Help dating a Tribute Legacy

Hi everyone. First post in this forum. It's awesome to see all the G&L enthusiasts!

I was hoping someone could shed some light on my Tribute Legacy (age, country of origin etc). I bought it used from someone in Pennsylvania in 2020. I love it a lot, and it ended up being my main S style guitar. I even sold a 2016 MIJ Fender because I liked the G&L so much more.

I can't find much online to help me (I took a look the guide for dating the Legacy line and couldn't find much). This guitar doesn't have a serial number on the back of the headstock, or a country of origin stamp anywhere I can see.

I popped the neck off and found a really faded stamp or label that might be the serial number, but it's very worn. It seems to start with a "10" and looks to be 7 or 8 digits long. Under the pickguard, I found a label with a barcode that says "G&L Nat Legacy Pre-R".

According to the dating guide, what I think is "10" denotes that the guitar was produced in 2010, but part of me thinks this guitar is older than that. The back of the neck was stained green from the previous owner's hand, and the hardware, knobs, etc. seem more worn than I would expect from an, at the time, 10 year old guitar. I'll let y'all (the experts) be the judge on this one though.

Thanks very much, and here are some photos!

https://imgur.com/a/W1DEuTO

Sorry, I had to use an album link because I was having trouble posting these on the forum.

Hey dataznrockinboi!

Welcome and thanks for the site appreciation, we think it pretty great, there’s some knowledgeable folks here and a few like me who just hope some of their awesomeness will rub off on me.

As far as dating a Tribute, I try to be very careful because if my wife finds me fondling a pretty natural bodied beauty like yours I’m in deep trouble!

If you look through this post link you should be able to figure it out.
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=18

Tell us about what ya like to play and jump in often!

Welcome to our site!

Here are your photos which needed to be resized because they are larger than 1024x1300:







You have a Tribute Series Legacy made in Korea and from the notation "G&L Nat Legacy Pre-R" it might mean it is a pre-release build
for G&L's evaluation prior to release which was in 2003. The build year could be 2002 or 2003.
It looks like the Serial Number was removed from the back of the headstock. Look closely near the top of the back of headstock you can see a faint rectangle the size of an eight digit number waterslide.
The barcode numbering in the bathtub route in the body is the model number coding for this model, it is not the Serial Number.
See this post regarding G&L Tribute Series Serial Number formats used: Re: Serial number significance

Here is a link to the Specifications of the 2003-2004 Tribute Series Legacy from the Internet Archives of the glguitars.com website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040927023137/http://www.glguitars.com/tribute/instruments/Legacy/index.asp

Here is a post about the Tribute Series introduced in 2003:
What is the new Tribute series which G&L announced in 2003?

Hope this helps.

I found a photo of a 2002 prototype Tribute by G&L S•500, which shows where the Serial Number would be and the stickers indicating the
Country of origin.



Hope this helps.

Thank you so much for the info everyone! The "Pre-R" part is interesting because I wonder how the original owner got his hands on this guitar... It seems like he really loved the guitar and played it a lot and I got it for a bit of a steal.

I'm using it right now to play in two bands, but it mostly gets use on one of them as it's a modern R&B/soul project. My other band is a country tinged indie rock band which I use my Yamaha Revstar for because it calls for humbuckers. Glad to be a part of this community! I plan on checking out more G&L guitars and possibly a bass in the future..