The 2020 Collection Part 1: You can't lock a good guitar down

Until 2002, I never bought a guitar without playing it first. And the time honoured method of actually going into a shop, taking it down from the wall and plugging in (unless it’s an acoustic) still holds good, at least under normal circumstances. Nevertheless, the last eighteen years have seen my guitar-buying move increasingly online: in most cases this was simply an expedient, as there was no other way of acquiring certain instruments, short of international travel.

The internet as a mass market phenomenon was less than a decade old, and ebay even younger when I made my first tentative online purchase, from that selfsame web platform. It was a mid-60s Eko Florentine, an obscure, small-bodied model with twin pointed horns and two pickups. The cost was a shade over £200, so the stakes weren’t too high if it turned out to be a scam. Any such fears were rapidly allayed when it turned up. A turning point had been reached, and over successive years, I turned increasingly to online sources in search of instruments.

When the first lockdown arrived in March 2020, guitar shops, like all other retailers, closed their doors. But with so much trade being done online, most if not all instrument retailers chose to remain open for internet sales, with a few enterprising businesses even offering drop-off facilities for those wishing to sell or trade guitars and other gear. Even so, there was a notable drop-off in the stock levels of second-hand instruments available from UK dealers.

As late as February 2020, I visited the Birmingham Guitar Show with a friend – the virus was already spreading, but had yet to make inroads outside a few isolated cases in the South East. This was to be my last encounter with ‘real world’ guitar sales for the forseeable future – until the time of writing this piece, in fact. My last ‘real world’ purchase was made the same day: a Squier Bass VI, from PMT in Birmingham. Somewhat portentously, it was leap day: February 29...

With so many uncertainties in the air, and the shops closed for normal business, I expected 2020 to be a quiet year for guitar buying. In fact, it ended up quite the reverse. The first guitar to arrive under wartime conditions (as it were) was an early 1960s Rosetti-branded ‘Solid 7’ made by the Dutch Egmond company: not an instrument I held out any hope for as a player, but which turned out to have a surprisingly snarly tone when coupled with the right amp and settings. I liked it so much, I bought another within weeks, this second example being the slightly ‘up market’ Sheerline Seven, a replacement for a duff example I already owned. So far, so good...

In April, I made the modest purchase of a Squier Strat, in 60s spec with a shell pink finish, reminiscent of the very first Strat I ever saw in a guitar shop, and having taken delivery, I told myself that was it for 2020. The Strat, like all modern Squier guitars, was of surprisingly high quality for such a budget instrument, and sounded to my ears more authentically vintage than the American example I’d owned for ten years. But that really was it... there would be no more purchases...

... until June. This time, it was a Burns TR2, vintage 1964: and in a real test of how far I could push the guitar buying boat under lockdown, it came all the way from Amsterdam (you can read the full story in the next post). This being a more serious financial commitment, I really thought there would be no more for the forseeable future...

Then, in early June, on Reverb (increasingly my go-to online source for vintage guitars), I chanced upon a very rare old British guitar in the form of the Broadway BWII... as detailed in an earlier post. Surely there was nothing else on the horizon? I was wrong, of course, and the same month yielded a 1962 Gretsch Country Gentleman that I simply could not turn down under any circumstances...

But that was surely the limit. Or rather it would have been, if it weren’t for the unmissable discount that Guitarguitar were offering on D’Angelico’s slightly eccentric ‘Ludlow’ model (and who in their right mind names an electric guitar after a market town in Shropshire?) The ‘Premier’ model, with a normal retail price of £699 was reduced to £299, which in the world of guitar buying is tantamount to giving it away for nothing. I’d fancied the model since trying one out in late 2018, and it was duly ordered, arriving in early July. And that was most definitely that...

Only, it wasn’t. In the world of guitar collecting, there’s always one more model to come. In this case, a bass rather than a guitar (and for reasons I’ve never quite fathomed, nobody seems to collect vintage basses in the way they do guitars, or get quite as misty-eyed about them). I’d previously owned an example of Yamaha’s decidedly original ‘Flying Samurai’ bass, bought cheaply off ebay in 2009. This first example had had its electrics replaced with a Jazz/Precision bass style setup, but it played well, despite a few issues with neck relief. It had gone in a trade a few years back, and as ever it was one of those departures that one comes to regret in retrospect. All of my ‘working’ (ie. studio) basses are semi-acoustics, with sometimes questionable intonation, and I’d been searching the listings of Andertons in Guildford, on the lookout for something new, perhaps one of Fender’s Vintera series. Then, in their ‘retro basses’ category, I spotted a real rarity: another ‘Samurai’ bass (or, more prosaically, model SGB-5a), this time in the very rare pearlescent white finish, genuinely lightly reliced as befits an instrument of 53 years vintage, and unmodified. It’s just turned up, in its original blue-lined Yamaha case, bringing 2020’s total to nine instruments.

That said, it is still only mid-December... Merry Xmas everyone!