Jump to content
Gibson Brands Forums

cunningham26

Members
  • Posts

    887
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    2

cunningham26 last won the day on August 9 2023

cunningham26 had the most liked content!

Reputation

94 Good

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Not Telling
  • Location
    Boston

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

  1. I wouldnt bat an eye at a natural finish if it played and felt like a '68- if anything they get confused with double-x braced and priced pretty low, but sound every bit as good as a 66-68
  2. I think by '66 everything was already 1 9/16th. i've never seen a factory natural headstock on something before 68 or so, and the serials are totally inconsistent. it's like they had numbered necks in a big barrel from 66-70 and they just pulled them randomly
  3. If it has the brown headstock, it's likely '69 as that started showing up with Norlin along with the engraved "J-45" TRC. However that doesn't immediately make it a double-braced boat anchor Norlin- these things aren't hard and fast and you can tell just by picking it up whether it's 70s style or more 60s style with the later appointments. to answer your question though, yes the natural headstock doesn't show up until sometime in 68-69 and then through the 70s
  4. if you google "guitar center used" you can also search their nationwide used inventory. They have a few of these but they don't seem to be priced any better that Guitar Chimp, which seems to be priced to market. in terms of authenticity i see no issues- that cherry sunburst is really hard to pull off and a fake is really easy to spot- they kind of just look like epiphone hummingbirds with a gibson headstock
  5. FWIW i have one of the 150th zephyrs from indonesia and the quality is impeccable!
  6. yea my guess is you just may prefer the sound of mahogany back and sides and the slope shoulder more than a jumbo with maple. definitely check out the IBG Hummingbird, it seems to be the best of that IBG bunch. For as much as I love epiphones it seems like J200s just need to be a very certain Gibson thing (and like 10x the cost) otherwise you're just buying it for the aesthetic. as for strings i was a big fan of martin phosphor bronze for years and years on my epiphone hummingbird and then my gibson j45. I just switched to John Pearse strings and they're really something else. worth the extra few bucks! good luck!
  7. lotta good advice here. J200s for as large as they are aren't particularly loud guitars- a dread or slope shoulder guitar is going to project maybe a bit more than a jumbo. especially a poly finished fresh-wood epiphone, im not surprised you're finding it to be a little muted. over time as it ages and as it is played, it will develop more character, but it's not as pronounced as their gibson counterparts with better quality components and nitro settling in faster.
  8. ok but you're still hung up on old being a requirement here and what im trying to get across is that it is not, even if "most people" in the guitar world are of that mindset. Lloyd Loar Master Models were sought out in the 40s by Bill Monroe et al because they were superior instruments, not because they were old and superior only to the contemporary instruments being produced. Picture a circle within a circle, the smaller one being Old and the larger one being Quality. that, in my humble opinion, is vintage, even if most people wrongly associate vintage dominantly with "old" as a tactic to sell their junk. if you wanted to get the most money out of your 30 year old sneakers, my guess is you'd find a way to spin them as "Vintage 90s Sauconys EX+ condition RARE color"
  9. you said it yourself that it's relative. most people are like you and think old = vintage that's why you see listings for VINTAGE 1974 EPIPHONE JAPAN. what i'm saying is that there are spans of time where conditions were such that the guitars made are truly different and while for the most part those spans are in the distant past, it's not exclusively in the distant past
  10. yea but saying vintage is only if it's older than you is totally arbitrary and age still aint nothing but a number
  11. if someone's trying to sell me a 70s bolt on epiphone acoustic telling me it's vintage because it's 50-something years old, that's not going to fly with me
  12. a 1993 bozeman acoustic is thirty years old this year! when jimmy page was playing on House of the Holy his 1959 les paul was only thirteen years old. Keith's hummingbird was a 1965 and was recorded in 1968. Dylan's J50 was a 46 and fourteen years later he was playing coffeehouses. until he switched to an old nick lucas.
  13. this is kind of the rub of it all- i see vintage in a true form of the word, with wine as the basis- you can have a vintage year from two years ago if conditions were just right to create something really wonderful that's then desired for a long time thereafter. So example the early Bozeman acoustics I would consider vintage because Ren was at the helm with something to prove, was semi-involved in the production, and there seem to have been somewhat limited numbers. fifty years from now I think we'll look at those as really desirable guitars as opposed to the millions of J45 standards made in the era that are fine but not truly vintage. you see it now- a 1929 L1 archtop isn't very desirable and can be had pretty easily. a 1930 L2 can be a five-figure guitar. It all depends on which ones have the magic.
  14. pre-1969 are generally vintage but they are now over 50 years old and with Gibson it all depends on the little specs and then the life it lived. i've played some dogs from 1955 priced to market, and played some really killer off years. modern era, i think the early bozeman stuff will get really valuable, stuff that Ren was actively involved in. Interesting custom shop stuff, just basically higher quality from the start will age and gain value over the factory line stuff. Depending on how they break in, i could see the Murphy Labs getting really hot too
  15. They're all in the Gibson shop but brace yourself for sticker shock and pray Sgt. Pepper doesn't find this thread. It seems really weird that this designer is all about american iconography and style, particularly that in the american south, but all the actual pieces are made overseas. I wouldnt pay $600 for a western shirt but certainly wouldnt pay that for a western shirt made in china alongside a levis shirt that retails at a tenth the cost.
×
×
  • Create New...