Guitar Collecting

Following on from the last post about the tragic loss of vintage guitars in the Nashville floods, Chris Spann from moneysupermarket.com has written this guest post to alert us all to the importance of making sure we keep the insurance up to date on all our treasured and valuable possessions, not just our guitars!

Have you ever spent a little bit too much on a guitar? Every collector probably has at one time or another; it kind of goes with the territory – along with casually changing the subject every time someone asks you how much you’ve spent on your new axe.

But imagine what would happen if that guitar was damaged in some way, or stolen: As well as the sentimental value, you could potentially be left out of pocket to the tune of hundreds, or even thousands of pounds.

Be honest, when you add another guitar to the collection, do you update your home insurance? If you only buy two guitars in a year that could see your collection’s value increase by £1000 or more, and before you know it you’ve got an awful lot of money’s worth of wood and wire hanging around your house.

It’s also worth finding out what your single item limit is on your home insurance; the last thing you need is to lose a prized instrument only to find that your provider won’t cover the full cost in repayment.

There are a number of things you can do to keep the cost down when you’re buying insurance as well; here are just a few things to consider:

• Fit five lever mortice locks and consider changing the locks – if your house has previous owners, you don’t know who might have a key.
• Fit smoke alarms and give up smoking – both of these things can decrease your premiums by a noticeable amount.
• Join a neighbourhood watch scheme – this can reduce your premiums by up to 5%
• Install security lighting and a NACOSS approved alarm – these will also help to slash the cost of your insurance.

Obviously, things like this aren’t only good for keeping your premiums down; they’re also great for making sure your prized collection of gear doesn’t end up in the wrong hands as well. Most thieves are opportunists, and as such a security light or clearly visible alarm sounder box on an exterior wall can make them think twice about trying your home, which is often enough to keep your possessions safe.

Too many people do not adequately cover their homes, which can make an already difficult time (dealing with the aftermath of a fire, or burglary, for example) all the harder when their provider refuses to pay up for possessions they have lost. Don’t let yourself fall into this trap, and check your cover.

Brad Paisley is one of hundreds of Nashville’s top stars, working musicians and tour support company owners who lost what will likely be millions of dollars in gear due the historic floods in Nashville.

Paisley is one of an estimated 1,000 musicians and business owners who house gear at Soundcheck Nashville, a storage rental hub in an industrial park down by the Cumberland River. Owner Ben Jumper said the 160,000 square feet of space he rents out is all flooded and the losses will be in the tens of millions. The storage facility is full of classroom-sized “lockers” used to store gear.

Keith Urban lost his gear. Friends say Vince Gill may have lost most of his entire guitar collection, including irreplaceable vintage pieces with historic value. A tractor-trailer full of LeAnn Rimes’ road gear is also probably under 3 1/2 to 8 feet of water, her guitarist Ryan Wariner said.

Wariner is trying to be optimistic, but there’s not a lot of reason for hope.

“Everything that I use but two guitars is in there — pedals, amps, speakers, mics, front house consoles, everything was in there,” said Wariner, son of Grammy-winning country artist Steve Wariner.

Another major Soundcheck client was the recently opened Musicians Hall of Fame, which stored historic instruments donated by dozens of top players, not only within the country music world, but from rock, R&B, soul and jazz players.

Joe Chambers, founder and chief executive of the Musicians Hall of Fame, which just opened a year ago, is distraught over the losses, but acknowledges that it could have been worse. “So many people lost the pillow they lay their head on at night, much less a guitar. But the fact is, a lot of historical instruments were stored at Soundcheck.”

Among those donated to the hall of fame were a Fender Stratocaster that belonged to Jimi Hendrix, a Gibson Les Paul played by the Who’s Peter Townshend, and one of Johnny Cash’s guitars.

“We had two of Lightning Chance’s basses — he’s somebody a lot of people don’t know about,” Chambers said, “He played at the Grand Ole Opry alongside Chet Atkins, Patsy Cline, Hank [Williams] Sr., the Everly Brothers. Both those basses just fell apart. One of them was used on Hank Sr.’s very last recording session — that’s the bass that’s heard on ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart.'”

Associated Press

I found this interesting little article yesterday; A subject close to my heart as I have a fair few “famous” guitar picks from my time working at Wembley Arena in the early 1980’s.

Unfortunately, many were unbranded, and over the years I have forgotten who owned what – It’s a shame that Angus Young and George Benson both favoured identical picks! I do have a few nice ones though; Rick Nielson from Cheap Trick, JY and Chuck from Styx, and a cool one that says “misplaced by Mick Jones” from Foreigner.

Here’s the article…

If you’ve ever wondered what all those guys were doing, eyes cast down, shuffling their tired feet, milling about at the front of the stage after Van Halen were safely in their buses and on the way to the next city… well, they were probably looking for guitar picks. Collecting custom imprinted picks is a collector craze that is still in its infancy but growing. Scott Roderick from www.swag.com, the biggest pick retailer in the world, thinks it’s catching on quicker than James Hetfield’s pick-clutching right hand.

“Guitar-pick collecting started off as a very cult-ish hobby and probably started gaining credibility somewhere around the mid-80s,” said Roderick. “A lot of stuff isn’t documented. Once again, it’s still somewhat a new hobby. But actual signature guitar picks, from bands, really started probably in the late ’70s, with bands like Van Halen. These old white on tortoise, or block black print on white are some of your earlier styles. And there were a few, Ted Nugent, I believe, had one, J. Geils; there were a handful of acts. But generally they’re block-type prints, very plain-looking. It’s the same as with backstage passes. You look at the old backstage passes, and there aren’t a lot of graphics. Basically it’s somebody’s stamp; not very graphically pleasing. But those are some of the first ones.

So generally they were white print or black print with the name of the band. But yeah, one guy looks at another and says, ‘Oh man, you’ve got your name printed on a pick; that’s cool.’ And one picks it up and then another picks it up, and before you know it, there are a lot of picks out there. And then some time in the early ’80s, you started seeing different colors, band logos, signatures printed on them, different materials.”

“There are really just a handful of companies who actually make these for the bands, one being Jim Dunlop, also D’Addario, D’Andrea,” explained Scott, when asked about print runs of something like a guitar pick. “Those of the three major players. There have been others who’ve come and gone…. plus Ernie Ball was in it for a time. They don’t even have records or samples of something that they printed 20 years ago. Nobody ever thought — and I’m speaking for them; they would be the ones to really ask to get the best answer — but they didn’t even think that this would be something people would think about collecting.

It’s really been since the mid-80s that somebody really started to go for this. I always like to use the analogy: Remember when we were kids and we took baseball cards and put them in the spokes of our bikes, or glued them into our books? Exactly. Well, now, nobody would ever think of doing that. So that’s my analogy with guitar picks. Nobody thought of these things as collectible. So there weren’t good records kept.”

Emphasizing the fact that the history can be lost, Scott said, “There have been times where you go backstage and you show an artist 60 different picks. ‘Look, I’m a collector, and here are all your picks.’ Sometimes they don’t even remember some of them. A lot of them grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. [laughs] And a lot of times, the guitar techs are responsible for specifications, and if that particular guitar tech is no longer with the band, some of the history goes away with that person.”

Goldminemag.com

I don’t know…I have very mixed feelings about birds playing guitars!

Trained as a musician and composer, French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways. His installation for The Curve will take the form of a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other instruments and objects. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a captivating, live soundscape.

The Barbican, London

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Just go to the Apple app store (direct from your phone or from Apple’s website) and search for “guitar collecting”.

Download the free app and then you can read the RSS feed of all our latest postings, and click through to the full article on the Guitar Collecting website.

We hope you like it..please tell all your iphone-owning guitarist friends, and leave us some feedback and comments about your thoughts!

I found this great story by Eric Dahl on the Guitar Center blog, so I thought I’d pass it on;

I’m one of those people that is always in search of the next cool guitar so I frequent all of the Las Vegas pawn shops, music stores, Craig’s List and of course Ebay. I’m also an avid reader of several musician magazines including Vintage Guitar Magazine, Premier Guitar and Guitar Player, which help keep me current on vintage and new guitar gear.

This all began back on September 10th when I was contacted by a pawn shop that I had bought several other guitars from in the past, about a Lucille they had for sale and wondered if I would be interested.

Being a huge fan of BB King of course I was. On the phone they told me it was an 80th Birthday Lucille model which I had never heard of! So I started doing research with anyone and everyone I knew that could help me out. I found out from Gibson, that 80 of them were created for BB King’s 80th Birthday in 2006 and that they sold new for almost $10,000.

Each one was issued with a letter from BB King also and only 44 were sold in the US. As you can imagine I was pretty hyped up. When I got to the pawnshop I was disappointed to find that the guitar had been gigged hard, was covered in filth, had pick scratches and even some small dents from being played. The shop would not budge on the price. It did not have certificates and the case wasn’t the original. I flipped the guitar over and looked at the headstock expecting to see the standard serial numbers. To my surprise “Prototype 1” was stamped just below where the headstock serial should be. I figured this was a fake or a really cool piece that had once been approved by BB King then given away to a fellow musician, friend of the family or relative.

Of course I bought it and took it home and cleaned on it for a few hours trying to buff off the grime and scratches, oiled the fret board and put on new strings. That is when my research really began. I couldn’t find anything about the 80th model in my Gibson or Gruhn reference books, just a few stray articles on the web. I contacted Walter Carter, the author of numerous guitar reference books and part of Gruhn Guitars in Nashville; he had no idea and had never seen a stamp like that on back of a guitar.

Then I contacted my Guitar Center friends here in Las Vegas and in LA, still no idea. Even sent pictures to Wally Marx, writer for Vintage guitar and Premier Guitar, and he had no idea. So I went back to Gibson customer service and played e-mail tag with Bob Burns for two months trying to find out if this was a prototype, if so did BB play and approve it, who built it, and how much it was worth? I was pretty much at my wits end and was ready to give up the quest. One day I was doing a guitar search on the web for a different guitar and found a contact with Blue Book Publications. It ends up he’s the owner of the company, Zachary Fjestad, super nice guy and flipped him pictures of my 80th Lucille.

He sent me more information than anybody else did all the way from Minneapolis, Minnesota their corporate headquarters! I kept bugging Gibson every week too and my contact told me that he had a guy there at the custom shop that knew something about my guitar and he was going to call me.

Finally on November 9th I get a call from Pat Foley, he is the Gibson Artist Relations Director out of Nashville. I assumed he was calling me up to give me some juicy details on the guitar and did he ever. First off he asked me if I still had the guitar here in the United States, which kind of seemed odd to me since where else would I keep it? Then I started asking him a series of questions as well.

It ends up the guitar was stolen from BB King, the beginning of summer 2009. The guitar had been presented to BB in 2005 by Gibson for his 80th birthday present in Los Angeles. Also this was Mr. King’s main gigging guitar for the last four years and he was so upset when it was stolen that he asked the Gibson Custom shop to make him as close a replica as possible.

Mr. King’s people and Gibson were very pleased that I did not try and sell this to a collector in Japan and that I was more than willing to return it to Mr. King the rightful owner. In appreciation BB and his Assistant, Lavern Toney worked with Gibson to have a guitar present for our meeting on November 30th at 3pm yesterday. Mr. King exceeded my expectations with his friendly greeting. He kept thanking me and shaking my hand and was so happy to get his Birthday present back that was stolen from him.

I got the experience of a lifetime to meet Mr. King in person and talk to him for 45 minutes. Plus he signed a Lucille to me, gave me some BB guitar picks to use and signed my BB King Treasures book. He wants of a copy of our picture together to put up at his office. I’m just happy that I was able to return a prized guitar to one of my guitar idols and inspirations so he can continue to give joy to so many other blues fans around the world!