What was your worst buying or selling decision.

Rocker

This is in the Amps section but it applies to guitars or other major pieces of equipment we use. 

In my own case it was trading in a Peavey DB210 for a Line6 Flextone 2. What was I thinking of? I don’t remember actually buying the DB210 but it was resident in our music room for at least a couple of years until I decided that the Flextone was the amp I needed (due to all the amp models that it had).  The DB210 was not very highly rated as an amp but it sounded good to me and it ‘worked’ for me.  The Line6 amp performed as per its spec but it sounded flat and undynamic, whereas the DB210 was everything the Line6 was not.   As I said before, what was I thinking of?

Nerine

Traded a 61 RI 335 VOS for a ‘97 Custom 24. 

stupid stupid stupid. 

This was ages ago, though. I wouldn’t make a similar mistake again. 

ICBM

I sold an all-original 1957 Les Paul Special (with a repaired headstock crack, but even so…) and used the money to buy a TOA 8-track cassette multitracker, a mixing desk and some outboard gear.

The TOA died when out of warranty and was unrepairable. The outboard gear became rapidly worthless.

I challenge anyone to beat that!

tone1

Didn’t buy a ‘71 345, and I also didn’t buy a Cunetto Tele I’d been lusting after……Regretted selling ‘the Tweedyluxe’ 

Grampa

Buying a THR30ii and selling an original THR10.

Danny1969

Maybe Selling a HiWatt Custom 100 amp for £120 in 87 

Or Selling a  Marshall Jubilee head and 4 x 12 cab for £300 in 96 ish

But probably thinking investing over 200K in building a large recording studio was a good idea in 2010

I've certainly learnt my lesson in digital all in one effects  / modellers. There's been so many times I've thought getting one was a good idea but none of them has ever worked out. I've always found plugging into a real amp was so much more enjoyable after a few gigs with a modeller. Luckily I've never blown a huge amount on one, £345 being the most i paid I think. 

On the whole though I've made more money from playing music than I have ever spent on buying  gear, and there's been quite a few gigs where the gig money was enough to purchase ever single thing I used to do the gig. So I'm not complaining. 

viz

Danny1969 said:

there's been quite a few gigs where the gig money was enough to purchase ever single thing I used to do the gig. 

You’re not spending hard enough. 

TheBigDipper

Worst: I sold a Cornford Hurricane just because it ran out of clean headroom in a band with a loud drummer. I used the money to buy a twin channel Rivera, which worked out great, but I lost the sweet, reverby cleans that the Hurricane could deliver at lower volumes.

 Best: I bought a Carr Mercury 8W a few years ago and l can't envisage ever selling it. It makes every guitar I own sound good. 

Kittyfrisk

What is this 'selling' of which you speak?

chromatuna

Sold on a couple of lovely old Marshall 50 watts heads, don’t know which ones sorry, in the late 70s and again in about 82. Glorious things, especially the first non master volume one. That’s dim and distant past though and they would be no use to me now.

It may seem strange but the one I regret most was Peavey Classic 30 that I bought new in Holiday Music Leytonstone (am I right about that name?) in the early to mid 90s and sold on about five years later for another Marshall as the drive sound wasn’t great. The clean sounds were however lovely and as my tastes in amps changed I wish I had held on to that one. Nuthin fancy but as good as a Fender IMHO.

Rocker

@Kittyfrisk, selling could be trade ins or the usual selling something for cash

Blueingreen

Best: Wal bass I bought for £300 and sold within a few years for approximately £1,450. It wasn’t all upside though because they kept getting more valuable and I could have got a lot more a few years later.

Worst: Les Paul Custom from around 1970 bought for iirc £220, sold for £400. I’ve no complaints, I needed the money and it was a fair price at the time. But typically I tend to hold on to stuff rather than sell it, and if I’d done the same with that guitar (and the Wal) I’d have a couple of very valuable instruments on my hands.

JohnPerry

ICBM said:

I sold an all-original 1957 Les Paul Special (with a repaired headstock crack, but even so…) and used the money to buy a TOA 8-track cassette multitracker, a mixing desk and some outboard gear.

The TOA died when out of warranty and was unrepairable. The outboard gear became rapidly worthless.

I challenge anyone to beat that!

OK. 

I sold a beautiful 1970 Gibson Les Paul Deluxe Goldtop to a bloke in a pub car park in Windsor for £250 in order to fund a Jap Strat with a locking trem for about £350. This was 1984, but still.

I still have the Strat. It smirks at me

TTBZ

The one I still regret most is the MIJ Pearl LP I sold for about £200 to help cover the costs of a parts guitar (which I also subsequently sold anyway). It was a heavy fucker but sounded and played really well, looked cool with all it's natural wear too. I'd love to find and buy it back one day as it's probably still my favourite LP I've played. 

Other than that I probably should have held onto my Laney GH50L which again I sold for peanuts buy a Marshall. I love the Marshall and don't currently need 50w, but it was a great amp and probably just needed a different boost pedal to get what I wanted out of it.

TimmyO

Sold a 1977 JMP 2x12 combo for £500. 

sw67

Worst - Trading in 74 twin reverb in 1994 for a blues deluxe
  Best - Buying a 74 twin reverb in 2022 for £50

Stuckfast

I had a Roland Jupiter 8 synth which I sold for under £3k. In a sense I wish I'd kept it, as it'd be worth many times that now. But I needed the money then, and you can get better synths now for a lot less than £3k.

1Strat2many

Still regret selling my first name electric Guitar, a 63 Gibson Es330 (bought in january 70 for £110 and sold for £265) and my first quality Valve Amp, A 1973 Pro Reverb sold for £175, both sold in 1980. On the plus side, over the decades, I have bought many great Guitars and Amps at (now) unrepeatable prices. Most of these I still have, play and treasure. I did “buy back” a stunning 66 ice tea es330 in 2004 and also have a number of Classic Fender Amps as well as a couple of Vox’s and a Marshall

tekbow

Possibly a controversial one.. and it's not a spectacularly bad decision so much as a personal preference, but there was no need for me to upgrade my old Soldano HR50+ to an SLO100, I genuinely wasn't missing anything.

Now that's not to say that the HR is objectively"better", but it's voicing, subtle as the differences are, might have been slightly more appropriate to what I play.

markj

Buying a Hamstead Artist 20 head.
24 hrs later, what the Fxxk have I done.

p90fool

Worst selling decision, the pittance I got for every 4-hole Marshall I sold before the turn of the millennium. 

Worst buying decision, a brand new Marshall dual reverb head, which sounded so terrible I gave it away for free when it was a few months old.