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Looper's Delight
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>>From: Krispen Hartung: Buying musical instruments as an investment...now >that's a notion that has always intrigued me. Not my 20 oz cup of chai >tea with two shots of espresso, as I consider myself a player and not a >collector....<< I have oscillated (vacillated?) between the two, insisting that my own stack of instruments was an "accumulation" & not a "collection", the distinction being that they all got work, occasionally, rather than living in their boxes or in glass cases on the wall. caged birds that can't even sing.... well, now there are too many of them to have them all working, even if I were to do three gigs a week. I still try to rotate them, but even so.... & so I have begun to think of them in terms of resale value or as investments. I hate myself for this. last year I went looking for & bought a 1963 fender precision just because I imagined it would have a certain "mojo" about it. I hate myself for this too. I'm not one of these pre-CBS snobs either- I have a few 70s fenders, & the one thing I can say about the furniture-factory years is that they were responsible for /inconsistent/ quality, rather than poor quality instruments. you just have to shop around, is all. but I wanted a fender from my birth-year, for some daft reason. & so now I own a 1963 L-series precision in pristine & original dakota red, which once belonged to a famous person (he owned it from 1972 until last year, & it lived at his famous studio in stockport throughout his famous band's famous career, while his famous bassist favoured a rickenbacker). in fact, there's about 10cc of the red paint missing.... :-) (curiously, this provenance didn't affect the price much) but it is a huge disappointment to play. not because it's bad, but because it's not anything remarkable. it's "book value" is way past it's value as an instrument. if I found myself in one of those unfortunate "women & children first" scenarios, I would grab my rickenbackers first, then one or two of the ibanez, then some of the later fenders..... I have absolute dog of a refinished late '73 precision, worth about a sixth of the red one. it sounds like..... a real rock'n'roll fender bass. after a few minutes, one forgets that it's not so easy to play, or that the post-'65 fender kink at the heel of the neck means it's impossible to set a decent action on it, or that it's probably got three coats of paint, or that it probably had several beers poured into it during punk...... accordingly, I now urge caution, & I won't personally buy an instrument made from anything more volatile than aluminium unless it's either very cheap or I can try it out in real-life first. d.