A Beginner’s Guide to the Patina Range
If you love the look and feel of a vintage guitar but don’t love vintage guitar prices, Patina Guitars is worth a look. The brand builds affordable electrics with genuine nitrocellulose finishes, stainless steel frets, and other details usually reserved for far more expensive instruments. Here’s a simple breakdown of the range to help you find your way in.
What Makes Patina Different
Most budget guitars use polyurethane finishes, which are durable but seal the wood in a way that limits how the guitar ages and resonates over time. Patina guitars are hand finished in real nitrocellulose lacquer instead, the same type of finish found on vintage and high end instruments. Nitro finishes breathe with the wood, and over years of play they naturally check, wear, and develop character, so no two well loved Patina guitars end up looking quite the same.
Alongside the nitro finish, every model in the range comes with stainless steel frets that resist wear far longer than standard nickel frets, locking tuners for tuning stability, a bone nut, Alpha pots, and custom wound Alnico V pickups voiced for clarity and bite. These are the kind of specs you’d normally expect to pay a lot more for, and Patina builds them in as standard rather than treating them as upgrades.
The Four Series, Explained Simply
Patina’s lineup is organized into four series, and once you understand the basic differences between them, choosing a model becomes much easier.
3 Series This is the natural starting point for the range. The 3 Series guitars use an SSS pickup configuration in a classic double cutaway body, built from a paulownia body with a roasted maple neck. They arrive with a clean, unrelic’d nitro finish, meaning the guitar is a blank canvas that will age naturally the more you play it. If you like the idea of your guitar earning its own character over time, this is the series to start with.
4 Series The 4 Series shares the same double cutaway shape, paulownia body, and clean nitro finish as the 3 Series, but swaps in an HSS pickup configuration, pairing two single coils with a humbucker at the bridge. That extra humbucker gives you a thicker, higher output tone alongside the classic single coil sounds, making this series a good option if you want a bit more versatility for heavier styles without leaving the vintage aesthetic behind.
6 Series Step up to the 6 Series and you get the same SSS configuration and double cutaway shape as the 3 Series, but with a light relic finish already applied. If you like the look of a well worn instrument but don’t want to wait years for it to develop naturally, this series gives you that vintage, well played vibe right out of the box, and it will only continue to age further the more you play it.
7 Series The 7 Series pairs the HSS pickup configuration from the 4 Series with the light relic finish from the 6 Series, again in the classic double cutaway shape. It’s the pick for players who want both the extra tonal flexibility of a bridge humbucker and a guitar that already looks like it has some history behind it.
A Quick Way to Choose
If you’re trying to decide where to start, it helps to ask yourself two simple questions. First, single coils or a bit more output? SSS models in the 3 and 6 Series keep things classic and chimey, while the HSS models in the 4 and 7 Series add a humbucker for extra thickness and versatility. Second, do you want your guitar to age naturally, or do you want that vintage look from day one? The 3 and 4 Series arrive with a clean finish ready to develop its own story, while the 6 and 7 Series come lightly relic’d already.
Whichever series you land on, every Patina guitar is built around the same idea: genuine vintage specs, without the vintage price tag. You can browse the full range and individual models on the Patina Guitars website, or use the dealer locator to try one in person.