As guitar players finding vintage guitar gear can seem impossible. The thought to look for your favorite amp or guitar crosses your mind and you find it was sold a few days ago at the perfect price.
As I use a lot of vintage gear, I would like to share with you some helpful tips on finding what you are after and even have Google find it for you. So, if you are tired of missing out on the vintage guitar gear you want by mere hours, read on. Perhaps you can grab that next guitar or pedal before your guitar buddy does…
What you will learn
- How most people search for vintage guitar gear
- How to use Ebay to bring vintage guitar gear to your inbox
- How to use the Reverb feed to find vintage guitar gear
- How to search all of Craigslist at one time
- How to find vintage guitar gear through forums
- How to use Facebook to find gear
- How to use the power of google alerts to find vintage guitar gear
Searching for vintage guitar gear.
When most people are after a particular item, their first thought is to visit Ebay, reverb, or Craigslist. People do a basic search on these sites and hope to find what they are after. When nothing is found, they will try again another day. But, there are many other ways that gear can be found, and the listing delivered right to your email inbox.
Having Ebay find vintage guitar gear for you
for years Ebay has been the go-to place to sell your musical instruments. With such a large marketplace available to the seller and buyer, Ebay is still the first choice for many.
But did you know eBay can find gear for you? To set this up: open ebay.com and type in the gear that you are looking for in the search box. On the results page select save this search.
You can then choose if you would like to be notified of new listings daily in your email inbox. You will receive an email notification when the vintage guitar gear that you are looking for is listed for sale.
Finding vintage guitar gear on Reverb
We love
Reverb
and if you haven’t tried them out, I would do so! They are far easier to use than Ebay!
It is not often that a newer company forces eBay to change its entire fee structure, but that is exactly what
Reverb
has done. The lower selling fees attracted much of eBay traffic and eBay lowered their fees on music gear to compete.
Ebay lowered their final fees from almost 10% to 3.5%. That is a massive difference! Thank you Reverb! So, let’s make Reverb find some vintage guitar gear for us.
They have made this very easy to set up by using a “gear feed.” You can customize this feed as you see fit.
To set your feed up you will first want to search for the gear that you are looking for. Remember that you can filter listings by category, price, etc. and ad the filtered results to your feed.
After searching for the gear, click the blue “ad to my feed button.” Your feed will then show new gear as it is listed.
Reverbs helpful feed page
has more info on how to do this if you should need it.
Searching all of craigslist for vintage guitar gear
Craigslist is thought of as a local buying and selling website. But, you can search all of craigslist at one time!
Being able to do this gives you power to find a goldmine of otherwise hard to find vintage guitar gear. That’s how I found my Westbury W20 tube overdrive that I have used for the past 7 years.
The only downside to searching Craigslist is that the seller may not be willing to ship. But, I have found with a polite email, upfront payment and a phone call they are always willing to ship.
I would recommend sending them an email containing the following:
- A personalized subject
- Your name
- City you live
- Why you want it shipped
- How payment will be done
- Request for a phone call
- Number to call you
Make sure they know payment will clear before they must ship. A phone call is recommended as it is more personal than an email and will let them know you are not a scammer.
How do I search all of Craigslist for vintage guitar gear?
there are a few websites that will allow you to do this. Give them a try and use the one you like the best. Some will let you filter out things more than others.
search craigslist
is just a basic Craigslist searching site. After you have completed your search you will have to scroll down to view the results as the top portion are Google ads.
search tempest
is a classifieds search engine that will allow you to search all of Craigslist, eBay and other classified sites. Craigslist results can be filtered by category, state, city, and miles from your location.
one craigs
allows you to search all of Craigslist by city or state and gives you some good tips on searching.
all craigslist search
is yet another…
there are many more sites that will allow you to do this. But, if you can’t find what you are looking for with the ones I have listed I would recommend doing another search later. 🙂
Forum posts and searching
there are many guitar forums. Most of these have a section for selling gear or posting wanted gear information. I would recommend signing up for some of these forums and posting in those categories to find what you’re looking for.
the gear page forum
has been around for many years and has various sections covering anything from guitar building, guitars, bases, synths, recording, vintage instruments, technique discussion, etc.
the Ultimate Guitar forums
is the “World’s largest community of guitar enthusiasts.” This website has everything from a massive database of guitar tabs, articles, and forums!
the guitar forums
has some neat sections. “stories from the road” is a very interesting read.
there are many other forums available
if you happen to find no valuable information from the ones listed. A quick google search might help you out. 😊
Finding vintage guitar gear through Facebook
Facebook is taking over the world! Your best friends dog has one, your mom has one and comments on your posts every day, and even your mom’s mom is learning to use it, to post your cute baby pictures!
There are billions of people on Facebook, with the average Facebook user interacting eight times a day. So how could we use this to our advantage to find vintage guitar gear?
Facebook makes it easy to gather a bunch of guitar gearheads all in one place through groups.
Facebook groups for vintage guitar gear
Anyone can create a group on Facebook. Many kinds exist from the extremely strange, to the incredibly useful! To search for a group just type in the keywords in the search box. For vintage guitar gear you could try
- vintage guitar gear for sale
- Vintage guitar classifieds
- Vintage guitars for sale
- Vintage acoustic guitars
- Vintage electric guitars
- Vintage amps for sale
- Vintage guitar pedals for sale
This should bring up some relevant groups for you to join. Select the group tab and find one that is offering what you need. After joining the group, you will be able to post.
The secret weapon of google alerts
The internet is a big place and growing rapidly. But our friend Google is very good at finding things. In fact, it is one of Googles main jobs to crawl around and index webpages.
What many people don’t realize is that you can tell google to find whatever you want, and deliver the result to your email in real time. It is known as Google Alerts and is free.
What is google alerts
Google alerts is well known in the internet marketing world for monitoring the internet for targeted information. For example, I could set up a Google alert so that every time someone was to post a link back to this blog post, the information would be emailed to my inbox. I could read what was said about my post and respond accordingly with answers to questions, etc.
Google alerts can be used to monitor your brand, competitors, questions, and other targeted information. So, what does this have to do with vintage guitar gear?
Google Alerts can help you find the vintage guitar gear you want.
Having a tool this powerful at your disposal will allow you to find the vintage guitar gear you want before anyone else. After you have set up a Google alert Google will begin monitoring for the keywords that you specify.
When information is posted online that lines up with your keywords and email is sent to you. This information may come from Ebay, Reverb, Craigslist, Facebook, Forums, Youtube and other websites.
Setting up a Google alert will give you an extreme advantage over anyone else. I have used a Google alert in the past to find a Westbury W20 overdrive, a Holmes Mississippi Bluesmaster, and other various gear and information.
Setting up google alerts.
setting up a Google alert is easy and takes about 20 seconds to complete once you have it down. To begin, go to the
google alerts
page. If you do not have a Google account, you will need to create one. After your account is created you can start setting up alerts.
To set your first alert up enter your keywords in to the box provided. For example, I entered “Westbury W20” in to mine. You will then be asked to confirm your alert and you can see previews of recent results. Since we are focused on the topic of vintage guitar gear, you may not see any recent results if the gear is especially rare.
Click on more options and you can choose how often you receive emails, what sources Google searches, language, region, and what quality of results you would like to see. I would leave the results on “only the best results.” If changed to “all results”, you may receive many emails that are not very relevant.
Hit the “create alert” button and your set. Now, anytime Google finds new information about the guitar gear that you specified you will receive an email. If you receive too many emails you can change the settings.
This about sums it up.
This about sums it up. (But not to analog. Sorry!) 😛 I hope these tips have helped you think outside the box when trying to find vintage guitar gear! Have you found any cool gear using these methods? If so leave a comment!
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