Rivington Guitars — Local services in New York

I hate to give a one star review to a small NYC business but I was compelled to write this after purchasing a vintage guitar from them recently.

I walked into Rivington about two months ago and found a 1976 Tele that I lusted for immediately upon laying eyes on it. Had a killer look and sounded pretty great too. Though I thought it needed a bit of a setup, I was interested in buying it--the only holdback for me was that it was $3195--a very steep price for that particular guitar. Other Teles from that era that I had come across ranged anywhere from $2300-3000 depending on originality and condition. When I asked an employee why it was priced so high, he responded that it was probably all original and had to check the listing online. He pulled it up and confirmed that it was all original based on Howie's description on the listing ("Vintage Original 1976 Telecaster") and it's high price tag. Under the impression that this guitar was all original and thus had more inherent value, I felt better about the prospect of buying it and I ultimately shelled out the extra cash to make it mine.

After about a week and a half of having the guitar in my possession, I was disappointed to find that it couldn't stay in tune. I wanted to get it set-up to my specs anyway, so I took it to a friend of mine who does in-house repairs at the famed Gruhn's Guitars in Nashville (who also happens to be one of their vintage Fender experts). He asked how much I paid for it and I told him the number. Within 10 minutes of running down the guitar, he informed me that the bridge was not the one that would have come with the guitar in '76 (additionally, it didn't even have the right screws for the saddles, which made the setup funky), one of the pots in the guitar was not original and the other was placed on the wrong knob (It also occurred to Gruhn's that these pots had been rewired to settings that weren't the way the factory would have made it), the strap pins weren't original, neck pickup had been re-routed, and the plastic pickup selector was not stock either.

To boot, part of the reason it wouldn't stay in tune was that it had pretty bad kick-up on the neck, a detail I overlooked when playing it in the shop--to make it play right it would need a refret. Sweet.

I'm a working musician, not a guitar collector, but I was pretty disappointed to find out that I had paid for a guitar that should have been sold for much less--not to mention I was lied to about the guitar I was purchasing.

I sent Howie an extensive email explaining my dissatisfaction with the purchase and why I felt deceived by his business. I closed it out by asking for a full refund despite the store's "no refund policy" (gee, I wonder why that is...). He opened up his response with "We are very careful about telling our customers that a guitar is all original..." and then went on to accuse me of tampering with the unoriginal parts myself: "How do we know if these parts are actually correct at this point once the guitar has left the store?" ... Are you kidding me?

Needless to say, no refund issued and instead I got a virtual middle finger from the seller.

Between the whacky bridge and neck kick-up it's gonna cost me even more to make this guitar play right, and I already paid a considerable amount more for it than I should have based on its true value.

The takeaway is that this place either doesn't really know what they are selling and so they carelessly slap on high price tags and false claims to see if anyone bites, or they do know what they are selling, lie, and overprice it anyways--neither warrants anything more than a 1...

In my experience behind the counter in retail for over a dozen years, I always found the customer supplied roughly 90% of the attitude. Rivington Guitars is run by stone-cols pros who know their guitars and have an extraordinarily high level of accommodation and respect with every customer I've ever see any Rivington guy deal with, whether in the main shop or "Acoustic West." Like most dyed-in-the-wool vets and professionals, suffering fools is part of the game. They do that well, too. But, waaay more importantly, when you walk into either Rivington on East 4th, you are confronted with an array of unexpected offbeat vintage guitars, along with the choice Strats and Gibsons, that make you ahemmm break out the bucks. If old guitars mean something to you. This is a Must Visit shop. As for Derek Hamilton's experience directly below, I am genuinely sorry to read he wasn't happy regarding Neal Winkowski, Rivington's Luthier/repair man. Neal has worked on my '54 D-28, '58 Coronet, '57 Strat, '60 Strat, '64 Hummingbird, '66 Guild Starfire, '68 Ric 360, '59 Country Club, '61 Casino, Neal BUILT my hybrid Srat Tel with all vintage Fender parts '57 - '68... I have been thrilled with every job he's done whether a repair, a sprucing-up, a modification. Vintage loonies like me are very persnickety about who we let near our gems with screwdrivers, glue, soldering irons... Neal is The Man. Thank you. Rivington's entire team is non-pariel for dead-straight dealings with good humor. One of the joys of living in NYC is there is ALWAYS another guitar shop to patronize. I go...

Walked in here for the first time the other day to check it out. I’ll start with this, a lot of the bad reviews here are people that seem to not have done any of their own due diligence about the instrument they are buying. I can tell you one thing, I’m not dishing out $3500 for a vintage guitar without doing my own research and double checking if all the parts look original, etc. That said, their guitar curation is garbage and their staff, including the owner don’t know much of anything about the instruments they are selling. Or they are just a sham guitar shop and screwing the people buying things by lying to them. They need to own up to one of these because I asked a hardware related question about one of the guitars and the answer I got was entirely off by two decades from when the guitar was produced. So again, either they are lying to sell over priced guitars or they literally know nothing about the guitars they are selling.

All this aside, the guitars they have are in bad shape and very few, if any at all were original. The ones that had repairs done to them or has attempts made to it to look decent, the components and parts used in this were the lowest grade ones on the market. If this shop were to be compared to guitar brands they are like a squire guitar. Pretending really really hard but it’s not fooling anyone.

Everything said about hospitality in the reviews is true.

If you want to go to a great vintage guitar shop, go to Southside Guitars in Williamsburg but don’t waste top dollar to get a squire with a Gibson...