About

We help people buy a used or vintage electric guitar without getting burned. Name the guitar you’re after, like a pre-CBS Strat, a Blackguard Tele, a Les Paul Custom, an ES-335, a Gretsch 6120 or a Rickenbacker 360/12, and there’s a page for it. Each one tells you the guitar’s story, how to date it, the versions and reissues you’ll see listed and what to check before you buy.

What players know about these guitars is scattered across books, forum threads, maker histories and decades of trial and error, and a raw eBay search gives you none of it. So we keep 36 guitar pages in one place, write down the tells that usually take years to learn (refinished bodies, swapped pickups and pots, reissues and parts guitars sold as originals, repaired headstocks) and pick the listings we’d buy.

We don’t sell guitars. No affiliate links. We earn nothing. We run no analytics or tracking cookies, and we’re not affiliated with any guitar maker. See how we work for how the pages are researched and our disclosure for how links, picks and photos work.

The Fretboard is part of allbutnew, a set of shops for secondhand gear. Got a guitar to sell? The “Get an offer” link on every guitar page sends it to our guitar expert, who replies by email.