fraze

Excellent copy of Martin D35 from late 70's / early 80's - so good that Yamaha couldn't make a profit on it and withdrew it after 18 months. Solid top, excellent build. Left handed in my case, so rare.

The cheapest of the Artcore range, the AF75 has warm bassy stock pickups for a jazz-blues vibe and is a true hollow body whereas most models in this style guitars have a hefty wooden block inside to improve sustain and kill feedback. Suits heavier strings for a vintage blues sound. Individual tone pots for each humbucker - the stock pups sound good to me although purists seem to favour upgrading to Gibson. Lacks the treble attack of some ES335 / Gretsch clones which are more suited to rock, and the true hollow body makes feedback inevitable at higher volumes - neat if you can control it, nasty if not. Beautiful gloss finish on the body, classy hardware including the tailpiece - a stunning looking guitar. It has a floating bridge which makes setup harder - likely to need a pro setup to start with and then care in changing strings so as not to move the bridge and put the intonation out. The body is plywood, which means it sounds quiet and pretty flat unplugged as it is acoustically dead. Also, there is some buzzing from the strings below the bridge. So, fine to play unplugged for your own reference but don't plan to perform with it that way! With an RRP around £300, you get a lot for your money - jazz purists tend to go for higher spec models in the Artcore range but this suits me fine for jazz-blues noodling and as bit of Hendrix. And as a lefty, you have to take what you can get as Ibanez no longer make LH Artcore models, I believe...

Solidly made and beautifully finished mahogany bodied electric with surfy asymmetrical shape and a glittery paintwork finish which isn't obvious from the picture. Neat gofaster stripes. Pickups are stock from the Korean factory where it is made - good quality but a touch hot and need rolled back for tone. The bridge pickups are counterwound and work together as a humbucker, although the tone is a trebly single-coil tone. Middle pckup position gives a nice "quack" while the neck pickup is a moody jazz or blues tone. Mine has a jazzmaster-style tremolo unit fitted by Chris Dipinto himself who is a fellow lefty. Good for surf, punk, rock, metal - pretty much anything. Well finished fast rosewood neck. Cons: heavy due to the solid mahogany body, not much subtlety about the pups, poor resale value.

Half a dozen echo effects, all useful including modulated echo (sound goes muffled as it repeats and dies away) and backwards echo (good psychedelic effect!). Casing built like a tank. It has occasionally seized up - that is, you can still hear the guitar but the echo effect has vanished completely. Powering down and up again cures it. Good bang for your buck - I suspect there are better but you would pay twice as much for them.