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Bass is a Squier and I wouldn't be able to pick it out.

Guitar is an Ibanez AR250 and it has a nice scratch on the headstock from careless use of wire cutters about 20 years ago that I never bothered to do anything about.

It would only take one look at the pitted, green corrosion that my sweat causes on everything it touches to recognize one of my guitars or basses.

I'd recognise my own bass from the donks. This has never happened but I'm sure I'd be able to tell mine from an identical model just by looking.

My current guitar is only a year old so it hasn't got many donks yet. And maybe I haven't really spent much time looking at it either. I've mostly just played it on stage. Well, I'm changing the bridge so it will have a non-factory bridge soon.

Being able to tell if someone has switched your guitar like a dead gunea pig is one thing. Being able to describe it in an identifiable way in a police report is another matter. I should really write down the serial numbers somewhere huh. I guess for the bass there is one fairly large chip on the back of the top horn, and there is also a rectangular sticker I stuck on the pickguard, under the strings next to the pickup, back when my friends' band first got signed and their record label gave them a whole lot of stickers. This has been there for so long that the image has been worn completely away by string action; it's now just a barely-noticeable white rectangle on the white pickguard.

My beloved Hagstrom H2N was stolen from our tour van 28 years ago and I would recognize it in under 5 seconds.

my main guitar has some really really light but specific scratches that i put in there by accident, dont remember how they got there, i think i was trying to scrape some shit off the body with a pick but the pick ended up scratching the finish in a weird way that i havent seen on any other guitar. only viewable under specific lighting conditions

twelvepoint wrote: Sat Dec 11, 2021 5:12 am Are we talking visually, or by the way the guitar feels or sounds? Visually, it’s pretty easy for me to identify my instruments by dings and irregularities. If I were blindfolded that’s another thing. I have a couple old Guilds where the finish has worn/flaked off the neck that I’d pick up on. But my newer guitars (a tele and Rick 12 string), no I don’t think I could tell if they were swapped out with another, if the setup was reasonably close to the original.

Oooooooh, I like the idea of a blindfold test.
What if you can't see it and you can't play it in the sense of strumming a chord or string, but you can touch it.

Now this is getting theoretically interesting.

Yah, there is a minor flaw in the factory paint, and the pickguard is cracked.

My Les Paul Special was a 1985 re-issue, tobbacco sunburst. Two soapbar P-90s .

I acquired a 1964 dogear P-90 and asked a luthier to install it in the bridge position.
So he cut the pickguard and mounted the dogear in the hole where the bridge soapbar one was, with the dogears out on the surface.

It sounded fantastic and looked weird.

Yeah, I would recognize that, as I am sure it is the only one in the world.

I've had the same Guild acoustic for 25 years, so all kinds of cosmetic wear and tear that is all mine, and it has a piezo pickup w a dead battery. My newish black Mexican Tele would be much tougher. The G string has a slight buzz currently that would be a tell. Last year I inherited a 40-year-old Fender 12-string acoustic when my partner's dad died and I've only restrung it once so far. Would go more by feel and sound than sight there probably.