Earn Your Dings
If you play guitar or have ever shopped for one somewhat thoroughly, you know that there’s a huge market for cosmetically aged guitars.
That is, you can go to the guitar store and buy one that looks like it’s from the ‘60s. That looks like somebody’s played it, smoked on it, and defecated on it every day of their life. And it’s showing the battle scars.
The idea is that you get the look and feel of something old but have something brand new.
Hilariously, there’s a whole cult—thousands of people on the internet who argue about what good aging is or bad aging is.
I call them pretend-aged guitars.
I don’t like it. I think it’s dumb.
It’s a way to make a $1,000 guitar cost $5,000. Because there are all these levels of aging, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I’m reminded of this because I bought a Precision Bass that’s dated 2005, and it sat in a closet. So, literally unused. Somebody took it out for a day or two.
The guy I bought it from said he was selling it for a friend, but now that I look back, it was probably him, maybe just a little embarrassed. He never touched it.
Whatever.
It was in climate-controlled storage, so it’s in as-new shape.
But I will say, the only bump that’s on it—which is on every single beginner-style instrument, which this would have been, although I would argue it’s not, but that’s another post—is at the end of the headstock, where the tuners are.
You can clearly see where—when taken off, someone’s hit the ceiling with it, there on the very end.
They’re long. It happens.
Every single one of these beginner instruments has a ceiling knock or a chunk taken out of the headstock because it went into the ceiling fan.
Every single one.
And I’d say almost every single guitar, if you’ve owned it for more than a year, you’ve hit the ceiling with it.
But not one single one of these pretend-aged guitars ever has that mark on it.
And you know it, because it’s a big white mark on the end of the guitar.
Think about that.
Not a single one.
So they age them, and they go on and on about realism, but they don’t get real.
You’ve got to earn your stripes in music. You can’t buy them.