What's with this 'Relic' shit?

[ELVIS]

I'm familiar with the story...

I'm just saying the 70's guitars are not as bad as the negative hype...

I have seen some bad ones though where the neck didn't fit the pocket at all...

[lesfunk]

Yngwie's strat 4 example?

[lesfunk]

...and Blackmore's and Marcus Millers bass... all 70's fenders

[Seshmeister]

My admittedly not huge experience of 80s strats back in the day was that there definitely seemed to be a time when most Japanese Squier strats I tried were great and the much more expensive US ones were totally mediocre.

[Seshmeister]

I wasn't going to weigh in on this thread but what this shit is all about is being a failed musician with $4,000 to spend. Sometimes the questions answer themselves, Sesh.

I know you have another thread going on this 'failed musician' thing as well.

To me it's kind of an immature simplistic concept. I don't think I ever wanted to be exclusively a musician just like I don't want to exclusively be a company director or a father.

Some people do and they may totally succeed at one thing. I don't want to just do one thing in my life I want to do all sorts of shit and that doesn't mean I've failed at it all. That's like saying if you don't get a gold medal in the Olympics you should never swim or if you can't fill an arena as a comedian you should never make a joke.

I think you have a certain kind of person in mind with this failed musician but not only should you define it better you should also consider for a minute that many of those guys just enjoy the taking part.

[ELVIS]

My admittedly not huge experience of 80s strats back in the day was that there definitely seemed to be a time when most Japanese Squier strats I tried were great and the much more expensive US ones were totally mediocre.

Jeff Healey and Adrian Smith played Jap Squiers...

[Seshmeister]

Don't get me wrong my pal bought a US strat a couple of years ago which is the best one I've ever played.

But there was a problem for a long time. I heard that they ended up getting Japanese quality control people into the US factories and that fixed it??

[Seshmeister]

Jeff Healey and Adrian Smith played Jap Squiers...

Stewart Copeland too I think.

It's all very subjective. I have a friend who has a $5000 Gretch semi and I find it a bit nasty to play but everyone else seems to love it.

[ELVIS]

They've always had a quality control problem, so does Gibson and others...

You can take ten Strats from any era and some will sound better than others...

The finish and set up seem to be very nice on the current Fenders...

[ELVIS]

I have three Japanese Fender Strats, but I'm lefty and the quality always seems to be better on a Left hand instrument...

I've seen tons of junky Jap Strats...

[Hardrock69]

The shitty 70s Strat thang was why I bought a Lead I when they first came out.....a 4-bolt neck as opposed to the Crapro-Tilt 3-bolt necks.
Out of all the 70s Strats I played in guitar shops, pawn shops, or at friends' houses and jam rooms, I would say 70% of them were deficient in one way or another. The neck was not fitted properly. Or the fucking thing moved because the holes had elongated, and there were only 3 to begin with.
The tone sucked fucking ass. The action was bad.

So it is easy for me to understand how 70s Strats got the reputation.

The Lead series guitars were rock-solid by comparison. I still have the one my best friend bought in 1980 brand new....the same day and at the same shop I bought mine.....it has a seriously solid feel to it, sounds great, plays great.....

But it could just be an anomaly.....one of the percentage of guitars off the production line that were good....

[ELVIS]

Fender cut costs with cheap metal on the bridge and almost non existent body contours which were still being done by hand...

The three bolt neck works great as long as the neck pock fits perfect, which most didn't...

[jhale667]

There used to be a pretty cool "relic" tutorial up on a builder's site that has since been taken down (some sort of business shiftiness), wished I'd saved it as HTML to repost here... but the guy took a finished body and froze, baked, and generally abused the hell out of it before he ever took a rasp or file to it - to correctly "age" the finish pre-'wear'... he was letting his kids ride their bikes over it, tied it to the bumper and drove around the block a couple of times on gravel, rubbed ash from his BBQ grill into the exposed grain...crazy stuff, but it looked pretty authentic when he was done.

[Cato]

can I show off my relic strat?

[Matt White]

KEWL looking strat Cato-san!

I'm all for the authentic way of picking up dings & dents, scratches and the such....the more ya play that thing "out and aboot" the more you seem to pick up............


that being said....I have some guitars that I've had for ages.....15+ yrs...that look like new.....becuz I TAKE CARE of my shit!!!!