they're like flying off the shelves because they can afford them and that is raising the profile of the real ones it's it's done this yeah right it's pushing it up like that yeah exactly yeah yeah but but the gap because it's a huge gap when you have the new reissue you're real really what you want is the original that's what you want i mean that's what you like because no matter how i don't know i don't want the original i don't you know what i think a good example is red eye so uh ed king's burst from skinner that now jason isbell owns and that the story of that transaction has been well documented and people like me i'm a massive jason isabel fan so for me jason is now a part of red eyes uh history yeah exactly absolutely you know uh gibson custom shop built him a clone to to take out on on the road and everything but you know i'm 32 years old i was born in 1990 i'm one of these people i was not around when zeppelin was cutting records and putting out stuff i don't remember when you know hey jude came out my parents were in middle school in high school and that stuff was and they weren't even listening that stuff my parents were listening to funk and r b and soul music from the time but i found that music in the early to mid 2000s on my own before youtube before social media really i found that music and it connected with me in a way that was completely organic and that is my sound as a guitar player that is my voice those are the people i look up to and i think that will continue to happen for future generations it's interesting this conversation is actually i'm sitting here realizing it's almost a conversation of are you typical is right it's 32 years old you're not typical right but there's no but the thing about how atypical is he that's very strange there's a lot of people though are we still talking about the guitar thing yeah yeah i mean i'm weird i'm not gonna deny that but there's a lot of people like me there's a lot of young people like me that like the stuff that they we look up to these bands we look up to these artists um and i think we always will because the art that they made was so good that it will stand the test of time i mean that's really what we're talking about that's the part yeah so i don't i don't disagree with any of this and i own plenty of vintage equipment right yeah but all my stuff is player grade yeah from the amplifiers everything it's all guitar the guitars i don't care about right you know if it needs a refret it's dave's going to refret it the stuff has to play because ultimately these are just tools right well that's a different discussion the difference between a collector and a player right right i'm the same way i just say i'll go back to the thing you put this stuff up on reverb and and see what it's worth you put a 59 les paul up there put a burst up there people do people do people do right and how much money do they get for them do they get i mean it varies on the guitar and it also like especially with a burst it's all about the top right if you want the big money it better be just crazy you know which most of them weren't so most of them were at best maybe medium flamed at best right and so you're thinking you know with with like 17 18 hour guitars you may you might have maybe 6 700 that were out you know really nice or considered outstanding the best ones there's a handful and they're already spoken for they've been in collections forever and they get traded between collectors because those guitars actually have names and they know who owned them and the tops are insane and you know so well i thought it was really funny you were talking about you had a guitar that was put back to a goal top yeah yeah because it was it was a yeah it was it was a it was an offset 52 that somebody had stripped and and um and the top was nice but it was offset yeah it was flamed when it was offset and um of course keith told me he said well i should have painted it red to make it look like harrison and i was like oh yeah like so i i took it back to a gold top i had a restorative top friend of mine did it and um it's funny because that guitar you know i had that guitar when i was 12 years old i bought that at a show with my dad an 83 or 84. wow and um you know it was a player great guitar then and i couldn't afford a 58-59 les paul my dad we had two of them in the 70s and we had sold both of them and even in the 70s those guitars were hard to find it wasn't even like you know it wasn't like you just opened up a paper oh there's a 59 burst yeah it's like man you had to beat the bushes to find it well it's like the story the red told where he's played four of the carters over time yeah and only one was the combination of a nice top right that's a really nice top but then that's attached to a really amazing piece of mahogany because that's really where most of the resonance is coming from is that mahogany neck that you know and then as we all know they were all handmade guitars so everyone was different every neck was different they're all different but see i'm i'm i guess atypical in that i could care less about the top in fact with maple guitars i i don't like flaming maple guitars at all i want them either but i want the most you should sit over here i mean i'm not i don't i can go either way with it but it's um you know sonically there's no yeah but that's that's the thing to me is like i i could have cared less what that guitar looked like it could have been painted you know safety cone yellow for all i cared it sounded and played unbelievably well and it did it was like the purest the way the best way i could describe it it was like the purest form of les paul that i've ever ever had a chance it's like that okay that's now the the yardstick to judge every other les paul by is that one that i played at carter yeah um and i would go so far as to say that every guitar whether it's a vintage guitar or not we talked about this the other day i i don't hit the guitar very hard you hit it much harder than i do you hit it even harder yet yeah so the three guitars that would be perfect for each of the guitars would be perfect are three very different guitars right definitely so that's another whole thing it's not just that this is an exceptional les paul it was a really great less ball for the way you play right um and that's another whole thing i think in the future there will be enough people around who are into these things that it will keep the values up i'm in agreement if as long as the music's around that was around when they were hot they will never die and it but now we talked about the player grade the player grade stuff will will be in major flux because at that point yeah buy a reissue because it's just about the same thing right now so you know but the but the super clean high-end stuff those will always bring money they've never failed yet honestly and i've seen it in the last 40 years i mean i remember one burst for three grand so sure and that was a lot of money that was should have bought him oh we did well and i sold him right in the recent van halen video i tell the story where he said he bought two from norm 259 and he's embarrassed to say he spent 10 grand yeah yeah well hold on someone in the comments can do the math so what year would that have been uh 80 was that was 1980 80. all right so whatever 10 000 was in 1980. we'll get back to everybody with that yeah i'm curious to see what people think yeah that's right um if these values will well at the end of the day i mean it no matter how great a guitar you have it's not going to make you a better player physically but it might help you mentally but that's right that's really where it's at though there you go so yeah and at the end of the day play whatever makes you happy but there you go uh you but my signature guitar you probably should check yeah yeah yeah and if it does it's a sound investment yeah and if it doesn't call him later and say hey well don't call rick because we started this on the darkest possible note when keith and rick are gone yeah yeah yeah worth anything yes right yeah really nice yeah yeah that's a wrap well uh thank you guys for hanging out and thanks of course thanks for dinner thank you dinner tilly yeah thank you tilly for filming thank you penny for being such a great such a good such a good girl go subscribe to five watt world let's get him over two hundred thousand yeah tonight um right yeah rick is fine he's got enough subscribers follow uh dave on instagram yeah follow dave on instagram uh dojo guitar repair and uh subscribe here if you haven't already thank you guys so much for watching and uh let's do this again cool yeah definitely thank you you

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 326,817

Keywords: rick beato, rhett shull, les paul, vintage guitars, five watt world, Dave Onorato

Id: 3FEDRzSNINg

Length: 32min 4sec (1924 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022