How Much Is A Guitar?
How do you make something expensive? You have to give it value
, give customers a reason to spend their money and there are lots of ways to do this.
* You can make it particularly well suited for it's purpose
* You can make it spectacularly beautiful
* You can make it from rare and beautiful items
* Or, if your object is old, you can publicise it's unique and fascinating history.
When it comes to value, it may not be what the item is, what it's made of or what it can do that is important, it could simply be the fact that it is second hand and one or many of the owners were famous. In the world of guitars, the most expensive items might be any combination of the above, but the last is more likely.
Most makers of quality guitars offer a custom build option, but some luthiers only create hand made items. Jens Ritter, a German maker of bass guitars specializes in carefully crafted instruments, made using the same techniques as Stradivarius violins. Working in a small village in Germany's wine region, Ritter makes no more than 60 guitars a year. All are known for their beautiful sound, but also for their particular beauty, one guitar is already part of the permanent collection of a German museum.
Many of his instruments are carved from a single piece of wood and most feature rare and beautiful details. One of these amazing objects currently holds the title of 'world's most expensive bass guitar' and like all such one off beautiful items it has a name; it is called the 'Flora Aurum'. Carved from a single piece of maple and with a nut made from Mammoth ivory which is more than 10,000 years old, the fingerboard is inlaid with a floral pattern in 24 carat gold and each leaf of the inlay is decorated with a black diamond. The value of this is reputed to be around $100,000. Is this the most expensive guitar in the world? Not even close.
At the other end of the spectrum is the relatively humble Fender stratocaster sold for auction in aid of charity and bought by the heir to the throne of Qatar. Guitars owned by the rich and famous have sold for large sums in the past, for example Eric Claptons stratocaster which sold for $959,000, but this instrument had never strutted the stage at the side of guitar virtuoso.
The world's most expensive guitar originally sold for $270,000 and was signed by Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Brian May, Ronnie Wood, Liam and Noel Gallagher, David Gilmour, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, Tony Iommi, Mark Knopfler, Angus and Malcolm Young, Paul McCartney and Sting. The purchaser then donated the guitar to charity to be auctioned again, and this time the price paid was a cool $2.8 million, a new world record.
You might wonder what sort of guitar could fetch this kind of price, surely a special guitar? You'd be wrong. The answer is that the instrument, donated by Fender, was an Arctic white standard series stratocaster. Normal price around $1300.00
Would your name add that kind of value to a guitar? If not, time to get some rock guitar lessons and start practicing.
by: John Blackwood
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