I’ve been buying and selling old guitars since about 1968. I used to insist on playing older, vintage guitars with fetish value. But as the prices of these older instruments has climbed, I now feel that much of the hoopla is pure fetish. There are valid arguments on both sides of the old vs. new issue.
On one hand, to some extent, most musical instruments (other than the violin family) are mechanical devices plus sounding devices. It is true that for most acoustic instruments, aged woods can impart tonal qualities that simply cannot be duplicated with newer woods. That is, if they were quality instruments to begin with. Not all old ones are great guitars. It is also true that SOME high quality older instruments have certain intangible inspirational qualities to them. Some of this is imaginary, but some is not. I’ve owned and played older guitars that have amazing “vibe” to them.
But, as a fan of Strats and having owned well over a hundred vintage examples over the years, I recently bought a near new one on ebay, never having actually played it. I knew, though, from playing others of that specific model, that this model had a neck profile that I really liked, was unavailable elsewhere, and was a precision-made deal. I’m about the last one who would reco a new guitar over and old one, but this one utterly devastates any one of the six 35+ year old ones I own. Maybe tonally it isn’t quite as good as my favorite old ones, but it’s better in every quantifiable way. And after you run it through effects and whatever, the tonal differences are pretty much swamped.
Better or worse, older or newer, is pretty subjective. I owned a 1959 Strat that was an absolute dog, both sound wise and playability wise. I’ve owned a very low-end Squier guitar, which is a Korean $139 Strat that had a killer, knockout neck and made a super guitar with a drop-in pickup upgrade ($150). I will say that a brand new or near new guitar (or most any other instrument) will tend to have much more uniform mechanics. Likewise, older instruments in the era I happen to prefer (say 1957-1968) more often than not have wear-based mechanical issues that (in some, many cases) you can’t fix because fixing them will de-originalize them, and/or they are too valuable to take out and jam on in a sleazy bar. In fact, the more valuable some of these things get, the more they seem like liabilities.
That's why the "vintage re-issue" and "reliced" lines of guitars have become so popular. Owners of valuable, collectible vintage instruments can leave their priceless guitars at home and hit the road with a worn, "reliced" version that is identicle to their prized vintage guitar but worth only a fraction of the original.
What do you think a 1962 Vega acoustic would be worth today?
The overall quality of guitars these days is just incredible. The industry has matured to the point where there’s really no reason to make a bad guitar anymore. All the bad designs have been tried and discarded. CNC machines get a bad rap for churning out soulless guitars but there’s no denying they’ve massively improved consistency, especially at the lower end of the market. And then at the high end there are the custom shop guitars. I haven’t tried the Gibsons but the Fenders are superb. The best Strat I’ve played was a mid-90s custom shop model that a friend of mine owned. However, my $400 Ibanez Talman, which is basically a strat with a reshaped body, gets surprisingly close. In the world of guitars, the gap between rich and poor has become very small and reduced mainly to unquantifiable mojo factors.