Someone told me I am a collector but I disagree; otherwise I'd be busy hunting collectibles not the potentially abject instruments which I hold dear. But I'm not alone in this, John Petrucci has this to say:
I'm not a guitar collector... I don't have old Les Pauls & Strats or any of that stuff, I just have some Ibanezes & my Music Man guitars. I never went down the road of picking up old guitars. I'm into playing them...
Why play something else just because it's old? Being old doesn't mean it' great. It might be, it could be awesome - but what I'm playing is perfect for me. It's like having a really perfect glove & someone tells you, 'No, you've got to wear this glove, because it was made in 1960!' But it doesn't fit me & it has holes in it!
When we talk to senior players (especially), they tend to opine that older guitars are better, more appealing & true treasures unlike the compromised production units of today. I believe, those guitars were magical. Something happened to them (referring to production magic of course, not a spell cast in any way). They ended up being appealing more than paltry survivors over time. Some of us would be drawn to this charm while the rest prefer to embrace the contemporary. It's OK to stand by our preferences, yes? But it gets chauvinistic & myopic if we tell people off because they don't align themselves to our liking.
