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Which era Gibsons are considered "vintage" nowadays?


Hannu

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What is considered a "vintage" Gibson guitar these days? I remember reading on this forum many years ago, that a vintage Gibson is only a so called pre-Norlin guitar, built before 1969.
Certainly,  guitars made before 1969 fetch higher prices, though maybe only for being more "collectible" than guitars otherwise almost as old, similar design, similar quality, sometimes better.
Those businesses and individual who actually sell old guitars, don't seem to care, you see a lot of much newer Gibsons advertised as "vintage", all the way to 1990's.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

This is a highly controversial topic, based on discussions I've seen on other forums.  My own opinion is that historically, pre-Norlin is accurate.  That is based on the history of Gibson's manufacturing quality during the 60's and 70's, and the way it shaped the used guitar market in the last few decades of the 20th century.  As you say, perceptions have changed (for various reasons) for some people, including people who don't understand the full history or were not around when the vintage market took shape.  Basically, opinions in the internet and social media world have now distorted what used to be generally understood.  So we have a 'free for all' in terms of the meaning of the term.  Oh well, the market will carry on...

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  • 7 months later...

The shift from Brazilian rosewood seems to be the line for Martin.  I would probably use the shift to the belly down bridge in 68/69 for Gibson.  It really  shouldn’t be a stagnant line though.  Cars become “antique” after a specified number of years and guitars should be treated the same IMO.

Edited by pcf
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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

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32 minutes ago, cunningham26 said:

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

I assume you're just talking Electric? I collect only acoustics (flattops and archtops), i consider only '40's and older to be vintage. 50's starts to resemble modern eras in design, manufacturing technique, wood availability, other materials and suppliers, etc.

 

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18 hours ago, pawlowski6132 said:

I assume you're just talking Electric? I collect only acoustics (flattops and archtops), i consider only '40's and older to be vintage. 50's starts to resemble modern eras in design, manufacturing technique, wood availability, other materials and suppliers, etc.

 

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. 

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That's a good point which begs the question does vintage just mean old? It sounds like you are saying no.

However, I do think that is a component and I would say that vintage means it is old (whatever that means, see my definition above) AND great.

 

To which I would say those Bozeman acoustic you're mentioning could be great but I would not call them vintage because they are not great AND old.

To me the term vintage suggests a bygone era of which today cannot be replicated for various reasons.

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2 hours ago, pawlowski6132 said:

That's a good point which begs the question does vintage just mean old? It sounds like you are saying no.

However, I do think that is a component and I would say that vintage means it is old (whatever that means, see my definition above) AND great.

 

To which I would say those Bozeman acoustic you're mentioning could be great but I would not call them vintage because they are not great AND old.

To me the term vintage suggests a bygone era of which today cannot be replicated for various reasons.

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. 

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14 minutes ago, pawlowski6132 said:

And I guess it only really matters when you're trying to sell something and use the vintage label to get premium dollars. If I'm in the market for a 93 acoustic from Bozeman and somebody wants to charge me more because they think it's vintage. That's not going to fly with me.

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

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3 minutes ago, pawlowski6132 said:

I think most people would say a guitar from the '90s is not vintage

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

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16 hours ago, pawlowski6132 said:

You're still missing the point. Yes most people think old is vintage but not old and s*****. Old and good equals vintage. Again, not old and s*****

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"

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I consider (as a completely randomly chosen example) the Japanese Washburn electrics of the early 80s to be “vintage”. However, this is my own myopic, narrow minded interpretation of the word, which means something representing a certain era, be it a page in a company’s history, a fad, a set of colors, materials, quality, etc that are no longer in mainstream use, by that company or in general. Or any combination of these points. Whew! To that end, I would also consider Fender’s cost cutting measures in the late CBS era as being vintage as well; two knob Strats, white dots instead of pearl, Jazz Basses with one piece pickguards… I call that “vintage ‘83”.  So the word vintage isn’t always equatable with positive.

Narrow minded but owning it. 

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