Buying used is the preferred choice on this site. Most of you live in the UK, a country where even mid sized cities have more guitar players than are on the island of Ireland. So the choice of used gear is much greater than in Ireland.
Most of my kit is bought new. Buying new means really being certain that the item is what I need and up for the job. Paying the high premium for new means that kit gets kept. And used.
There is an active music community in Ireland but standard kit like Strats and Teles are the main weapons of mass destruction. And if you spend good money on a Strat and it does the job, why change it? So there is a very small market for quality kit in Ireland. Lots of cheap electrics and acoustic guitars. Cheap as in <€100 and thus hardly worth bothering with apart from learning to play on them.
Just idle musing on the oft used phrase, buy used.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. [Albert Einstein]
Nil Satis Nisi Optimum
Comments
The fact that by definition used guitars are being sold so have already been judged moor to be that rare special instrument (despite what a lot of the adverts claim lol)
Which I did, and found an SG
Gotta suck it up, it is what it is, look on the bright side, you live next door to a ton of good stuff
I’ve never sold a guitar I didnt have some kind of beef with, even if it was just a cosmetic niggle that I couldn’t get past.
I suspect that the genuine cases of “just need the money” are fewer than we hope.
These days I buy on availability and spec. Of the last 3 instruments I’ve bought, 2 have been new because there were no equivalent used instruments available during the time period I wanted them.
I don’t regret my decisions, even if I decide to sell them one day I made the right choice because otherwise I’d have wasted a lot of time not making music the way I wanted.
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
Whilst I doubt that those shoppers had travelled just to buy musical instrument Christmas/birthday presents, the savings must have been worth the time, trouble and expense.
Having bought new and used I can't imagine I would ever buy new again, buy it used and its worth roughly what you paid for it, I've sold stuff I love just to try new stuff, the buying and selling is a hobby in itself.