I have never been a real fan of guitars that are built to look like they have seen many years of abuse. Fender's Custom Shop Relic series has been around for awhile now, and at the NAMM Show they introduced their Road Worn Series which allows players with a more modest budget to own one of these time tested looking guitars. I had the chance to look at these guitars at the show in January, and I will admit that I can see the appeal of these guitars for a player who likes this style. My personal opinion however is that if I am going to have a beat up guitar, it is going to look that way through real aging and playing.
With this in mind, I would like to share an experience I had at the G&L booth during the same show. We stopped in to see our friends at G&L and look at their new offerings for 2009. While we were waiting, we decided to look around at the guitars on the wall. Each guitar had a tag next to it with model name and other relevant information. Every so often however was a guitar or bass which looked like a very aged classic, but these guitars did not have a model number tag or any other information. As we were looking at these guitars, I figured that G&L had pulled out some real and true classic guitars from the past and had peppered them throughout their booth a look back at the history of their guitars. I remember thinking that this seemed like a very nice touch, but never did it occur to me that these weathered looking guitars could possibly be a brand new model set that was being introduced as the "Rustic Series" by G&L guitars. I would soon find out that this was exactly what these guitars were.
After finding this out, I took a closer visual inspection of these guitars, and in all truth, these guitars are unbelievable in their attention to every last detail. The hardware has been tarnished so well that it leaves you believing that it must be very old. The wood showing where paint had been rubbed off looks incredibly aged making you think that the paint must have rubbed off years ago exposing the raw wood to the elements. The Rustic Series truly look like museum pieces that belong behind glass in a guitar hall of fame.
Later in the day while at the Fender booth, I took another look at their Road Worn and Relic series. While I will admit that Fender also did a good job on their guitars, and I give them credit for coming up with the original idea of a worn guitar look, I just do not find them quite as convincing as the guitars G&L is putting out. In truth, the Rustic Series had me actually thinking that I might like to have one of these worn guitars in my collection. To date, these are the most real looking of the used and abused looking guitars I have seen to date, and I really don't think anyone is going to be able to do better then this.
I would later learn that the reason these guitars did not have tags with model number and information was because they were a last minute addition to the booth, and tags were not made because they originally were not going to be there. This actually worked in the favor of G&L since the lack of this information is the key that fooled me.
Gary Allen