-
This guitar is being sold online for a suspiciously low price. The seller said it was a Gibson "L5 Yaz". I said "Do you mean 'L5 CES'?" and they said yes. The seller does not appear to be very proficient in English so it was difficult to have any kind of in-depth discussion with them. They said they bought the guitar secondhand "for two years" and hasn't used it much.
What do you think? I know nothing about Gibsons—they're way out of my price range.
-
02-01-2019 08:49 PM
-
Fake. Everything about the guitar is wrong.
Keith
-
I'd be more confident buying the chair.
-
Not even a little bit close.
-
Thanks! I figured it was too good to be true!
Originally Posted by floatingpickup
-
That is no L5. And it's a pretty bad attempt at even attempting to imitate an L5. There are just so many things that are un-L5.
It looks like an Epiphone Joe Pass with a fake Gibson headstock . Brutal.
-
Yup its a fake, run... Or I have Elaines number if you like fakes
-
Well, the headstock says Gibson. Not much else does, though.
-
These things are all over sites like aliexpress.
That one is unusual in that they didn’t even using a floating bridge. I wonder what those posts are mounted into.
I’m not sure they know how to intonate a floating bridge anyway.
-
Ah yes, the Gibson “L5 Yaz”, that’s a classic. It’s like they didn’t even try to imitate an L5. Said to themselves “copy the headstock, give it f holes, people won’t know the difference”. Also wasn’t Yaz a prescription birth control back in the 90’s or something?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
-
Wow. I’m no Gibson scholar but I’ve never seen a fake that bad.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
-
Pay him in Monopoly dollars. It is not worth the shipping fee; that requires real money. Maybe he accepts cryptocurrency? I think I may just have some ICO mined out of my laptop. I call it AurumFoolem.
-
No way in hell is that an L5. A no brainer.
-
The pillows in the photos are a nice touch.
-
Chibson
-
Yaz: Originally Posted by RoboTom
Yaz can either be used as a verb meaning 'to pee' or the sound it makes when you pee.
--Urban Dictionary
-
Cheap fake. They run about $250-$300 online. Hope we'll see some crackdowns as part of the China trade deals.
-
-
Why would anyone try to use a $600+ Instrument with luthier tools (means faking the headstock with acceptable reality) when on alibaba you got the whole fake for $350. Besides of the above nonsense, the Epi has floating bridge and no center block or anything to hold the fixed bridge. The pickguard is Epi style though. Originally Posted by va3ux
-
Fake!
-
I know this is an old thread, but I am a moderator on an Ibanez Jem website, and the real danger here is the people who instead of reaching out to the selling platform to say its a counterfeit, instead go directly to the seller. They say things like, "the body isn't the right width, the tailpiece is wrong, etc." and the next round of fakes becomes that much better.
Please keep this in mind when you see these: If you suspect the seller is in Asia particularly, don't ever give them any information they can use to improve their next attempt at a fake.
-
Jim, this would be true in 1960, but in 2021 all the information, specs and *photos* are on the Internet and available for everyone, who want to make a fake. Originally Posted by jim777
-
It isn't about the fake as much as it is about the ignorance of the customer. Many will not do their homework if they think they've found a bargain and need to grab it quick or lose out. I'd be surprised if there is a single person here who doesn't know of someone who bought a fake something on the Internet because they didn't know the difference and didn't want to lose the opportunity to get something 'too good to be true'. Originally Posted by Gabor
I've seen it happen with Ibanez guitars literally thousands of times in my 20 years of being a mod on a guitar forum. It isn't for nothing that Ibanez came out with the "Jem Jr." for $299 new, it was because of all the copies mass produced in China getting better and better and better over time. Ibanez wanted folks with only a few bucks to get something real and not even be tempted by the fakes of their $2000 guitars because too many buyers couldn't tell the difference. I've probably told 50 guys over the years, "Sorry man, that's a Chinese knockoff" and it hurts every single time. If that had happened to me back in '75 when I started, having saved for literally years to get my first good guitar, I don't know that I'd still be playing.
-
I was talking about giving observations on differences does not count as help to the fake maker in 2021, because you mentioned this issue as part of the problem.
-
I don't think that's always ignorance, Jim. People buy fakes for many reasons, but I don't think ignorance is the main one. For years, my first thought when shown or told about a "score" on a $750 L-5 or a $25 Rolex was "how stupid can you be?" - but I've since come to realize that issues of emotion trump those of intelligence almost every time. I'm sure that some actually do let "I'll never have another chance to own one of these" cloud their vision, common sense, and judgment. But I know many people who've bought cheap fakes in the bizarre belief that they can pass them off as real in an effort to fake something about themselves. And their personal fakery is most often as obvious as that of their possession(s). Greed is only a common factor among the truly ignorant who think they can resell it at a profit. Everyone who actually thinks you can buy a $750 L-5 will look first on the internet, find these new, and wonder why anyone would pay more for a used one with no documentation. Originally Posted by jim777
Some who intentionally (or "innocently - wink, wink") buy fakes want to be thought of as richer than they are. Others want to be considered more knowledgeable or sophisticated than they are. Some want a target population (like those in a watch club, a guitar forum, etc) to accept them. I suspect that more than a few fakes are sold to players of modest ability who think they'll be more welcome at jams and gigs if they seem to have a great instrument. Of course, some actually buy into their own fantasies. I strongly doubt that anyone with any knowledge of a top quality product of any kind is totally unaware of the fact that you can't buy a real one from a bona fide commercial vendor for 10% or less of its market value. Most of the people who buy these have to know somewhere deep inside that they're buying into and using fakery for their own purpose. If outed by a knowledgeable friend or thwarted in an attempt to dump it when discovering it's a dog, they assuage their shame with a story about how they were duped - but 99% of those who buy something like a $750 L-5 know they bought a fake.
Those who know what the real thing is, have always wanted one, and are intrigued by the remote possibility that they've found a bargain will be sufficiently skeptical to use the same internet on which they found it to research it. Having lived through this with many friends and coworkers, I've observed that 99% learn enough to pass on it. There are two more interesting fakery issues for me. First, most fakes are so fake that you can spot it a mile away. Given the cost and effort required to set up a facility and business to make and market fakes, I've always wondered why most were so bad. The one that started this thread is so far removed from an L-5 in basic shape and features that it was probably an existing guitar model rather than an ad hoc effort to make a fake L-5. If you're going to the time, trouble, effort, and expense needed to build a model to spec, it takes no more of each to shape the headstock right than wrong. Putting a Cupid's bow on the fingerboard is probably a bit more, but little else is. The block inlays on that L-5 are clearly the wrong size and proportions. But if you're doing inlays, it's no harder or more costly to make them exact replicas of the original. Even the tailpiece could probably have been faked with a stamped replica, yet the one in the OP has what's probably a generally available part from an existing cheap guitar. Most fakes seem to me to be made from existing bare bodies, necks and parts designed and originally made for modest guitars (many of which are probably decent values).
The big problem for all of us is the fakes that are good enough to fool experts and that sell for market prices. There are enough wonderful vintage guitars out there with proper maintenance, repairs, refinishing etc to make it hard to tell the patina of use from camouflage. But I think that the cheap and obvious knock-off industry feeds the insecure far more than the ignorant.
Reply With Quote
“Shearing style”
Today, 05:26 PM in Comping, Chords & Chord Progressions