Factory "Aged"/"Relic'd" Guitars : Homage to the Greats, or Just the Ultimate Poseur/Try-hard Trophy Guitars?

 

WHAT THE HELL?

From Jonathan Horsley in Guitarist Magazine in November, 2025:

It doesn't take much to set the guitar-playing public off. But if there is one subject in electric guitar that’s guaranteed to ruin Thanksgiving dinner, it is the idea of relic'ing a guitar.

For some, a pre-worn finish is a crime against humanity, up there with not muting your guitar when tuning up. Others think it looks cool.

Many might argue either way, but isn’t relic'ing just a case of tying a guitar to the back of your car and doing donuts in the carpark?

In a recent interview with Guitarist, Fender’s Chief Product Officer Max Gutnik tries to explain that there is a lot more to it – claiming it has taken their luthiers years to perfect (?) the relic jobs we see on its Custom Shop builds. "Perfect"? Um...no.

“You know, relicing is hard to do. It’s ironic because people think you can just drop it a few times and drag it down the street,” says Gutnik. “But it’s actually a really intensive process that adds a lot of hours to the guitar.”

Me? I'm calling bullshit. I would take the "Pepsi Challenge" with 10 random guitars, and I could pick out the actual vintage ones from the shitty relic'd ones. I've been around vintage instruments for 4 decades now, and there are "tells" you pick up along the way. 

Finish wear is often the most obvious dead giveaway it's a fake. After all, we all play the guitar differently, in terms of technique as well as how we treat our instruments in general. Where one player’s belt buckle might grind down the finish on the back of a guitar might be different to another’s (or not at all). Not all guitars age the same. Look at John Frusciante’s and Mike McCready’s Stratocasters, for instance. But then you have guitarists who are not delicate with their instruments (Angus and Malcolm Young, Neil Young, Billie Joe Armstrong), and the wear on their guitars looks nothing like the aforementioned. 

“Trying to make the relicing not look uniform is really important,” continues Gutnik. “The processes we use have improved so much: you want the feel and the look of a broken-in guitar, but you don’t want anything actually broken! So we just keep improving that process, the lacquer and paint…”

Let's stop right there. First, there was a period where even Fender was using some kind of programmed etching pattern, and there are posts on threads out there to this day that demonstrate 4 or 5 different guitars with almost identical wear---but hey, glad they finally learned that people don't want their fake-old guitar looking like someone else's fake-old guitar. But just as importantly, let's talk about the actual paint work. Today's lacquers are not formulated the same as those used on the Golden Era classic guitars (different plasticizers and mixes thereof), and in cost-cutting measures, they're not even applied the same, so it's never going to be apples-to-apples. I can look at, for example, my Angus Young signature SG and my late-60's EB-0 bass (from the time period the Angus is supposed to replicate), and the EB-0 has minimal shrinking of the lacquer, still retains a mirror-like smoothness, but the AY has the telltale woodgrain pores peeking through that make the surface less smooth. That's just one example, but very, very obvious to me. 

“It’s like getting a pre-washed pair of jeans: they’re broken in so they’re comfortable right out of the store, but they’ll continue to wear and become your own,” says Gutnik. “That’s what’s so great about nitrocellulose lacquer. If you have to wait 25 years to get to that place, I mean, you might not get there! So starting that process and having the guitar feel super comfortable out of the gate is what we’re aiming for.”

But here's the thing: the comparison is not even in the same ballpark, as some of us cannot fathom paying a premium for "new" jeans that already had the worn-out knees or tears, and even if they were more affordable, would we REALLY have bought a new pair of pants with half the wearable life of a fully new pair? I just simply cannot get on board with "relic'd" or "factory aged" guitars, and I doubt I ever will be able to. But then again, I wouldn't buy a car that's beat to hell (unless it's as an intended restoration project), and if I want a "used" guitar, I'll just buy a "used" guitar, save myself the added premium for the "custom shop aging" and be done with it. Hell, I've seen original vintage examples of certain guitars for literally only a few hundred more dollars than a badly "aged" replica, and if I want that particular model with "age" on it, I'd rather just pay a little extra for the real thing and not a counterfeit.

Out of the dozens, or probably hundreds, of guitars have seen that have had this kind of process performed on them, I can literally count three that actually looked legitimate (except on one of the guitars, supposed to be a reissue of a '64 Gibson SG, it was before they started doing the horn tip shaping properly, so that ruined the façade instantly for anyone who knows SG's, and while the aging wasn't the worst I'd ever seen, the slabby upper horn tip told me it wasn't a vintage SG). The rest were either overdone, worn in bizarre places that you never find certain types of wear on an instrument, or just otherwise too clean looking to pass. It's almost like guitar satire or something, where you're just exaggerating this preconceived thing and it's not really to be taken seriously. I know I'm pissing off a lot of well-to-do's with disposable income and weekend warriors who saved up for months or years to buy their fake-aged Strat or Les Paul by saying this, but it's corny as hell. Stop it, please.

I bought my prized Custom Shop '64 reissue Gibson SG Standard last year to replace my original near-mint '64-'65 one that I had to sell 8 years ago after being laid-off at work (since my then-wife certainly wasn't going to help with the household expenses or Christmas for our child). In mid-2023 the Gibson Custom Shop FINALLY (after 23 years) started shaping/tapering the horn tips on them properly, and I knew I would finally be able to get a suitable stand-in for my lost Holy Grail SG. Not being a fan of the overly-faded "cherry" they use on their stock models (I prefer an "as-new" unfaded finish), I ordered mine in "Wine Red" (GLOSS), which looks more like the as-new "Cherry" finish back then, and no, I did NOT opt for either the "VOS" nonsense OR the "Murphy Lab" crap. I wanted a brand new instrument that carries on the spirit of my old one, for me to "age" (or not) on my own via natural playing. And even as a custom "Made 2 Measure" one-off, it still was cheaper than a production-line Murphy Lab guitar.

Personally, I think these custom shops that produce these pre-aged instruments should be replaced by a player-centric program that allows players to purchase brand new Custom Shop instruments for a deep discount, or do an "abusive leasing program", where you get a brand new shiny vintage reissue guitar, and literally your job is to gig it, play it around the house nonstop, take it to rehearsals, play the crappy, smoky dive bars with it, really just don't give a crap about it and treat it like some regular player's guitar or a beater, even stuff like leaving it out in the trunk of your car in freezing temperatures or subjecting it to environmental changes quickly, like bringing it out of the cold from that freezing car into a warm house and cracking open the case to influence weather checking and stuff. You know, never wash your hands before playing it, don't be careful when it comes to eating or drinking around it, let the schmutz really build up on the hardware and stuff. In other words, methods that cause NATURAL wear and "aging". Yes, it would pretty much require one to put all their focus on banging around that one guitar during the process, but that's the point then, innit? Once you have achieved the level of play wear desired,  you box it up, ship it back to the manufacturer for a once-over, some adjustments or restringing (maybe a fret-job of some sort if you did a really, really good job with it), and then you get a new guitar in the mail to repeat the process over and over again. That would at least be more legitimate, and the wear on the guitars would be more honest. Because paying a premium that sometimes adds anywhere from 25 to 75% extra cost to have a badly faked vintage guitar just seems laughable to me.

No matter how much you want to convince me (or yourself) that your Murphy Lab Gibson or your Journeyman Relic Fender is "art" or "passable" as a vintage guitar, let me go ahead and be brutally honest with you and say, "no, it isn't". It will fool your country club buddies or maybe some dude in the audience at the local bar who "knows just a little about guitars" (insofar as he can tell the difference between a Les Paul, Strat, Tele and so forth), but you're not fooling anyone who's had their hands on actual vintage instruments. So again, I say: stop it, please.