“Good Buy” or “Good Bye” - Knowing If & When Upgrades Are Worth Doing

No one wants to play a guitar they don’t like. The advice I commonly give customers is “Don’t buy a green guitar if you don’t like the color green”. It might be a good deal (price is usually the #1 factor in most new instrument purchases) but a purchase is not always the best move depending on one’s true desires.

Yes, upgrading an Epiphone Les Paul with better hardware (tuning machines, bridge, electronic components, pickups - a lot of it!) can bring a $500 guitar to perform closer to it’s $2500 bigger brother (and sometimes even better) for less money than buying a Gibson Les Paul of the same style, but that’s not always the case. The decision can be difficult to sort through, so let’s discuss some of the things to consider before buying a fixer-upper.

Know the market. 20 or more years ago there were only a handful of places online you could buy a used guitar. Ebay was the #1 marketplace for instrument buying and selling, but it certainly did get tiresome getting mixed results when searching for a “fender” and seeing car parts instead of guitar parts. With the advent of Reverb, musicians quickly found themselves at the helm of a dedicated platform to buy and sell musical instruments. After millions of dollars in sales and countless transactions across the globe, Reverb has developed into one of the most relied upon sources for calculating the value of guitars with real-world sales data.

It’s a savvy move to look at completed sales on Reverb (and Ebay) as well as searching used and new inventory available from the likes of Guitar Center, Sam Ash, and even Music Go Round before clicking “Buy Now” on a new guitar. This first step will help you understand the baseline that you are about to establish for your new instrument or upgrade project. But unless you are one of the rarer musicians that keeps everything you buy, it is equally important to acknowledge the resell value of your new instrument. This can be a key factor in determining what upgrades you may want to invest in or what might not be feasible in the long term.

Visualize The Results. So let’s take a look at a recent upgrade experience that comes to mind involving a Gretsch Electromatic series guitar. Gretsch is known for having both their inexpensive line of Chinese built models and their high-end Japanese models. Both offerings look pretty similar at a glance, but there are some differences that set the price far apart from each other. Some careful research had to be performed to make sure that the hardware could be upgraded on the Chinese model to bring it as seamlessly close to its Japanese counterpart. But it turned out that with the help of multiple aftermarket vendors we are able to get the right parts to pull off the upgrades achieving exactly what we wanted to see and hear in the end.

This isn’t always the case though. Compromises usually have to be considered when trying to do more radical changes to instruments. Routing for a Floyd Rose on a Les Paul would be a drastic move versus buying a Floyd equipped Gibson or Epiphone model (the latter would be able to accept upgrades in the Floyd Rose realm as well!). When figuring out what you really want, consult with the shop that is going to help you in the conversions or upgrades (specifically the luthier or tech that will be doing the actual installation and not a salesperson). This will help you and your tech keep a level of sanity throughout the rest of the process.

Prepare Yourself For The Cost. Adding up the bill, the price started to climb as the components list grew. At just about $600 for the guitar, the cost of pickups, new bridge, tuners, Bigsby vibrato (oh, and the hardware would be gold-plated), the parts list soon surpassed the original value of the guitar. While it was a tad staggering, the cost was still less than if we had purchased a used Japanese model of the same guitar. So in this case we went for it - and the results were fantastic!

This is quite common - the amount of labor and parts needed to upgrade a less expensive instrument easily outweighs the original cost of the instrument. Sometimes it can be a worthwhile venture, especially if you are chasing a hard-to-find more expensive model or if the upgrades bring you closer to your “dream sound”. Just remember to tap the brakes and realize that it can cost you quite a bit to get you where you want to go.

Understand The Limits. Let’s revisit the idea of “compromise” that was mentioned earlier. It’s not always going to be possible to make your dreams come true. If you want a Floyd Rose on your Martin D-15, you are going to be disappointed to know that it cannot be done. If you want your American parts to fit seamlessly on your no-name Strat-copy, it will most likely not turn out perfectly, nor may it be possible. Sometimes the idea of upgrading a cheapo guitar seems so good that we forget that our dreams are not always able to become reality.

I’ll stress the importance of talking to a professional again. Make it a point to have regular communication with your techs and figure out exactly what is do-able on their end and what they might recommend for your gear quest. If a tech mainly works on mandolins and banjos, you might not want to bring them your BC Rich Warlock for a rewire and touch-pad interface installation. Our shop focuses on a variety of repairs and upgrades across the spectrum, but there are things we don’t work on nor would we be the source to ask for advice on (banjos are usually safe to count-out of our comfort zone as well as refinish work past hand-finishing). Bottom line, your techs will understand some things that maybe you might be looking past (yes, the fancy knobs you want to install look nice, but they might require a different potentiometer shaft in order to fit properly!).

Guitars are great tools for making music and bridging that gap between your emotions and those you wish to share them. Finding that "perfect" tool can be exhausting for mentally and financially. When you hit the limit of what is possible, it’s up to you in the end to make the right decision in the matter.

Conversations at our front counter are pretty straightforward, and our consultations sort through this list of things to consider. I’ve said it many times before, and it’s written on the hang-tags included with outgoing repairs: “A well informed customer is my greatest asset”.