Y’know, I thought the whole anti-relic complainy thing would have gone away by now. Guitars made to look old: it’s been done for decades at this point. Why are we still arguing about it?
But I get it. Guitarists can be a conservative lot, despite playing weird, often pointy, frequently deafening electrified musical instruments. Just look at how uppity people get about developments like the seven-string guitar (commercially available for over 30 years now) or the Floyd Rose over 40 years). And let’s not even start on what happened when Gibson tried to make easier-playing Les Pauls. Nope, we’re a superstitious lot and a lot of us prefer our instruments to be virtually unchanged from designs released in the 1950s.
So why do so many guitarists get their knottables in a knot about guitars that have been made to look old? Why do Fender relics, or the output of Gibson’s Murphy lab, make some people so damn angry? It’s not like we can all afford vintage 50s and 60s examples of classic guitars, complete with six or seven decades of abuse and wear.
“Scratches should be earned,” they’ll say. Why? What does it matter? What does anything matter? Is a scratch any more or less of a scratch depending on whether it’s caused by a trained luthier or by your dog knocking your guitar off its stand? Does a pristine guitar with a big accidental gash out of it add monetary value because scratches are somehow sacred?
Here’s the thing: the aesthetics of a guitar have nothing to do with anyone who doesn’t own that guitar.
But there are a couple of reasons why I’m pro-relic, even though I’ve never owned one.
For starters, have you ever played a vintage guitar? They’re wildly variable. And some of them are absolute turkeys. If you can get in on the vintage market right at the very bottom, you’re not getting a great guitar. You’re getting the stuff that the assholes with all the money don’t want.
But more importantly, if you have played a few real vintage guitars, you’ll notice that there are certain things that happen to guitars after a lot of use. The fretboard edges get smoother and the back of the neck tends to get more roughed up, which takes away the sticky feeling that these guitars would have had originally. And yeah, guitar builders have caught up to this and developed all sorts of satin or oil finishes, and started paying a lot more attention to the edges of their frets and fingerboards. But there’s something extra earthy about the feel of a relic’d neck. By definition it’s gonna have a bit of extra attention paid to it to make sure it has those features.
So yeah, maybe a bashed-up guitar body might not be for you. But if you get your hands on a nice relic’d neck from a company that knows what it’s doing, you might just find that the feel of the guitar outweighs any bias you may have against the look. Ultimately I think a lot of people weigh in based purely on looks and opinions without actually backing that up with real-world experience. So don’t let grumpy bastards on social media tell you what you can or can’t play. Don’t buy gear to impress others, don’t buy gear based on how the specs look on paper: the guitars we play can be intensely personal things, and often you can’t really know whether you like a guitar or not until you actually play it.