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I've heard a few times of people buying guitars as investments. do you think pedals could be bought as investments and ifso which ones do you think. obviously the klons have gone sky high, but Im noticing some early Japanese made boss pedals rising in value quite sharply over the last few years too.

Man, pedals shouldn't be investments, they should be used as tools. I f someone buys a Klon, Tubescreamer, etc. just because they think they'll get money out of it at the other end, then they have missed the point.
If you're not going to use a pedal, then don't buy it. My pedals are going to beat to hell by the time I'm done with them.
I know some dudes who do stuff like this "I should be able to get 200 bucks for this here muff" and he never uses the fucking thing.

Bassboar wrote:Man, pedals shouldn't be investments, they should be used as tools. I f someone buys a Klon, Tubescreamer, etc. just because they think they'll get money out of it at the other end, then they have missed the point.
If you're not going to use a pedal, then don't buy it. My pedals are going to beat to hell by the time I'm done with them.
I know some dudes who do stuff like this "I should be able to get 200 bucks for this here muff" and he never uses the fucking thing.

hey man, i agree with you. just sold a beautifull snowdrift as it wasn't getting used. i was just wondering if its possible and if people do it???

Yes it's possible and people most definitely do it.

I buy art to enhance my environment, I buy pedals for the same reason.

There are much more secure investments than pedals in the world. Invest in in clear-felling in the Amazon, or Arctic oil drilling, poaching bluefin tuna, becoming an R&B/Idol star without any musical instruments or talent (i.e. buy Autotune). Much more $ on show there.

Yeah for the money spent versus returned, I don't think pedals are a very good investment. You'd have to wait a while before you see any money back, and for all the waiting, I don't think it would be worth it. For example, Akai Deep Impacts go for like $800 or some stupid amount like that, and they went for $100 new when they were being cleared out. So the people who bought those got lucky, since the guy from Muse made them super popular among people who like to copy famous people and have lots of money to blow, thus the prices climbed up. While yes, they keep climbing, the people who make the most money are the ones who bought one new on clearance and sold it now, which I think is a span of like a decade (I want to say it was released around 2001 or 2002). But really, the only way of those people made a good pay day, I think, is if they decide they liked the pedal enough to keep it, but not enough to keep it when they're going for $800, or if someone bought one, put it under their bed and forgot about it. Otherwise, you pay collector's price now and sell it for a collector's price later and maybe make a few hundred bucks.

My point is, the hobby finding insanely good deals on pedals (which is not very common) and flipping them short term for some quick cash makes more sense to me, versus buying pedals as an investment in hopes that they'll shoot up in price. The gamble really isn't worth the amount of time you'd have to wait, and there's probably a lot better investments that can be made for the money. Not to mention that companies will sometimes re-release pedals that have been out of production but have gotten a big following, thus killing the prices of the original run pedals (or so I would like to think...).

allicio wrote:hey man, i agree with you. just sold a beautifull snowdrift as it wasn't getting used. i was just wondering if its possible and if people do it???

People definitely do...



Although I know this guy plays out with this gear too, and is writing a book on this stuff. Thoroughly nice guy.
His collection is worth more than my house

Wouldn't pan out real well unless you could consistently buy at wholesale, and even then, what the market wants is changing as the boomers fall over dead and kids want totally different stuff.

Vintage is probably alright for investment. Contemporary stuff changes too much.
I've been buying and selling for a few years and I just about break even.

Whenever I have an expensive pedal, I always expect the bottom to drop out on this whole market and all the ILFers and TGPers to realize that, really, they can get away with Boss or Line6 just fine.

I've only ever lost money on selling gear, and I've owned some real byoots.


C

CBA wrote:I've only ever lost money on selling gear, and I've owned some real byoots.


C

this

I hate the idea of buying either pedals or guitars as investments, I just play, and I never care if I ding them up. I actually usually feel relieved after the first time I ding up a new bass (or a car, for that matter), because that means I can totally stop worrying about it.

Although I will totally admit that I've bought pedals before just to flip them, but that's not quite the same thing.

rfurtkamp wrote: and even then, what the market wants is changing as the boomers fall over dead and kids want totally different stuff.

Yep. Vintage market is gonna go through a substantial downward adjustment as boomers dip into their collections in their retirement and/or die. Some segments of the vintage market busted way before the economy at large did, too, as a matter of overheated demand. Unless it's stupid cheap, your money is probably best spent on a notion of whether as an instrument/pedal/amp it is intrinsically worth the asking price to you. You might get lucky over time. My Space Echo is probably worth 2-3 times what I paid in the early 90s, but I didn't buy it because I thought it would outperform blue chip stocks -- I bought it because it was awesome.

Lot of that pricing adjustment is on full bore - I got a RE-150 fresh from an overhaul for $350 recently and couldn't say no as I missed my old 301 desperately.

Even most plexes are fairly cheap if you shop around, I paid I think 275 for mine back in 1990 or so and I see functional EP-3S etc for $350+, not much of an increase.