gillyribeiro's Studio Setup

Fantastic guitar! Flawless right out of the box. One of (many) Yamaha's best kept secrets.

Alder body, flamed maple veneer top, maple neck, rosewood board.

Factory-loaded with a Seymour Duncan 59/JB set and Yamaha piezo pickups, this guitar covers everything you want to do. Its dual output allows to use a dual-amp setup, which, essencially, makes it easier to control the tone. Either way, you can use a single output and the blend pot to mix your magnetic and piezo signals (lessons learnt from the Yamaha's bass guitar department). You can't go wrong with the 59/JB pair. They cover the whole gamut.

The only con is the nut. It should be GraphTech. But that's very easily solved. Pair that with the stock Sperzel locking tuners, and you have an über-stable guitar.

A basswood body/maple neck/rosewood board Ibanez RG is a natural benchmark for the super-strat style. And you get just that with the RG470 (I'm basing my review on my own 1997 RG470).

But the rest is rather "cutting corners", or better, a "low cost version" of the RG570.

First off, the licensed Lo-TRS bridge is nothing special. Not even comparable to the high-end Edge family. So, the whole assembly (plus nut) was replaced. Then, the pickups. The HSH configuration is an RG standard, but the stock INF-1/INFS-1/INF-2 aren't that great. At least, if you want to level-up your playing (they get lost in the mix, specially with higher gain levels, which this guitar is meant to be used with). Off with them, enter a set of DiMarzio PAF Pro/HS-2/Evo 2.

And, with that, essencially, only the body remains. So, I consider this as a building block guitar if you happen to have some spare hardware/electronics laying around.

At the end of the day, the construction is top-notch. And, after these mods, it remains my most-used guitar to date. I guess that says it all!