I thinned the herd down to near extinction.

[gearbasher]

Well, I shipped out my last "culled" guitar, today:

I went from this:

[gearbasher]

And this:

[gearbasher]

To this:

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

12 down to 2. Damn. I sold off all my electrics after Henry was forced off the thrown. I'm down to 6 acoustic and one electric bass.

Hope you made a nice chunk of change.

Edited January 13, 2021 by Sgt. Pepper

[Brucebubs]

The two 'G's'.

[E-minor7]

56 minutes ago, gearbasher said:

To this:

 

Quite a cut.

                                                                                                                                                         May they last long and serve you well. 

[Dave F]

I'm going through the same process. How painful was it? After the first dozen or so I started going numb. I'l probably stop a little sooner than you did.

[RBSinTo]

Never understood the need to have "the whole set", but different strokes.........

I drew the line at four guitars, ( two dreadnoughts, an acoustic parlour with a removeable pick-up, and an ES style knock-off ) and that works well for me. My wife doesn't complain, they don't take a ton of space, and all my musical needs are covered. And I'l likely dispose of them in my will.

RBSinTo

[dhanners623]

My guess: Once it sinks in, you won't miss them. Fewer guitars to worry about. Besides, the music is in YOU, not the guitars. And even if it were in the guitars, you've still got two REALLY NICE GUITARS.

[gearbasher]

I haven't been  playing much. I was spending more time humidifying than playing. The Martin D-60 and the Gibson SJ-45 Deluxe were the hardest to part with. They were just too pretty.  I'll be selling my house soon and downsizing. I want to move as little stuff as possible, even though I'm staying in the local area. I was going to keep  what I considered the three best sounding guitars, but my J-45 Rosewood developed a crack at the head stock, so off it went.

Edited January 13, 2021 by gearbasher

[Sgt. Pepper]

You had me at D-60.

Edited January 13, 2021 by Sgt. Pepper

[E-minor7]

2 hours ago, E-minor7 said:

                                                                                                                                                   May they last long and serve you well. 

P.S. - Don't sell sofa and cushions. The set rocks !

[BigKahune]

Damn, drastic.  Hope those remorse bugs don't start crawling.

I'll probably get to that at some point (26 😎), but not yet.

 .

[zombywoof]

When we moved from MS to KS I talked with the moving company about having to pack up a bunch of guitars.  They said no problem as they had recently moved the Waylon Jennings estate and still had a truck with a room built specifically to haul guitars. 

But you did better than I when I decided the time was right for a purge.  I managed to shed five but eventually replaced two.      I have offered up another four but while I have a small dealer interested he wants to wait a bit to see if the world settles down.  

 

Edited January 14, 2021 by zombywoof

[Dave F]

This past year sold 28, gained 5, standing at 26 , want to get down to 6 (plus a few cheap sentimental ones)

Getting harder to pick which ones to keep. Thinking the L5, Super 400 and J45 Legend are next. Very nice but I just don't play them.

[ksdaddy]

I'm accepting the fact that the guitars that inspire me to play and bring out my best aren't the ones I expected. There's some cheap guitars here that really keep my attention for a long time and some very expensive ones that leave me cold. There are some illusions of a lifetime that are being shattered but I won't fight it.

I don't need the money, I don't really need the room, and the price of used stuff isn't about to go down, so I may just hold off any major culls. The unused ones can sit for a spell.

 

[BluesKing777]

 

I have a few I intend to move but it is a bit tricky with the virus.......the shop I like to consign with has been struggling to get stock after being picked clean in the ‘buy guitars rush’. I assume lots of those will get sold once people realise it is actually hard work, but here we are now in some kind of lull....the musical chairs seemed to have stopped and........

 

BluesKing777.

 

[E-minor7]

5 hours ago, ksdaddy said:

I don't need the money, I don't really need the room, and the price of used stuff isn't about to go down, so I may just hold off any major culls. The unused ones can sit for a spell.

Guess the brass tr-covered 1964 Southern Jumbo stays where it belongs. 

[BoSoxBiker]

Congrats on your purges, everyone. It's tough to do.

[j45nick]

I'm a bit of a hoarder by nature. Realistically, I only play  four or at most 5 of my guitars. In the case of mahogany slope-Js, I have three that are more or less these same, but I keep them in different tunings for different purposes.

That's a bit lazy.

Other guitars that I never or rarely play I only keep because at the time I bought them, they meant something to me. That's a pretty feeble excuse when you think about it.

On the other hand, I recently gave away a perfectly good almost 20-year-old car that I haven't driven in three years, even though I still paid the insurance and registration on it. 

I struggle to let go of things, even when it makes sense to do so.

For about 40 years, I made do with a single guitar (well, maybe two if you count my travel guitar), in part because I could not justify spending the money on more guitars. Late in my career, I got to the point where I could indulge myself, and I did.

Now, I've sold off a couple, and every day play the game of "which one goes next?" 

[zombywoof]

10 hours ago, ksdaddy said:

I'm accepting the fact that the guitars that inspire me to play and bring out my best aren't the ones I expected. There's some cheap guitars here that really keep my attention for a long time and some very expensive ones that leave me cold. There are some illusions of a lifetime that are being shattered but I won't fight it.

I don't need the money, I don't really need the room, and the price of used stuff isn't about to go down, so I may just hold off any major culls. The unused ones can sit for a spell.

 

 

Tell me about it.  I have as much and sometimes more of a problem bringing myself to part with a Harmony or a Kay as I do a Gibson.  Of the 5 I let go of (which included two Gibsons) the only one I truly regretted  parting with was a Kay K24.  But it was needed to seal the deal.

[cunningham26]

These threads are great to see every now and again to remind me that while the family pics and NGD are fun, even the die hards are willing to admit that usually they're not giving equal time to an entire herd

[Jinder]

There is a purity to thinning down the herd...the zen life. I love the Maple J45 you decided to keep, is that one of the Big Leaf run?

A lot of my instruments went last year out of necessity to survive, given over 170 gig bookings were lost to Covid. I went down from 16 to 7, but have crept back up to 9 now with the purchase of my Sigma CF-100 copy and a little Harley Benton tenor, both of which have proven to be massively helpful in terms of getting my hands working again after several months of illness and a lengthy hospital stay...I have had extensive joint pain and grip strength problems, so a tenor guitar and a short scale parlour with 11s are a great deal easier to wrangle than my big Gibsons with "grown up" strings at present!

The current herd:

'67 J45

'95 Dove

'03 Takamine EAN20C

'05 Hummingbird 12 string

'15 SJ200 Standard

'16 AJ Flame Deluxe

'16 Squier VM Jazz Bass

'20 Sigma LGMC-SG100F (CF-100 copy)

'20 Harley Benton CLT20S Tenor

 

I've played SJ200s for many years and it's the guitar that I'm most commonly associated with. When I was struggling desperately last year after suddenly losing the entire tour to support my then-new album 'The Silver Age', I had no option but to put it up for sale...a consortium of several hundred people who have followed my work for a long time (I can't bring myself to use the term "fans"!) bought the guitar from me collectively and returned it to me to use. I have never been more astonished by such an indiscriminate gesture of kindness, and will treasure that guitar for the rest of my life. 

Edited January 14, 2021 by Jinder
Adding info I omitted from original post

[gearbasher]

Nice story about the SJ200.

The maple J45 is a Flamed Maple LTD. I don't know how many were made. I've seen 4 others on-line (I believe another member here has one). All of the other ones I've seen  have ebony boards and bridges. Mine's rosewood.  

[Jinder]

18 minutes ago, gearbasher said:

Nice story about the SJ200.

The maple J45 is a Flamed Maple LTD. I don't know how many were made. I've seen 4 others on-line (I believe another member here has one). All of the other ones I've seen  have ebony boards and bridges. Mine's rosewood.  

What year is the J45? I fell in love with Maple slopes after playing a Maple J45 in a Glasgow guitar shop in 2008. It just rang and chimed...pleased my ears and hands in every imaginable way.

 

I never managed to capture a Maple J45 of my own, but eight years later, I played a Maple AJ in the same store and fell in love with that even harder...took me a year to get the funds together to buy one, and spent a lot of 2017 searching for one, as they were a limited run and sold fast. The Glasgow one was gone, so found one in Ireland which sold before I could buy a ferry ticket. Mike Lewis found one in Paris which sold in an afternoon, and the trail went cold...eventually I tracked mine down all the way across the ocean at Wildwood in Colorado. Absolutely glorious instrument which still makes my heart leap whenever I pick it up.

I'd still like to add a Maple J45 to my stable at some point. Lovely guitars.