The Fret Wear Test Most Guitar Buyers Get Wrong

The shiny frets everyone trusts

You probably think fret wear shows up as dull, shiny grooves you can spot under a bright light. It doesn't always. A fret can look glassy and smooth while it's already worn past playable - the wear that kills tone hides in fractions of a millimeter, not visible craters.

What actually wears down first?

Frets don't wear evenly across their whole length. A Stratocaster with fret buzz almost always shows the damage in three narrow zones - right where the first three fingers land the most, usually between the second and seventh frets. Everywhere else, the wood and metal can look brand new. That uneven pattern is the real signal, not an overall dull finish.

Why your eyes get fooled?

Light plays tricks on rounded metal. A worn fret catches light differently depending on the angle, so tilting a guitar under a store lamp can make a flattened fret look perfectly round, and a healthy fret look worn. Staff at A-1 Trade & Loan on Commercial Drive see this constantly with trade-ins that owners swear are mint, because the seller judged the frets by eye alone under one light source. Eyes are unreliable here. Touch is not.

The straightedge trick that actually works

The fastest real test takes about ten seconds and needs no tools. Lay a credit card or a metal ruler flat across three neighboring frets. If the card rocks or you can slide a piece of paper underneath in the middle, those frets have worn low enough to cause buzzing. Do this in five spots along the neck, not just one, since wear clusters in those first-position zones. A guitar that passes this test everywhere usually plays clean the moment you plug it in.

The clue that hardware can't fake

Worn frets and fret buzz matter less to long-term value than most buyers assume. A neck that stays straight, with original tuners and a real matching case, holds its price even with fret wear, because a fret job is a routine, affordable fix. What kills value is a warped neck or non-original hardware pretending to be stock, since neither of those problems gets solved with a quick refret. Fret wear is cosmetic and fixable. A twisted neck is structural and permanent. Buyers who panic over shiny frets often miss that distinction entirely.

Before handing over cash for any used guitar, run the credit-card test across five spots on the neck, then pull up sold listings on Reverb or eBay for that exact model and year to see what a comparable instrument with similar wear actually brought. Bring the original case to that comparison too, since cased guitars consistently sell higher than the same guitar sold bare. Thirty seconds with a card and two minutes of scrolling will tell you more than staring at frets under a store light ever will.