ajcool

Really a beautiful guitar. Usually sold in the 400-500 dollar range, great for a squier but all the budget went into looks. The wide range humbuckers are not articulate enough or warm enough for my liking as well as being brittle and in most models it has 250k pots for humbuckers that should have 500k pots. But if you are willing to replace the pickups and pots then it is easily as good as a 1000 dollar guitar. Fretboard is nice and plays barre chords pretty well, but not the best option for someone trying to shred 16th note runs at high tempo. In my experience the sound hole wasn’t very influential on the sound for a semi-hollow.

I got it as my first amp and it worked pretty well for that, I didn’t have to understand the settings, just choose a preset. Over time however, I began to resent the amp because I was hyper-fixating on warm sounds from tube amps that the solid state couldn’t give me. But now as a more experienced player I am capable of fine tuning the amp settings to get a tone I am actually happy with for jazz. I’ve done multiple performances with this amp in school sized auditoriums and have been able to play loudly enough for it to be distinct even with the master volume a little over halfway. I would recommend this amp if you don’t want to specialize in any genre and it’s pretty good for the price. I also think the tone is pretty muddy and sharp when overdriven and topped gain however I belive that is my guitar pickups fault.

*disclaimer, I got this guitar as a gift I didn’t ask for and I play jazz, not metal.* If you only ever played metal and were a beginner I might recommend this guitar, but for every other situation it disappoints. Firstly, the huge pickups make it close to impossible to play finger style on this guitar, and I have experience playing finger style on humbuckers. Secondly, the fretboard and guitar smells like old dry wood (a side effect of the unglazed wood), which discourages me from playing it and stays on my fingers after playing it. Thirdly, when the tone knob is rolled down the sound is unplayably muddy, I literally can’t distinguish different notes in any pickup position when the tone is all the way down. Fourth, it simply doesn’t play barre chords as well as some other guitars of its level. Some redeemable traits are that the neck does allow you to play fast as advertised, however that’s not my style, and the tuning stability is remarkable. You should definitely look into other guitars for its price range and I’m sure higher end Ibanez’s don’t have the issues I described here.