If I was being strict about this then both of my items would be guitars. Guitars are after all unique. My “would never sell” would be my acoustic guitar, a quite unusual 1991 Gruhn Design Hohner D2 with a solid spruce top and rosewood back and sides. It was a model only made for a couple of years by Hohner who were trying to shake off their budget reputation by getting George Gruhn, the well-known guitar dealer, to design a guitar for them. They must have lost money on them as the didn’t make many. I bought mine second hand for £200 in 1995.
My “wish I’d held on to” would be a no-name P bass. Ash bodied, maple neck and fingerboard, clear gloss lacquer with a white scratchplate. Quite ugly and extraordinarily heavy but it was my first bass and I wish I still had it.
So on to what my non-guitar items would be. I actually buy very little gear and I sell even less. I’ve always tried to live by a “buy something you’ll keep and if you can’t afford it, wait” policy.
BAE1073 MPF
My choice for an item I’d never sell would be my BAE1073 MPF. A 2 channel Neve 1073 clone I bought in preference over a real Neve because a modern Neve isn’t quite the way they made them back in the ’70s. This is. On a more practical level, this is all hand-wired, with no surface mount components and should be repairable by anyone with some know-how and a soldering iron. It will outlast me, stay compatible with anything I might have to connect it to and will never be orphaned by a new operating system. And it sounds fabulous.
Roland Juno 106
My “wish I’d held on to” isn’t a guitar but it is an instrument - a synth. However, unlike a guitar, a synthesiser doesn’t vary from example to example as a guitar does. It’s an appliance rather than something alive like a good guitar. It’s a Juno 106 that I bought from my local music shop in 1988. At this time, just before dance music and rave culture broke through in the UK, you could barely give an analogue synth away. This is the period when people were chucking out classic analogue polysynths because they didn’t have a decent piano patch and while I didn’t really know what I was buying, I thought it looked cool and it didn’t cost much.
I’ve tried the Roland Cloud version of the 106 and can confirm that I really wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and the original. But there is something great about a big grey 80s polysynth. It had patch memories, MIDI, the famous (and noisy) Juno chorus, DCOs so it never went out of tune and a great, fat unison mode. Add a touch of Bright Plate reverb from your Quadraverb, open up the filter on a big sawtooth bass and you’re in business!