Fender Custom Shop Masterbuilder: The Rise in Popularity of Relicing]

The relic’d guitar trend has swept through the market in recent years. Be it Gibson’s Murphy Lab going to extreme lengths to make new guitars look like they’ve seen decades on the frontline, or firms like Charvel offering pre-roughed-up axes as a stylistic choice, relic’d guitars are selling like hot cakes.

As Fender Masterbuilders, Andy Hicks and Austin MacNutt have seen this trend gain traction firsthand and believe they understand the reasons for its growth, and are also keen to dismiss one of the biggest counterarguments.

“There are people who want an instrument that looks like it’s straight out of the early ‘50s, and then there are other people who see [relicing] as another aesthetic part of the guitar,” Hicks nods, in conversation with Guitarist.

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“In just the same way as people have their favorite colors, they also tend to have their favorite relicing level,” Hicks adds. “And it’s not about, ‘Does it look like it actually happened to the instrument?’ Something that you’ll hear a lot of is that relicing is like ‘stolen valor’ – like, ‘Oh, you didn’t earn that relicing.’ But I think people who like it are not thinking of it like that. They’re not thinking, ‘I want this instrument to look like I’ve played it for 60 years.’ They just think it’s cool.”

“I always tell people there’s nothing stopping you from ordering a NOS [non-relic] guitar,” MacNutt returns. “I’m more than happy to not beat it up [laughs] – so you can have both.”