FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

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Question:
I was reading a post on another newsgroup and the poster said he was buying a 20 year old vintage Gibson Les Paul. It got me to thinking about the word Vintage and how it relates to guitars or instruments in general. While the dictionary mentions age in its definition of vintage as Length of existence; age. It doesn't say anything about age being an issue. It seems vintage relates more to a specific year such as in winemaking. The dictionary also says Characterized by excellence, maturity, and enduring appeal; classic. A group or collection of people or things sharing certain characteristics. Old or outmoded. So if I say that 2003 was a vintage year for Martin D 28's and indeed some great instruments were made that year I have made my Martin a vintage instrument? Or did something special have to happen that year that produced those outstanding guitars? I have always heard but cant swear to that for instance an antique is anything over 100 years old. There doesn't seem to be a age marker for the term vintage. It almost seems in wine making vintage is just a descriptor of the year it was created and there doesn't have to be anything outstanding or different about it......its just simply vintage 2001 cabernet...I always thought of the term vintage describing something special not just identifying a year. What makes a guitar vintage in your eyes?

Answer:
True...it is a dating process, as well.  I have a 1998 vintage Ford Probe...that does not make it a vintage auto. (My wife has a 2005 vintage truck.) Yeah, it makes it a 2003 vintage Martin. I have a 1953 vintage Maccaferri G40. This is the common interpretation.  I have a few prints that have a label on the back (probably with acid-based paper) that reads...Authentic antique -- over 100 years old.  And they are. It is not given in lapsed time but actual date of creation. And you know it is good when the rubber of the jar lid doesn't fall into the wine when you take off the lid. The year will identify it...it is up to you to know if it was a good or bad batch. One that is desired as a collectable...and one collector might only have paint stenciled top ply flat tops with cowboy scenes on them.  This would be from the era when this was done.  Me doing my True Tone that way would not make it valuable to that collector, even though it is from that era. Someone else would never call a ply Western Auto True Tone a vintage guitar. I don't know where a copy of my vintage guitar magazine is...it might define what definition they use. When I was collecting vintage guitars in the 90's, the term vintage was generally applied to guitars made before 1970. Today I'd guess 70's guitars could qualify. When I had that problem with my Martin (1971) last year and I was posting notes here and posting notes on other guitar/luthier forums trying to decide what to do about having it repaired... and then when I finally took it in and had the neck reset and the repair work done... I was told by quite a number of people that my guitar was not quite old enough to qualify as a vintage Martin.  So...I tell people I have an older but not quite vintage Martin.  Who knows what qualifies and what doesn't.... This would also depend how long the guitars had been made, I would expect. Considering how long they have been making Martins, there are some really old ones out there so maybe your 1971 is still too new. If a company started in 1950, I would think someone could advertise a 1953 as vintage and mean more than vintage of 1953. I have some vintage guitars but they were so cheap when built there could hardly be any prestige in collecting them...owning them, yes; collecting, no.   My Les Paul Gibson dates to 1972.  For many years I have jokingly told people that it’s not really collectable, it’s only 30 years old... When I first got interested in musical instruments, in the mid-70's, anything made before or during WWII was considered vintage.  I think because of the profound influence those designs have had on subsequent handbuilt and high end acoustics, to a lot of acoustic players that is where the vintage designation belongs. Electric guitarists have never really bought into that, though, especially considering that the solid body electric guitar wasn't even invented until after the war. I guess this just shows how subjective this term and these slightly varying subcultures can be... (I remember the real consternation my father expressed when he first realized that the cars he rode in as a child were considered antique...) Personally, I think it makes more sense to use the term pre-war to designate instruments built before Pearl Harbor, and vintage for anything more than twenty years old. But overall continuing usage will determine that, not my opinion or the opinions of a handful of us on a Usenet newsgroup.  My GUESS is that for the next ten or twenty years or so the term vintage to acoustic players will be synonymous with pre-World War Two, while the electric guitar players will continue to go their own way. The usage I have seen most often here in Oz is 25 years, as for cars. Eg when I sold my 1976 Maton a few years ago, the dealer's comment was We can advertise it as vintage now. I take your point about it being a qualitative term, not necessarily tied to specific age. But in the guitar market, I think most people think of vintage guitars being anything up to about the late 1960's. That was the point where Brazilian rosewood started to disappear from the market, and it was also (arguably) the beginning of the corporatization of guitar and amplifier companies, and the beginning of more efficient, less handmade modes of production. To break that down further, I think there are three main periods: 1) Anything prior to the turn of the century (1900), which might be called the antique guitar market. Many of these are highly valued, but not necessarily playable or useful in modern music contexts. So they don't get talked about that much outside of specialized collector groups. 2) The period from 1900 up to World War II, the pre war guitars. This is usually considered the golden age of vintage guitars, where the various classic acoustic steel string guitar (and resonator guitar) were developed, and still serve as models for modern designs. 3) The period from WWII up to the end of the 60's... still considered vintage, but usually not as valuable as guitars made before WWII. My mid '70's Guild D25M might technically qualify as an antique since it's over 25 years old now, but I have a hard time thinking of it as vintage in the context of that period of guitar production. It will be interesting to see where other people here think the dividing lines are. I'm just spouting my take on this. Consider saying that it is an antique and then say under your breath, if it were 2075.  That will make it an antique among antique collectors.  This 100 years is pretty well fixed I understand my Framus achieved vantage status the day it was built. Frami owners never much cared for vintage anything else....Norman (Vintage? Vantage? It's A FRAMUS!!) Draper I think we're spitting hairs here.  An antique or a vintage object is what ever the public accepts as such.  On the Antiques Roadshow, they commonly accept as objects of interest various items from the 1960's and even the 70's.  Beatles memorabilia is highly collectable (a word commonly used in that field), and, as we all know, is far from 100 years old. I can't see an antiques dealer turning down a Georgian revival table made in 1906 in favor of one in poorer condition that was made in 1904, just because of the fact of one being over 100 years old and the other not. In fact, as I implied earlier, I hear dealers referring more to objects being collectable or not rather than splittin hairs over whether it's an antique or not. I saw where somebody (Mandolin Bros?) found what appears to be one of C. F. Martin's first instruments, that is from 1833. Antiquity besides, that's an interesting instruments.  Perhaps less valuable, but similarly interesting would be one of Jean Larrivee's early instruments, or, perhaps, Bob Taylor's. Not So!  Slingerland had a solid body electric with Spanish neck in 1939 ! With a hum-cancelling pickup, no less.  And if you choose to include lap steels, you can push the date back another four or five years and include models from Stella, Rickenbacker, Regal, Gibson, and others. Sorry, but even if we call a tail a leg, the dog still does not have five legs. Antique is 100 years.  This is common in Britain and the US and if it was sold as an antique and was built in 1904, the buyer has reason to complain to the auction house for misrepresentation. The roadshow is entertainment.  People who buy stuff for capital appreciation are real picky about this. Southby and others make this a real big deal. They can word it anyway they like but in the catalog and on the provenance, it had better be right.