On Thursday April 14 I said goodbye to an old friend. My Heritage H-550 Custom had been with me since December 2004. I still look back at the email thread with Jay Wolfe from Wolfe Guitars and smile because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The instruments craftsmanship was superior, the attention to detail was amazing and the sound was fantastic.
Still, I was using an instrument way out of my league and only reinforced the adage that the musician makes the guitar, not the other way around. This is something I have had to remind myself when I look at cameras with a several thousand dollar price tag.
I had been contemplating selling the guitar since the middle of 2008, and when I was unable to find anyone I knew to buy it the guitar was posted on Kijiji. Perhaps as a way of saying I shouldn’t sell it, it took some time to find a serious buyer.
I had several offers for a trade but only had two people show actual interest in buying it for money. The ad was on Kijiji for thirteen, maybe fourteen months, maybe more. Every three months I would get an ad expiration notice and I would repost it, bumping the ad to the top of the pages, receive the random email of interest here or there but that was it. Selling a $2,000 instrument in Edmonton was quite a challenge, but it’s a high end instrument that has a niche market so I understand that it took a while for the right buyer to come along.
I didn’t need to sell the guitar, but I wasn’t playing it and I could put the money towards other areas. I originally wanted to sell the guitar to buy a DSLR and a Playstation 3. Both of those items sorted themselves out before the end of 2008 so the sale of the guitar would go towards paying their purchase off or other bills.
The gentleman who bought the guitar gave the H-550 a workout, something it has been deprived of for too long, and it sounded amazing. Hearing a guitar you love perform a swan song was incredibly bittersweet. I thought that I had made the wrong decision, but in the last year and a half the Heritage never sounded as good as it did then. It is going to a better place and to an owner who knew the level of craftsmanship the instrument had and treat the guitar right.
When I closed the Kijiji ad I noticed that I had 1337 views, which felt like a nice way to end the sale.
