Looking for a used guitar - some general questions

Jazzaferri

Have you heard the Stradivarius guitar. Phenomenal sound.

Awful, as any parent of a child who has taken violin lessons can attest.

Oh and for those that wNt, Benedetto are now selling a carved top "Gypsy" guitar.

woodamand

Adventure on the coast - warning, kind of a long read!
I am on vacation on the Oregon coast at Newport a small town of 9,989 souls (yes I looked it up) that has two main industries, fishing and tourism. And, I discovered, one music store called Red Lotus. Yeah, very Oregon I know.
I cannot go thru a town and not go into a music store if one exists. So I stop in there today and see they have some cheapish guitars on the wall, along with you know some violins, basses, strings: your only music store for miles, a bit of everything.
I say hello to what I am guessing is the owner, and he says play anything you want. I pick up what looks to be the best instrument in the store, some Chinese made acoustic and start banging away on one of the few GJ tunes I know (after all I just started down this path), and after a few moments put down the guitar. Nothing exciting in this place I think.
I am fixing to leave when the owner says, he I have a GJ guitar over here do you want to try it? I thought, what the hell why not?
Turns out it was a Dell'Arte Anouman, about ten years old, so I was told. The guitar at first glance looks beautiful and amazingly enough, the owner has a thick pick (a Dunlop Primetone as it turns out) and I proceed to bang away on the box.
You already know I have had hardly any chances to play a GJ guitar, so this was a treat to me. I had all the time in the world, so I spent some of it coaxing sounds out of this box. My first impressions: perfectly built with beautiful woods, and with the exception of a few dings here and there, in pristine shape. It was a US made model, not made overseas.
My second impression as I start to play it: thick, blocky D neck. Action is OK, and I have large hands so a big neck is not a problem, but this neck profile would not be my first choice. D hole and 14 frets to the body, which I think is what I want to buy eventually. Really, it is easy enough to play I could get used to it. After all, I play my Harmony archtop constantly, and trust me the neck is bigger on that than on this box.
I play it for some time, tunes, runs, all the usual stuff. I realize that what I read is correct, that GJ guitars, at least this one, sound better when the hand is nearer the bridge as opposed to the tone hole. I am also putting in a bit more force to get the tone out of it.
I try playing at every volume and velocity I can think of, and every speed too. I even do strait rest strokes and up and down strokes - whatever I can think of. I am surprised, the guitar is not as loud as I thought it would be. And while it sounds OK, I am not knocked out by it. It is not particularly bright, or deep or mid-rangey. I guess you could call that balanced, but I wasn't able to get what I considered to be a great tone out of it no matter what I did.
OK, I am new to this so I don't expect to sound fantastic, but I was hoping that this guitar would maybe excite me more than it did. If I owned it and played it all the time I am sure I could coax more tone out of it. It sounded much the same plugged in using the K & K pickup.
The owner wanted $2000 for it, marked down from $2400. I told him I was interested, but not at that price. I have seen lots of comparable Dell'Artes for a lot less than that.
Well, he wasn't interested in that, no bargaining.
Its funny to me that I am probably the one person in 10,000 or so that would wander into this shop and even know what a GJ guitar is, and more than that, have the money to actually buy an instrument if I find one I like.
So maybe the guy is in no hurry to sell? Instead to $2K, I spend $9.00 on the Dunlop picks. I really like the sounds of these picks!