| A lot of the same advice that applies to DB goes here too:
a) You'll usually get a lot more guitar the the money buying used.
b) GUITARS ARE NOT FUNGIBLE. Try hard to play THE guitar you are buying. Leave yourself open to the magic and the surprise.
c) Look hard for condition. Things that might get overlooked:
* Play the guitar set up with the gauge you like to play. There's a TREMENDOUS difference, sound and touch, between 0.012-set and 0.013-set.
* See how hard the truss is cranked when set up to your preferred gauge. Is it totally loose with 13s? You might have trouble moving to a 12 set. Vice versa, if it's cranked on 12s what are you going to do when you want to step up?
* Pull the strings off to the side and see how dug-out the frets are underneath the strings, especially the first five or six. Pictures of guitars just about never show this and it's not easy to see from pics whether a guitar needs a routine fret-mill or a more costly fret-job.
* Bear in mind that a bound fret-job will cost more (and the luthier will earn it, too).
* Is the bridge totally glued down?
There are a few things that would just totally knock a guitar out of the box for me. I don't want to buy a guitar that needs a neck reset just because of the cost. I never buy a guitar with a crack next to the fretboard extension -- there are lots of ways to sorta fix it but doing it right is really surgery. I don't think I've ever kept an Indian rosewood guitar for more than a month. On the other hand, millions of players think I'm dead wrong on all three points.
Last but not least, bear in mind the wise words of veteran guitar retailer Tom Baxer: "Every customer that leaves the store is convinced that he or she has found The One -- and each of them is correct, at least for a while."
Have fun and let us know what you find.
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"We can give to those who listen to the essence the best of what we are. But to do that, at each stage we have to keep on cleaning the mirror." -- John Coltrane
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