Buying or selling your used vintage guitar online can be tricky — especially at a time like this when prices are soaring. The Vintage Guitar Magazine’s 42 Index rose 10.7% from 2021 to 2022. The Fender segment increased 14.3%, Gibson increased 10.7%, and Martin increased 7.1% (source: The Vintage Guitar Magazine). So the market is pretty hot right now. The average price of a vintage guitar is somewhere around $2,000 and with online platforms like eBay and Reverb making everything so easy, you want to get your vintage guitar appraisal right before making a transaction.
As a baseline, The Official Vintage Guitar Magazine uses these retail grades to categorize vintage guitars:
- Budget: up to $250
- Intermediate: $251 – $1,000
- Professional: $1,001 – $3,000
- Premium: $3,001 – $10,000
- Presentation: $10,001 and up
No matter what category your vintage guitar is in, you can use the process described in this guide to evaluate it before hitting the buying (or selling) races.
The Vintage Guitar Appraisal Process
There are plenty of reasons to evaluate a vintage guitar. Maybe you wish to buy or sell a guitar and want to know its value before completing a transaction. Maybe you have an old guitar and you are curious about its price. Whatever the reason is, you can use the process described below to get a solid evaluation for it.
- Step-1: Find the Guitar’s Model and Year
Any guitar appraisal process must start with an exact description of the instrument. To begin the appraisal process, find your guitar’s brand, model, manufacturing year, finish/color terminology, and key features, such as tremolo, wood selection, etc. You will need these to specifically define your guitar. - Step-2: Determine the Guitar’s Condition
The guitar’s price will be strongly affected by its overall condition. A guitar in good condition is worth only 60-70% of an excellent-condition guitar’s price. Furthermore, relying on a seller’s described condition or your “gut feeling” is almost always a bad idea, so it is critical you evaluate it carefully and objectively. You will apply the guitar’s condition to the pricing you find in the following steps. - Step-3: Use the Vintage Guitar Price Guides
There are three established blue books and price guides that you should check. These are (1) the Blue Book of Guitar Values (2) the Orion Blue Book and (3) The Official Vintage Guitar Magazine Price Guide. The first two are available online while the later is print only. - Step-4: Check Reverb’s Price Guide and eBay’s Sold Listings
Looking at past deals can give a pretty accurate sense of how the market evaluates your guitar. Both Reverb and eBay provide this data which is extremely helpful for our process. It is online, easy to use,very accurate, as it is based on real transactions, and best of all, it is free. - Step-5: Compare To Live Online Listings
The last resource, which is also very practical, is looking at live listings. Live listings can tell us how much sellers of similar guitars are looking to make. While this is ask-price, which may vary from the final negotiated price, and while it may include some variations on your guitar’s model/year, still this is great input for the vintage guitar appraisal process. - Step-6: Sum Up Your Findings
Once you have accumulated all the price points from the previous steps, it is time to put everything together and establish your final appraisal. This step is more complex than it seems as you will need to factor in not only the guitar’s condition and special features but also to detect and treat price outliers.
Finally, remember that guitar prices fluctuate constantly, and whatever appraisal you arrive at, it is probably valid for just a couple of months.
Step-1: Find the Guitar’s Model and Year
The first step in determining the guitar’s value is finding the exact model and manufacturing year. Acoustic and Spanish guitars, and some hollow and semi-hollow electric guitars would have a certification label inside the soundhole.
You can also look for the guitar’s original certificate of authenticity, if that is available. Compare the serial number on the certificate to that of the guitar, to make sure they perfectly match. Note the model and year as they will be the basis for the continued valuation process.
If the certificate of authenticity is not available, look for a receipt or any other original documentation that includes the serial number, model, and date of the guitar.
If neither certificate nor receipt are available try an online serial number look up search. Checking serial numbers can typically be done at the manufacturer’s website and the lookup would result in the model and production date.
Keep in mind though, that these databases may not cover guitars from older dates. If you need access to earlier serial numbers, from our experience, the best source would be the Gruhn’s Guide to Vintage Guitars book. Another reliable source is “The Reverb Gear Dating Hub” which includes the earlier serial numbers of all popular brands.
You can also use our Fender and Gibson serial number crawlers.
Step-2: Determine the Guitar’s Condition
Now that you have the guitar model and manufacturing date established try to assess the guitar’s condition. The prices you find in the vintage guitar price guides are for excellent-condition, all-original guitars. Replacement parts and refinishes can greatly affect value, mostly to the negative side. A refinish will usually lower the guitar value by 50%. Repairs that are considered necessary, on the other hand, are mostly judged by the level of expertise displayed in the work. An amateurish repair will negatively affect the price of the guitar.
According to the Official Vintage Guitar Magazine Price Guide a poorly executed neck repair or significant body repair can lower the guitar price by 50%. A professional refret or a minor, nearly invisible, body repair will reduce the guitar value by only 5%.
As for faded color and aesthetical damage, collectors will be looking for ‘collectors grade’ guitars, and such defects can lower the price by up to 50%. Players, on the other hand, who tend to appreciate relics, will be looking for ‘players grade’ guitars, that might show some more traces of use, but are still playable.
Here’s a rough price adjustment recommendation applied on Reverb’s guitar condition definitions:
Condition | Price Impact | Definition |
|---|---|---|
Mint | 100-105% | Completely blemish-free and have not been modified in any way |
Excellent | 90-100% | Has been used, but only has minor cosmetic defects |
Very good | 70-90% | More cosmetic imperfections than Excellent, but still in great condition overall |
Good | 60-70% | In fine working order but have significant cosmetic imperfections |
Fair | 50-60% | Have various imperfections that impact the function of the item |
Poor | 30-50% | Have clear functional problems that will generally require repair |
Non-functioning | 10-30% | Guitars that simply do not work |
Source: TrueRelic
Step-3: Use the Vintage Guitar Price Guides
Now that you know the guitar’s model and year and have a good assessment of its condition it is time to check the vintage guitars price guides. There are three main guides to check, and luckily two of them are available online. To illustrate this, let’s search for a white 3-bolt neck, rosewood fretboard, tremolo 1976 Fender Stratocaster and see how to establish its market price. For simplicity, let’s assume it is in excellent condition.
Editor’s note: the prices shown in this exercise are as of November 2022. While the pricing may change over time, the vintage guitar appraisal process remains the same.
The Blue Book Of Guitar Values
On the The Blue Book of Guitar Values homepage, we enter the “Industry”, “Manufacturer”, and “Model” and hit “Search”. We then get what seems like an endless list of Stratocaster entries. Fortunately, these are ordered by dates and by series. So we scroll down carefully until we find the series that matches the guitar we are appraising. In our case it is the “Stratocaster: Early Models (1954-1991 Mfg.) – STRATOCASTER THREE-BOLT NECK (CBS MFG. 1971-1981)”.
Once chosen, we get a list of colors. If you are not sure what the name of the guitar’s color is, run an online search for the closest names and see if one of the image results matches your guitar. Once you find your guitar’s color, scroll all the way down, and click the yellow “Buy Model” button. We will now checkout and pay the $2.95 fee. You will be asked to open an account along the process.
Go to “My Account” at the top menu and click on your “subscription”. You will then get a table similar to the one shown here. Look up the year and condition of your guitar to figure out its price. Our white 1976 excellent-condition Strat should be worth $1,650 to $2,150 according to The Blue Book of Guitar Values. Note that we’ve added 10-15% for the white color as recommended.
The Orion Blue Book
Another established price guide is the Orion Blue book. It monitors prices across many industries and we will, of course, focus on the “Guitars & Musical Instruments” Industry.
- Once there, we search for “Stratocaster”, and click the “Year” column title to arrange the list by “Year”.
- Then we click on the model that best describes our guitar. Note that in our case the description does not include the “White” color, so we will proceed with the understanding that there may be up to 15% change in valuation based on the actual color.
- Next click on the “Get Blue Book Value” button, confirm your product selection, click “Next”, and proceed to pay $3.95 for the Orion Blue Book price estimate. You will be asked to open an account as part of the checkout process.
- Note: the checkout form seems to have a bug forcing a “state” field to be filled in for non-US credit cards. We were able to bypass this error by choosing the United States (even though the card was not a US card) with a random State, while filling up the rest of the form’s details correctly. The payment still went through.
The Orion Blue Book’s definition of price categories can be a bit confusing. Here’s our interpretation of it:
- Initial Retail Pricing: MSRP – this is the price for a mint-condition guitar.
- Current Used Market Value: Retail Used – this is the price for a good-condition guitar.
Looking at the excellent-condition category (MSRP) the recommended price is $1,250 for the walnut body. While our guitar is white and that finish option is not listed, it still gives us indication for market value.
The Official Vintage Guitar Magazine Price Guide
While the first two price guides were available online, this one is not. It has been around since 1989 and is the one running the The Vintage Guitar’s 42 Index mentioned earlier. It is very detailed and organized professionally. A copy is priced at $39.97 with free domestic shipping. Expensive compared to the previous two options. However, if you wish to value a few guitars, or if you wish to value a pricy one, this is a good resource to use.
As can be seen below, this guide does not vary the price based on color/finish but rather gives a range of $2,300 – $3,000, which is significantly higher than the one provided by the two online guides.
Step-4: Check Reverb’s Price Guide and eBay’s Sold Listings
Reverb’s Price Guide
Reverb’s Price Guide is a great resource. It is online, easy to use, very accurate as it is based on real transactions and best of all, it is free. However, as it is based on real transactions, the less popular models, which let’s be honest, are the majority of models out there, will not have enough transaction-history to work with. Nevertheless, for popular models it is the go to guide.
First, we enter the brand and model in the search box. In our case “Fender Stratocaster”. Then we filter by “Decade” to the 1970s. We identify our model category and click “Get Price Estimate”. We then choose our Model and Condition and click “Price Gear”. For our guitar the estimated price range is high and wide: $3,305 – $5,412. But there’s also a note on the side that says “We’ll need more transactions to display the Price History for this product”, which means there aren’t a lot of transactions out there for the reverb price engine to work with.
eBay Sold Listings
To view sold listings on eBay, click “Advanced” to the right of the top search menu, search for the guitar model and year, and on the results page, choose, on the left filter sidebar, “Sold Items”. Make sure you are looking only at listings from that past 12 months to ensure price relevancy.
Running a search for our “1976 Fender Stratocaster” we see two sold listings, which would need to be extrapolated to get an excellent-condition equivalent price:
- $2,500 in a very good condition (=> $3,100 after condition extrapolation)
- $2,900 in a good condition (=> $4,300 after condition extrapolation)
So far, across 5 price guides, we have a very large spread of evaluations. Obviously some are very wrong. Let’s move on to compare to live listings which we will hopefully find!
Step-5: Compare To Live Online Listings
There are some very obvious sources for live listings, like reverb.com, ebay.com, and craigslist.org.
On eBay, we see twenty 1976 Fender Stratocasters for sale. After excluding the two hardtail options (we are pricing the tremolo version), the ask-price range is $3,000 to $6,000. All guitars came with the original case and seemed to be in very-good condition to excellent condition.
On Reverb we find 16 such guitars for sale, with an ask-price range of $3,000 to $6,000. Exactly the same range as we see on eBay.
It is important to keep in mind that ask-price may be negotiated and often the more expensive listings will either not sell or be negotiated down 10-20%.
To further narrow down the price range, we will now run a Google search and let the search engine do the work for us. We are now looking for listings of respected online stores, other than eBay and Reverb, where the prices are final. Here’s what we’ve found:
- vintageandrare.com: $4,300, condition: very-good
- guitarpoint.de: $3,500 (sold), condition: excellent
- chicagomusicexchange.com: $2,600 (sold), condition: good
- trentsideguitars.co.uk: $3,225, condition: very-good
- adkguitar.com: $4,600, condition: very-good
- guitarplace.de: $3,100, condition: good
- Guitar House of Tulsa: $3,900, condition: very-good
So, to sum up step-5, of live listings review. Once extrapolated to excellent-condition, there is a range of listings between $3,500 and $5,000 out there. All from, what seems to be, professional online music stores.
Step-6: Sum Up Your Findings
OK, it is time to sum everything up. Here’s what we have so far. We are pricing a white 3-bolt neck, rosewood fretboard, tremolo 1976 Fender Stratocaster guitar, in excellent-condition, in order to demonstrate the vintage guitar appraisal process. The table below summarizes the evaluations we have found.
Source | Low | High | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
The Blue Book of Guitar Values | $1,650 | $2,150 | Added 10-15% for the Olympic White finish |
The Orion Blue Book | $1,250 | $1,250 | Walnut body |
Vintage Guitar Magazine Price Guide | $2,300 | $3,000 | |
Reverb’s Price Guide | $3,300 | $5,400 | |
eBay Sold Listings | $3,100 | $4,300 | Extrapolated to excellent-condition |
Live Online Listings | $3,500 | $5,000 | Extrapolated to excellent-condition |
Summing up the guitar appraisal exercise findings
The two blue books seem wildly out of touch with the market price so we will strike them out in this case. We will also give a higher weight to the sold listings as these provide hard data points.
Based on the information we have collected, we evaluate the guitar’s price to be $3,500 to $4,500. Of course this is not a guarantee that you will be able to buy or sell such a guitar within this range as many other factors apply, such as the seller’s credibility, refund policies, their sense of urgency, the demand for certain finishes, and sheer luck. But with a high level of certainty we can say that most transactions of such guitars in the recent weeks would be within this price range.
The Vintage Guitar Condition Factor
Remember to keep the listings’ guitar condition in mind, as you look at their pricing, and to make your own judgment as to the guitar’s actual condition. In most cases, when a seller describes a guitar as excellent it is actually very-good and when they describe it as good it is actually in fair condition. Typically moving the described condition one bracket down is a safe bet on top of your own assessment, based on the information you have. You can use our “How to Inspect a Vintage Guitar” guide if you wish to learn how to evaluate a guitar’s condition with greater accuracy.
Go To the Experts
If you are still in doubt regarding your guitar appraisal, you can always use either local or online professional guitar appraisers, and you are certainly more than welcome to use TrueRelic’s services.
Vintage Guitar Appraisal FAQs
You ask, we answer
Buying or selling your vintage guitar online can be tricky — especially at a time like this when prices are soaring. The guitar appraisal process includes: (1) finding the guitar’s model and year, (2) determining the guitar’s condition, (3) using the vintage guitars price guides and blue books, (4) checking reverb’s price guide and eBay sold listings, (5) comparing to live online listings, and then, (6) summing it all up.
These are Reverb’s guitar condition definitions:
- Mint: Completely blemish-free and have not been modified in any way.
- Excellent: Has been used, but only has minor cosmetic defects.
- Very good: More cosmetic imperfections than Excellent, but still in great condition overall.
- Good: In fine working order but have significant cosmetic imperfections.
- Fair: Have various imperfections that impact the function of the item.
- Poor: Have clear functional problems that will generally require repair.
- Non-functioning: Guitars that simply do not work.
Checking a guitar’s serial number can typically be done at the manufacturer’s website and the lookup would give you the model and production date. Keep in mind though, that these databases may not cover guitars from older eras. If you need access to earlier serial numbers, from our experience, the best source would be the Gruhn’s Guide to Vintage Guitars book. Another reliable source is “The Reverb Gear Dating Hub” which includes the earlier serial numbers of all popular brands.
