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Post by
Larry Mal » Mon Dec 14, 2015 5:21 am
Well, no, CBS didn't make the guitars the same way after Leo Fender sold the company, CBS started running Fender as a profit driven company and less as a maker of fine instruments. The quality dipped in measurable and demonstrable ways. The products also changed in ways that were to be improvements but still stand in contrast to what came before (or after), like the sometimes very narrow nut widths on some guitars of that era (my '69 Jaguar and '79 Lead 2 could be examples of this).
Which brings me to this: if Fender and Gibson, the two biggest names in electric guitars then and now, hadn't both gone through ownership changes that resulted in notably different designs and quality? We might not even be having this discussion. If Fender kept making Stratocasters the exact way they made them in 1965 or whenever, some guitars might actually just be "old" and not really considered any better because of that (although a lot think, and I do, that older guitars often play better due to age).
SO I still dislike the term "vintage" with guitars. For one, it's not exact, it's mainly marketing more than anything. People who own old guitars have every interest in you finding value for their instruments, of course. And "vintage" sounds the best.
Yet not every old guitar is vintage, is it? So it's not simply an age thing. And it's not simply guitars of a certain era, because now things that had never been considered "vintage" in the sense that they reflected a heyday of guitar making are now starting to be marketed as "vintage", my Fender Lead is a great example of that.
Hell, even Jaguars and Jazzmasters are examples of that. They were hardly considered part of any "vintage" no matter what era they came from.
The only thing that changed was demand went up, and so did prices. Like I say, "vintage" with guitars is a term that means absolutely nothing specific except that it's how a guitar is being marketed towards you. And since it doesn't actually mean anything, I try not to use it."
etc,PP