Are you looking to sell your guitar but don’t know where to turn? Can you simply not find your model anywhere online and worry that it has been passed by appraisers around the world? Do you need a helpful online guitar blue book service that can help you to work out just how much your vintage instrument is worth?
Well, you’re in the right place, for this is preciselty what we will be exploring today!
Table of Contents
Where to Get Your Guitar Valued
There is a whole bunch of different bunch of options by which to evaluate the relative worth of your guitar depending on a whole bunch of your different preferences.
1. eBay
This isn’t a bad place to start, especially as it can provide a great generalized overview of the value of this and other things in relation to one another.
That being said, there is quite a notable difference between what people ask for when selling their electric guitars and acoustic guitars and what they eventually get when they sell (if, indeed, they manage to sell them at all). If you are going to use eBay to find out guitar values, then make sure you are not just using one listing for reference but rather a few different ones that have reached a similar price.
Some users might not be using any guitar reference information and might simply want to get rid of the instrument. Similarly, they might need a guitar appraisal and, thus, price it way over the amount that it’s worth.
You can then make your own average if the listings online are, say, from some custom builders or otherwise don’t quite match up. This can be a helpful way to work out, say, the average price of an acoustic guitar.
2. Guitar Store
You also can’t really go wrong with heading to your local guitar store. This can be especially helpful if you are an older musician who wants to sell their old instruments but doesn’t feel quite comfortable enough navigating a computer and/or the internet. This is something many independent luthiers would recommend in favor of blue book publications like the Orion Blue Book.
You really can’t beat just visiting a store in person to get a valuation as you can get a real measure of someone’s real feelings. That being said, it is not unheard of for a guitar store to want to make a profit on the thing that you are selling to them. On average, you can expect a guitar store to offer you about 60% of the actual price they think they can get for it otherwise.
You can’t blame them really – they are a business after all and they do have to make a profit – and the 40% that is removed from the sale on your end is made up for by paying for the burden of selling it that you would otherwise have had to bear yourself.
3. Gruhn Guitars
Looking to take your appraisal experience online without losing the feel of a guitar store experience? Then, perhaps Gruhn Guitars is the route for you. Many believe that the service offered by Gruhn Guitars is one of the most in-depth valuation services that you can receive without actually visiting the store itself.
Basing the valuation on the average price of your instrument in relation to the condition as told by you in your own personal opinion, Gruhn will conduct an appraisal alongside the specific serial number of your instrument and pictures provided by you.
Now, as you might expect, such a service isn’t free – in fact, it’s likely to set you back $75, but you really can’t go wrong with Gruhn. They are a safe bet for anyone who has an older and more expensive instrument that they are looking to get appraised because they can’t really find it anywhere else online.
So, if your instrument is too valuable to send out into the world for valuation, do so remotely by hitting up Gruhn Guitars with a healthy batch of pictures to hand and see what they have to say!
4. May Music Studio’s Guide
Perhaps you would like to side-step the use of an appraiser altogether and get the job done yourself. Maybe you don’t want to rely on the expertise of someone else, a guitar luthier or salesman that, though they clearly know what they are doing and talking about, might be trying to swindle you in some way.
No, if you feel this way, then it’s better to evade such a service altogether and do the job yourself – and this is precisely what May Music Studio’s Guide can help you with!
Indeed, instead of evaluating the guitar for you, they offer you a set of guidelines by which you can appraise your own guitar yourself. Of course, there is the usual blue book worship, but there is plenty of room to avoid paying money toward a blue book service and, in fact, May’s Music Studio offers plenty of free tips that you can follow to save yourself some bucks along the way.
Among the key tips are those that help anyone to know what to look for in their own guitar compared to the average on the market when engaging in the act of market valuation and appraisal.
5. Official Vintage Guitar Price Guide
Any real technophobes among us will no doubt rejoice on high at the news that this is a print-only publication meaning that, yes, you are going to actually have to buy or otherwise order a copy of this if you want to stay in the loop on the price of your guitar and others like it.
It is an altogether beautiful thing that, in this age of fast technology and information at the speed of light, there are still things reserved only for conveying on paper, that a publication that started out in the early days of guitar worship is still going and still able to cultivate a readership.
This is something to be lauded, not just for the novelty in an increasingly technological world, but for the fact that it is still able to keep up with the pace of guitar manufacture. Over 2000 brands are featured within this Vitange Guita Price Gude pages, including acoustic and electric guitars, basses, amps, effects, etc, all updated annually to stay ahead of burgeoning trends.
So, if you have an old Gibson and want to know its value, then you can’t go wrong with this publication which gives you all you need to know in one handy package.
6. Reverb Price Guide
Now we move onto what is considered by many to be one of the lynchpins of instrumental sales in the world today, Reverb. Reverb is essentially what Discogs is to vinyl records but for new and used music gear. A site like eBay is a bit more of a free-for-all which means you need to average out prices and work things out for yourself. Reverb is more than happy to step in and let you know the average price of something that sells on the website alongside a whole bunch of different diagrams to help visualize it all.
This helpful and lucid user interface is among its best qualities and one of the main reasons so many users often return to Reverb time and time again. The information you are presented with is as clear and transparent as possible, helping you to see the sales trends of the particular item you are looking to buy and/or sell, presenting a range of prices of how much it has sold for in the past and when it was last sold.
And, unlike plenty of other blue book sites that are supposedly meant to help people, this one is totally free!
7. Blue Book of Guitar Values
So, now we have explored all of the alternatives, we may as well have a brief glance at the real blue book services, even though they have been superseded in many ways by sites like Reverb which do a lot of what they do but with no financial ties.
By selecting the accurate make and model of your guitar, you can immediately receive the current valuation of the guitar in question as it stands on the market at that very moment. Instead of just receiving it then and there, you will need to pay before you can access the actual valuation which seems a bit old-fashioned in comparison to more democratic sites like Reverb.
What really sets Blue Book of Guitar Values out, though, is that they also offer an actual publication that you can read, though you obviously aren’t going to get it for free and will in fact have to pay a fee. In a lot of ways, it is also a little silly as prices are often constantly in flux depending on the item in question, much like acoustic guitar reviews by price range, and so a hard copy of such information will immediately be outdated.
8. Orion Blue Book Online
Believed by many guitar sellers and buyers to be the ‘Mac Daddy’ of valuation services, offering their services to evaluate the price of pretty much any item you can conceive of. They are also good if you are just looking to see how the market is moving in a particular direction, much like with Reverb, which is especially handy if you are looking to buy and sell.
What really gives Orion Blue Book Online a bit of a leg up on a service like Reverb is how many years they have been operating, ensuring that they are plenty versed in the appraisal of all sorts of different products and items.
Their expertise does not just end at the mainstream end of instruments – you are likely to find exactly what you are looking for even if it happens to be a little rarer – heck, they even have a separate section for vintage guitars and basses.
Of course, as with other blue book services, this service isn’t free and in order to get an actual valuation for the item you have searched for you will have to pay. Again, for all their worth, the days of sites like this seem numbered in the wake of democratic offerings like Reverb.
Final Tones
So, there you have it! Hopefully, you have now found a guitar appraisal service fit for your own needs and financial circumstances that can help you to sell your guitar for the best possible price!
FAQs Guitar Blue Book
If you are looking to avoid spending money in the process of appraising the price of your guitar, then your best bet is to use a site like Reverb which offers plenty of the same options as many other blue book sites but without charging you a single penny unless you actually choose to sell through them.
Indeed, you can, depending of course on the brand and popularity. There are plenty of services and articles online about how to find out your guitar’s worth/when it was made by the serial number, though this practice is more often than not the preserve of bigger brands like Fender, Gibson, and Gretsch. For less common guitars, you might want to search for a professional for appraisal.
This will very much depend on the age of the guitar and what kind of condition it is in. Having a vintage guitar is all well and good, but if it is all beaten up, then you are going to fetch considerably less for it when put up for sale. Similarly, your guitar might look clean and pristine, but if it is brand new and not worth all that much, to begin with, then it isn’t really going to fetch much when put up for sale.
This will entirely depend on the age and quality of the instrument as well as what condition it is in. The guitar market has never been so saturated, with instruments ranging from around $50 all the way up to remortgaging territories of 100s of 1000s of dollars.
