Was planning to list it for sale somewhere, but no idea what to price it at. Any idea? Is it even worth someone's time fixing it up?
You won’t believe how nice that will clean up, if done right…
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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guitars
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It's nice enough that you can put some time and effort into it and end up with a really great guitar. It's not super valuable, so you probably won't make money on it, but it's not crappy enough that it isn't worth fixing.
As others have mentioned, the biggest question is the neck. If it's intact and straight (actually slightly bowed towards the fretboard), you're good to go. If the neck is cracked or warped, then it's probably not worth it.
I love the worn punk look. How does it sound?
Without getting too deep into it...
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It has notable corrosion, especially around the pickups and the strings.
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Would you want to be electrocuted by testing a guitar with corroded pickups?
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Other obvious things, like lubricating sticky tuner knobs, needs new strings, needs cleanup, needs the truss rod adjusted for a warped neck, etc...
It's not all as easy as you'd think. And looking at the corrosion on the pickups, I wouldn't wanna plug that thing in to test immediately, I'm not in any hurry to get electrocuted.
Sure it might come out pretty damn nice, but it needs some professional work before anyone with experience would even dare test the sound.
Edit: I love how I'm getting downvoted, when I have experience refurbishing both acoustic and electric guitars. Rust on the pickups? That's sat up so long you don't just randomly plug it up, unless you like short circuits...
I'm not an electrician, but I really doubt the kind of electricity coming through a cable is enough do anything more than a slight ouchy. There are amps powered by 9 volt batteries.
If there is high voltage present anywhere in your guitar, it's a serious issue with your amp. There are high voltages present within a tube amp, but the amp isolates those from the input jack. The guitar itself only generates a tiny audio signal.
Please educate yourself before insisting what is or is not potentially unsafe...
Why is My Guitar or Microphone Shocking Me?
Please do not take unknown electrical issues for granted.
It’s oxidation on the pickups. This will not short anything. This person has no clue what they are talking about.
A guitar pickup, wires and magnets, don’t suddenly start shocking people and shorting amps with “rust” or oxidation.
I've been looking at my trust axe sideways after reading that comment. I've been playing it and it's corroded pickups for 20 years and I'm not dead yet. So, must not be that big of a risk.
The rust was from my parents basement growing up. Our house was built into a hill and it's a high humidity environment. Didn't take proper care of it until later life. She's no gem, but she's mine.
Have you ever worked on antique electronics? I'm assuming not, but I have. The pickup coils are likely just as corroded and probably shorted from the back side with that much corrosion, which I assume from experience is from many years of age in a humid closet or basement.
I know what I'm talking about, that guitar shouldn't be plugged up until an experienced tech opens it up and at least does a basic inspection and makes sure the pickup coils aren't shorted out with a multimeter, at least to start with.
Hahahahaha this isn’t an antique guitar. Those aren’t even active pickups.
You are clueless about guitar electronics and how magnetic pickups work and are made.
Yo the dude is able to recognise a warped neck just from that picture, you better listen to him!
Also you definitely can die from corroded pickups, but only if you play High Voltage by AC/DC.
I'm using the word antique a bit loosely here, as I don't know what year it was made. But obvious context clues tell me that the guitar definitely has some years behind it. There's the obvious corrosion, plus OP said they inherited it, meaning almost certainly the original owner has passed away.
I actually spent about 6 years as a guitar technician for a band that amongst other equipment rocked a Fender Stratocaster and dual 1000W Peavey stacks.
They'd never allow such a corroded guitar to hook up to their equipment willy-nilly without a full professional teardown, inspection, cleanup, any necessary parts and repairs, new strings, set the intonations, etc.
Maybe just maybe I've got a more professional attitude about it, from experience.
Hell, at bare minimum at least clean the old strings and spray some WD-40 into the tuner knobs and tune the thing up, can't tell much of anything about how an old guitar is supposed to sound if you don't at least try tuning it.
But I still wouldn't go plugging it into an amplifier without checking the internals first, for all I know it could end up shorting out and blowing a perfectly good amplifier.
This is an Epiphone Les Paul Pro in alpine white. Judging off the tuners and truss rod cover this guitar is from around the early 2000’s. This doesn’t have “years” behind it.
Back to the oxidation on the gold pickup covers. That is super common with any style of gold pickup covers. Oxidation doesn’t cause any issues with sound from a pickup.
It is okay to be wrong even with experience because you are misinformed about the basics of guitar electronics and how they function.
This guitar won’t short anything out. A guitar with passive or active pickups for that matter will never short out an amplifier or pedals. If there is a short in the guitar’s wiring, no sound will be produced. It won’t cause any damage to whatever device it is plugged into.
I would suggest learning about how guitar pickups and wiring work before helping anyone else out with their rigs.
that amongst other equipment rocked a Fender Stratocaster and dual 1000W Peavey stacks.
This is a weird flex.
You can literally short the input to the amp and be fine. In fact, cheap cables do this all the time. There would have to be a major issue with the amps isolation between the preamp and power amp to have an issue. This is possible, but a rusty pickup is not really the issue. You're simply ill-informed. It happens to the best of us.
Have you ever studied Samuel Goldwasser's PhotoFacts?
I have. I've actually studied it so many times that I know the typical failure mode of electronic components in almost any situation.
Amplifiers are powered by transistors (or tubes back in the day, not much difference). When they happen to be stressed to the point of failure, they practically always fail as a short circuit.
Short circuits aren't fun, that's why they invented the Variac to properly test suspicious devices.
Edit: I hate to repeat myself, but would you plug in a rusted toaster? Do you not value your life, or would you rather test the components and clean things up first?
If you don't understand the difference between a toaster and the front end of an amplifier, then you've outed yourself.
Also, no. Nobody tests their toaster when they plug it in.
No, everyone tests their toasters when they plug them in. Only the dead don't report results, so the results are biased towards the living.
Please tell me WTF is your problem with maintaining a guitar?
Lol. If someone plugged in a shorted toaster, it would trip a breaker at worst. But survivorship bias is an awesome mental gymnastic. 8/10.
And nobody is arguing against maintaining a guitar. Just that you are being dumb. And maybe are a troll.
You mean you have no respect for electrical safety? None whatsoever? So you'd be okay if someone threw a live toaster in your bathtub?... 🤔
Bruh, get real, you have no respect for electrical safety. Go screw an outlet if you're so confident..
Gee, the bathtub isn't the same as plugging it into the wall. Is it?
No, it's not. And you know it's not. But you probably don't know why it's not.
Or you are a troll.
Or perhaps there are already videos about such risks?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=xS_5K5YEYv8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I've built multiple amplifiers from scratch, both tube and transistor based. But go off.
Good for you, awesome! Have you stress tested your circuits with corrosion to see what may or may not fail first?
Nobody asked you what you could build from fresh scratch, I'm asking you what you'd do with electronics that have 15+ years of salt water vapor damage...?
Yes, I have experience with old electronics as well, and guitars, repair work, the whole lot. And I have an bs in EE.
But none of that matters because what is really happening here is that you are wrong, and instead of learning and moving on with a better understanding, you are tripling down and pulling the wool over your own eyes.
And you and all of your friends are dismissing safety. Fuck all that, I respect safety and always have. You've got mains going into the amp, the cable going into the guitar, and metal wires on the fingers. Oh, don't forget about the metal whammy bar...
Although the risk of electrocution is minimal, it still exists. My folks had a rule to not fuck around with sketchy equipment. What the fuck is your deal with cleaning and maintaining a goddamn guitar?
Lol. Nobody is saying to not maintain a guitar, wtf. What a wild stretch. You must be defensive.
They are just saying that you are wrong that a rusty/shorted pickup is some serious safety risk. Because it is not, and you are acting self-righteous, ill-informed, and paranoid.
Yeah, and the guitar only has 5 of 6 strings, and some nitwit asked how it sounds...
Get real, lemme ask you how a 6 cylinder engine would sound with a dead cylinder. Lemme ask you how a motorcycle would drive with a broken spoke or two...
Nothing that relies on timing is gonna sound right without proper maintenance. I mean goddamn, at least WD-40 the existing strings and tune them first, how TF anyone gonna judge the sound of a corroded guitar without a basic checkup and cleanup?
Holy shit you are going to die on this hill.
You won't even explain how in the fuck this could actually happen. Give it up already, your amplifier is not sending all the power through your guitar, if it was, it still wouldn't matter if your coils are corroded or not.
My buddy John Fields, legendary electrical engineer for Peavey Electronics (he has done work on the 5150/6505), has told many people who have spread this myth that they are full of shit. If you are getting shocked while playing, it is not your guitar, it is the fucking thing giving it power.
Yes, the thing giving it power is the amplifier and the electrical circuit it's plugged into. And unless the guitar itself is wireless, the guitar is plugged into the amp...
It's entirely possible to plug a messed up guitar into a perfectly good amplifier, and then the next thing you know you've got a shorted amplifier. It's called a cascading failure. No it's not all that common, but it can and does happen.
Is it so much of a stretch of the imagination to be better safe than sorry, not take any chances, and treat the equipment with a little respect and at least inspect the internals before plugging it in?
I'm an electrician and a guitar player. You're a fucking idiot. Stop posting misinformation.
If you have a multimeter, you could safely check all contacts on the guitar, and ensure it has been properly grounded via a brief disassembly.
If you decide to do this basic due diligence before posting I'm sure you would be able to approach this with a more tolerable attitude.
If you just want a price, without restoration, you'd be lucky to get $100usd shipped.
Responding to this comment chain as a whole.
- You can be shocked through a guitar (or mic), but not really by the guitar itself.
- Amps also rarely shock people as they have grounds in them that can protect from shocks, but some have ground lifts.
- Pretty much the only case you will get shocked bad enough that it'll be a problem is in live sound.
A guitar has lots of metal components that can have a current running through them including the strings themselves if they touch the pickup coils. Usually there's never going to be enough current in them to shock you. Passive guitars aren't going to produce any of that current alone. I have an active bass with a 9V battery and it isn't going to shock me playing normally unless that battery somehow becomes ungrounded and the stings come into contact with that circuit. Which is rare, and also weak enough not to do any damage or even be noticable.
So a guitar (or mic) isn't going to shock you, but the equipment a guitar is connected to could provide enough current to noticably shock you. If that amp or whatever has a ground fault or had its ground lifted, it could be a shock hazard as bigger amps can hold a lot of voltage in their chassis.
Some in this thread have said that you straight up can't be shocked by a guitar and that is blatant misinformation.
An example of how to get shocked is in live sound, you'll likely have all your amps and stuff plugged into some kind of power supply or generator. That power supply is providing current to your amp. Let's say that power supply has a ground fault, If your amps ground is good, it's probably fine. The current in your amp that should be flowing to ground, is doing so. If you lifted your amps ground cause it was buzzing or something, that current from the power supply is now running wild in your amp. That current can and will travel up the 1/4in jack into your guitar and into the pickups. Making a circuit that electrifies everything as there are no grounds for that current to disapiate into. Now, when you pick up your guitar and press down on a string, that string potentially makes contact with the pickups sending current through the metal strings into your body and potentially through your body into the ground as you are now the only ground in the circuit. This shocks the shit out of you. And considering that a power supply can be very high voltage this could easily be fatal.
https://youtu.be/xS_5K5YEYv8?si=__vaNi_33fAtSygB
This video is good at showing how this works. Plus the guy uses an ohmmeter to prove that there is an electric current flowing from the amp into the bass in the first minute or so of the video.
As a side you shouldn't really ever be lifting the ground on an amp with the expeception of maybe studio recording sessions. Ground lift switches are often there to cut out buzzes and hums in the amp. In live sound and practice sessions that buzz really doesn't matter, especially live it'll get washed out by all the other sounds. If it's actually an issue, then you need a new amp or find a tech willing to work on amplifiers.
I heard that if pickup coils have gone really bad and lost their grounding they could potentially shock you, like the guitar itself shocks you, but I don't know anything more about that. Maybe that could apply to the guitar in question? If it's not active I doubt it. It's what amp you plug that guitar into that could cause problems.
TLDR: That guitar in question isn't really an electrical hazard unless it's plugged into an electrical hazard. It should be looked over irregardless before selling it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/xS_5K5YEYv8?si=__vaNi_33fAtSygB
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thank you for sharing even more wisdom than I can apparently put into words. I wish I could give you more than one upvote for your detailed comment and information! 👍
I am still a student in audio engineering but I've taken/been taking classes in electrical engineering focused on audio and live sound classes. Plus I've been working for a bit doing stage hand stuff and sometimes they let me handle audio and power stuff. So there are certainly things I don't get yet.
But we've been given lectures by a couple different professors about how to set up stuff properly so we ain't shocking the shit out of the musicians we're supposed to be working for. Kinda important info lol.
Hahahahaha! So it isn't the instrument shocking the damaging the equipment. It is the equipment being setup or used incorrectly.
Spell check yours and reread my comments.
It is squipment being setup, used incorrectly, and faults in the equipment that can shock you, the player. I don't think I even mentioned electricity damaging an instrument or equipment.
You are arguing in bad faith, ignoring things that I have said, and putting words into my mouth.
The reason why this thread is so shit, is because a lot of people instantly became hostile trying to correct one another.
I buy, sell, and trade guitars. It's not worth more than a few hundred bucks. It's an Epiphone. A kid or touring musician might appreciate it.
Absolutely. It's a perfect excuse to learn wiring, painting, fret replacement, fret leveling, setup. All the skills.
As long as it’s a set neck neck and the neck is good and straight, it’s a decent guitar.
And no, the corrosion won’t cause a shock.
Ended up selling it for $200. Considering the fact that within about a few hours after posting the ad I had a good 30 different messages, many of them not even bothering to try and haggle(nevermind the low-ballers I would normally get), maybe I priced it too low. Meanwhile I have thousands of dollars worth of my electronics listed for sale at more-than-fair prices, and in two months I haven't gotten a single response from anyone that wasn't a scammer or an extreme low-baller trying to drive the price down.
Search in reverb for a comparable Epiphone Les Paul to get an idea of the value. My guess would be around 300 depending on the shape it's in. (Looks pretty rough but hard to tell from one picture)
You might be able to look up the year it was made etc from the serial number on the back of the headstock.
Cheers and Good luck