The finest production-built electric guitar I've ever played.

It's really not fair to compare this to hand-luthiered, custom-build electrics, but that's what I'm going to do. I'm a long-time lover of Fender Strat-style guitars, and have played those single-coil marvels for almost 25 years. I was in the market for a modern guitar that was built for more modern and extreme styles of playing. I needed something with hotter pickups, more soaring harmonics, and a tremolo/whammy setup that I could abuse the living snot out of.

Ibanez is the gold standard for those, but I've never liked the almost sharp edge radius on their bodies, which look like graceless Strat copies cut out of a single plank of wood. Even the Jem series that Steve Vai plays, which command sky-high prices at the top of the production line, are cut from the same ungainly RG shape.

I was seriously thinking about having a guitar custom-built, which I've done before for a Strat-style guitar which I'd post if I could create items. The problem when money's tight is that if you have to sell a custom guitar, it's virtually worthless relative to the build cost: it's a no-name after all. Buy a top-end collector guitar secondhand, though, and it'll be a zero-risk investment that you can unload anytime for the purchase price if you're suddenly in need. So when one of these beautiful guitars came out of somebody's attic virtually unused for below market price, I took the chance.

Let me put it this way: the seller shipped it from Canada tuned to pitch, and when I pulled it out of the box here, the floating bridge was precisely in tune. That should tell you about the build quality we're talking about here. It is without a doubt the finest production guitar I've ever played, and better than quite a few custom shop and hand-luthiered "bespoke" guitars as well.

It's got all those things you metal guys will want, except for extra strings. It's beefy and powerful and unlike my lovely old Strat, it's easy to get blistering tapping runs and squealing harmonic wails out of it. All the crazy dive bombs and stupid guitar tricks you want will come out of this axe if that's what you want to play. What surprised me, though, was how crisp and delicate it could be as a jazz guitar: you can roll off some tone, dial in a less aggressive setting right on the guitar, and settle into some Les Paul, some Wes Montgomery, some Lenny Breau if you want, before cranking the bridge humbucker and going right back to Satch Boogie.

Honestly, aside from playability, which is very good and comparable with any high-end electric, I'd say the extreme tonal versatility is what surprised me the most, and where this axe blows every guitar out of the water. There are only three pickup selections between two pickups, but the high-pass filter and the coil split are incredibly neat functions, especially once you learn to control your volume and gain through guitar, pedals, and amp smoothly. I've never really played the Strats with Tone on anything less than 10 because as you roll off volume or tone you get a lot of mud. Amazingly, volume and tone controls shape the sound of this guitar in really amazing ways: no sound in the instrument's range from dark to bright, from gentle to searing, ever comes at the expense of sound quality. I'm futzing with my amp a whole lot less as the tone control I need is much more onboard than with other guitars I've played.

Finally, owing to that versaility, I'll say this is the only "Signature Series" guitar I've ever played that doesn't lend too much of a signature sound and colour to what you're doing. I've played the Stevie Ray Vaughan SS strat, modeled after SRV's famed "Number One"—and while it was really cool for about 10 minutes sounding like SRV, that's not a tone you want to be your only tone ever again. Likewise with "Lucille"—the B B King signature guitar is great for sounding like B B king, and not so great for almost anything else you'd want a Gibson semi-acoustic (it's really more of a chambered Les Paul) to do. In contrast, the JS2410 will give you a range of respectable copycat sounds if you buy it to sound like Satriani (hot tip: the most important part of Satch's rig is 40 years of intense practice). The tones are right, the sustain is right (though don't be fooled, this guitar doesn't have a tricksy Sustainiac built in, though it sustains so well it doesn't need one). Unlike the other models, though, a few quick knob twirls and pedal adjustments and you no longer sound anything like Satriani. Want to sound like Springsteen instead? How about Mark Knopfler? Cream-era Clapton? Bad 80s-soundtrack-era Clapton? It takes very little monkeying to get you from here to there.

I play this guitar through a Line 6 M13 into a Line 6 modelling amp, and I know those things normally get a bad rap, but they work so incredibly well with this guitar. There is tone for days and the electronic gadgetry plays very nicely with the high output of this guitar. You don't experience a lot of tone suck at all when plugging through numerous fairly inorganic, synthetic effects. I'd go so far as to say my effects & amp setup improved when I plugged in this guitar.

All in all I couldn't be happier and heartily recommend it. And as a final note since I was whining about the Ibanez shape, this body has the sleep rounded edges that made the original Strats so sexy in the 1950s, and THEN some. It's a delight to hold and play, though it's obviously a little heavier than the traditional Stratocasters, and you will never get tired of the plain simple beauty of the thing.

No fancy pearl or abalone; just a couple neck dots. No curly puffy quilt-maple patterns. No gimmicks like auto-tuning bridges or light-up doodads or other distractions. It is elegant in its simplicity and a joy to play.