Re-buying guitars is a bad idea?

Is it okay to rebuy a guitar you had before?

Above is an Epiphone Les Paul Custom Classic Pro. Nice guitar for what it is. I've owned an Epiphone Les Paul before, see this one, and think... should I get it?

Over the years I have bought and re-bought four particular shapes of guitars. Stratocasters, Telecasters, Les Pauls and Jazzmasters.

I'm a firm believer in not hoarding instruments. At my worst, I owned 7 guitars. Now I own 4, one of which is in pieces (a Strat,) one of which was brought back to playable condition (my first guitar, also a Strat, and I'm never parting with that one,) and two SX Furrian guitars in the Telecaster shape.

Right now I own no Les Paul guitars, but I see the Epiphone above and think yeah, that looks cool because it has the "tuxedo" black-and-white with gold accents. Very classy. But then I think about the last experience I had with one of these and whether this one would suit any better.

For other players, it would totally work. If you want a Les Paul and want something good for well under $1,000, the guitar above ticks all the right boxes.

For me, however, it wouldn't. I'd ultimately run into the same issue I did with my last one, which is an unusable single-coil sound.

The above guitar does have ProBucker pickups with push-pull for the single-coil tones. But I know I will never be able to make that guitar sound like a Telecaster. That is why I play Telecaster type guitars now. When you want Telecaster type tones, get a Telecaster.

For humbucker tones, oh yeah, that 'Paul can absolutely do that with ease. But that's just not my sound now.

Every now and then when I see a cool guitar I've had before in one form or another, I have to sit there for a moment, think, and remember why I play the guitars I do now...

...but that doesn't mean I don't have other single-coil pickup guitars I'm considering for a re-buy. I'll leave that for my next article.

On a last note for now, the guitar above is one of the better LPs you can buy at the moment. Full body binding front and back and neck, all the good stuff, all the fancy electronics, and so on. Also, when Epiphone does gold, they do gold right. This isn't something where just some of the metal components are gold. All of them are, right down to the strap buttons, output jack plate, tuner covers on the back of the headstock, every screw and even the pickup pole pieces. Again, Epiphone totally does gold right, which to me is a good selling point of the instrument because they don't miss anything.

Published 2020 Sep 8