Tuesday 30 September 2008

Review: Fender Mexican Telecaster

Fender Mexican Telecaster

Let’s face it, Telecasters have a severe image problem. Telecasters are not cool, they are not sexy, they are not hip. I know that you will at this point wave your arms and pull faces at me, giving a long list of top dudes from the most happenin’ bands on the planet who pack a Tele with attitude, but I don’t care. Think Telecaster and the image that comes into your head is not Tom Morello or Lee Glaze, but Francis Rossi, or, worse, Garth Brooks. Albert Collins, the man they dub “the Master of the Telecaster” was last cool round about the same time that the woolly mammoth died out. Telecasters are associated with tedious Country and Western, over-serious blues noodling, and bad ponytails. It is no co-incidence that Andy Summers plays a Telecaster. As cool and hip celebrity rock n' roll endorsements go, Andy Summers is right up there with Prince Phillip.

Of course, it is not Fender’s fault. Uncool people buy guitars just as much as cool people, and Fender have happily been handing them over to personality-free people making personality-free music for decades now (Travis and Coldplay have amassed about twelve thousand between them, apparently). They have even, particularly in the 70’s and 80’s, attempted to make ‘cool’ Telecasters, festooning them with whammy bars, lurid paint schemes, overcooked humbuckers, f-holes and pointy headstocks. They sold about four of them, because, as any fule no, adding cool bits to something that is not cool, just makes it embarrassing, like a Trabant with a spoiler, or a politician with a baseball cap. The cool and happenin’ dudes of the time, took one look, laughed heartily, and went back to their pointy Washburns and heroin addictions.

So the Telecaster has been pretty much unchanged since Wilma Flintstone looked at the prototype and said it looked ‘a bit last year’. Fender, having realised that they are doomed to churn out the same tedious square piece of wood for all eternity, quite sensibly outsourced much of the production to Mexico, so that they wouldn’t have to look at the damn things quite so much. The Mexicans managed to cut the production costs to the extent that you can now be spanking your own plank here in Blighty for as little as £300. Have they sacrificed quality? You might think that it’s not actually possible to get such a basic guitar design wrong, seeing as Telecaster wiring diagrams are available on the floor of Roman villas in mosaic form, but it can, with a great degree of effort, be achieved. Encore, for example, managed such a feat by fitting theirs with the very worst pickups in the entire universe, resulting in an instrument that squealed with feedback if it was so much left in the same room as an amplifier, during a power cut.

Sadly, it seems that Fender’s Mexican suppliers haven’t had that much imagination, and this instrument is solid and well built. The electrics are flawless, no bits are falling off, and everything fits together very well. This example is in fascinating ‘Black’, and other vibrant colours available include ‘Blue’, ‘White’ and, for those that can stand the excitement, ‘Sunburst’.

Plug in and you are treated to the whole gamut of Telecaster tones, from “twangy” to “twangalicious” from two single-coil pickups that are free from noise and well-balanced. Your audience will be pleased to note, as their stomachs surge up through their spinal columns in attempt to strangle their ears, that your country pickin’ rendition of “She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain” is delivered with crystal clarity and excellent string balance. And should you push the boat out for a rousing rendition of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree”, and turn the gain on your amp up to an ear-splitting two-and-a-half, that the tone and character of the guitar (and sadly your own) pushes clearly through the overdrive.

The strings are a bit close together for my fat fingers, but the action is low yet buzz-free, implying neck geometry and fretwork of a very high standard. Make no mistake about it, this is a quality instrument, and considering that is costs less than ‘cheap’ imitation designs from the likes of Tokai and Fernandes, whilst being of at least equal if not superior quality, it represents remarkable value for money. Therefore if you’re going to commit credibility suicide, or if you regularly wear a cowboy hat without irony, you’re best off going for an original, at least at this price. I’ve played an American-built Tele before (I was drunk and it wasn’t mine, ok?) and I honestly can’t say that it was significantly better than this, certainly not enough to justify paying almost three times the price. It would be a great guitar for the studio, partly for its crystal-clear tone and versatility, but mostly because that way no-one will see you play it.

So do you still want to buy a Telecaster? Consider the following facts:

1.Ryan Peake, rhythm guitarist in Nickleback, plays a Telecaster.
2.Ryan Peake is even less cool than Chad Kroeger.
3.Chad Kroeger looks like a gargoyle trying to swallow a squirrel.

Ryan Peake (in common with many things, including the majority of mummified corpses), is less ugly than Chad Kroeger. Chad, however, plays that most fashionable of instruments, a PRS. Therefore, Ryan’s relative lack of coolness must be down to his choice of guitar, implying that playing a Telecaster is about as good for your social stature as organising a Gary Glitter benefit gig.

So yes, this is a quality guitar with character. Sadly the character is that of the assistant manager of the Swindon branch of Endsleigh insurance.

Verdict 4/5

A great guitar that will lose friends and alienate people.

Review: Line6 Variax 600

Do you remember, back in 2002 or so, when the Variax came out? Every magazine put it on its front cover, whole issues were devoted to relentlessly brown-nosing Line6, it was universally hailed as the Future of the Guitar™. We, the buying public, were told that if we did not all go out immediately buy this marvellous piece of technology, the stereotype held by all ‘serious’ guitar people (ones who write for magazines), that all guitarists are conservative luddites who want our guitars to look and play the same way they did when Noah was making a nice little earner selling Stratocasters hewn out of offcuts, would be forever proven true and that the government would have to force people to buy them under pain of imprisonment so that we could all march on to musical heaven.

Which of course was nonsense. Guitarists, as well as other musicians, are always willing to embrace new designs or technology if it’s any good. Amp modellers, transistor-amps, locking trems, peizo pickups and wireless systems were all rapidly adopted by amateurs and professionals alike, either because they were cheaper or more practical than existing options or let you make a new and interesting sound – Line6's own POD was a massive success as it made practicing, recording and even performing, much easier and cheaper. Guitarists love to push the boundaries, of sound, overall volume and acceptable behaviour, but they’ll only turn to something new if it’s any good. Which brings me to the Variax.

Well, six years down the line, I think it’s safe to say that, comrades, the revolution has been postponed. I have never seen a professional musician use one live – the closest I came was seeing a session musician backing a DJ on Jools Holland’s show using the bass version. They’re not, even with new and improved models featuring such radical new ideas as a tremolo arm and a slightly more heterosexual design, exactly flying off the shelves, and have at the most a niche market. Tellingly, no other manufacturer has attempted to produce a rival, even Yamaha, whose massive financial resources and track record in peizo systems, sampling and synthesisers would make them ideally placed to take on that market.

For those of you who this has passed by (and, to the shock of the guitar journos, that may be more than a handful of amnesiacs and recovered coma victims), the Variax is a ‘modelling’ guitar. By means of a few switches and a dial on the guitar, you can ‘call up’ any one of 25 different simulated guitars, with various pickup switching options as well. Models on offer range from Teles and Strats to resonators, acoustics, and even a sitar. So, it's a bit like a keyboard that can be a trumpet, piano or oboe depending on which button you press, you know, like in the 80's, except that it's like only offering 25 kinds of piano and maybe (gasp) a harpsichord.

But to listen to the music press at the time, it was the beginning of a whole new paradigm. With thousands of pounds worth of guitars available at the flick of a switch on an instrument costing just £700, we were all going to burn our oh-so-yesterday Les Pauls and Rickenbackers, because this was the only guitar we’d ever need. Any parallel between this and Line6’s marketing blurb, or between the content of the magazines that came out at the time and what would have happened if the mags just let Line6 write the entire issue for them while they went down the pub instead, is, of course, purely in the eye of the beholder.

A lot of guitar ‘experts’ were made to look pretty silly. A great deal of guitarists, me included, wandered down to their local guitar shop to see what all the fuss was about, played one, though “nah”, and carried on with whatever they happened to be doing. The ‘experts’ were left scratching their heads, either wondering why or castigating the guitar-playing public for failing to appreciate the genius of Line6’s marketing department, sorry, the guitar. So why didn’t it perform commercially the way they said it would?

For a start, as guitarists rapidly discovered, playing one made you look like an absolute tool. Few convincing revolutions look like a 25-year-old Danelectro design left out in the rain. Line6 had obviously decided that a ‘neutral’ look would be best, so that they could sell it to everyone. Of course, that resulted in no-one liking the design, which was uninspired and limp. Truly revolutionary guitars break new ground in design. The Strat and Les Paul, to name but two, were design classics as much as great guitars to play and listen to. The Variax looks as if it was designed by a washing machine salesman. Now I’m the first to rant against shallowness and putting image before music, but this is showbusiness, and looks are very much part of the package. Would Slash be such a legend if he had a short back and sides and wore a suit? Of course not. Now picture him playing a Variax. The problem suddenly comes into focus…

Nor will a Variax make you sound like Slash, either. Partly because Slash is way better than you, but also because you can dial in the right Les Paul and the right amp settings into your POD, but you’ll still be playing a Variax. Part of the Les Paul’s sound comes from its relatively high action, responsive fretboard and massive body sustain, and the Variax has none of these. A Les Paul sounds different from a Strat partly because it has different sound dynamics, but also because players play it differently, due to its shape, size, neck dimensions, weight and the way it responds when you play it. Whatever the knobs on the Variax tell you you’re playing, your hands tell you you’re still playing a cheap Strat, which is what the Variax feels like, and that will affect the way you play, and therefore how you sound. Slash playing a Variax wouldn’t sound like Slash playing a Les Paul, he’d sound like Slash playing a Variax that sounds like a Les Paul. And then he’d hunt down and murder anyone who had photographs of him doing it.

It seems that the geeks at Line6 were so obsessed with their modelling and clever software that they forgot they were making a guitar. This is why the music journos missed the point as well. Most of them are descended from bedroom noodlers. You know the type. Know every scale, study the theory, can disassemble and reassemble a guitar in 5 minutes flat, but lack a creative bone in their bodies and have never played in a band. I knew some at university who were technically stunning, but couldn’t even play standing up. They were often maths and engineering students, with mathematical minds that could recreate anything, learn any scale, but not break out of their own comfort zone into something new. (Apropos of nothing, they tended to like Dream Theater.) To people like this, I’m sure the Variax was very appealing – they could recreate more things, imitate more things, and the fact that they looked like a berk was irrelevant because no-one was watching. The ones who went professional became session musicians, or, more tellingly, guitar journalists.

I’m not saying for an instant that the Variax doesn’t do what it says on the tin. The sounds, by and large, sound right (except the 12-string and sitar, which are almost unlistenable), and it offers a lot of different tones, although there's nothing on offer with active pickups, or any baritones. I’m sure that if you’re in your home studio, recording advertising jingles or whatever, a Variax offers you tremendous flexibility to produce a lot of different sounds that suit whatever it is you want to record. But for anyone playing in front of actual human brings, it’s very different. Especially at the rock/metal end of the spectrum, most gigs are so loud and the sound quality so bad that any subtlety in tone is entirely lost on the audience. If you saw Zakk Wylde playing a Variax, you wouldn’t think “wow, that sounds like a Les Paul”, you’d think “Wow, I wonder what criminal organisation are holding his family hostage and forcing him to play something that makes him look like such a dweeb?”, and notice that he can’t shred because of the Variax’s middle-of-the road setup, 22 weedy frets and cheap-feeling neck.

There are other problems too, like the fact that the software can’t cope with alternative tunings and you have to pay a whole load of a lot more for the privilege of a rubbish whammy bar, but the big problem here is one of philosophy. All the Variax does is imitate that which has already come before. The truly revolutionary instruments, and I just don’t mean guitars, were those that could let you make a sound that you could never make before. Think of the truly revolutionary guitarists, the great innovators – Hendrix, Van Halen, May, Morello, Bellamy. Aside from pushing the boundaries of the guitar’s sound into uncharted territory, they all either built their own instruments or used conventional ones in a way no-one had done before. They couldn’t have done that with a Variax – it actually relies on you playing within the limits of conventional playing and technique in order to function.

The Variax could not be the future because all it did was imitate the past. It didn’t do something new, it just did something old in a way that was cheaper, but not as good, as how it could be done before. The technology and the opportunity exist today to create new sounds and ways to use them. Much as keyboard synthesisers did in the 80’s, guitar manufacturers can look at this technology not as a way of saying “how can we make this guitar sound like another one” but “how can we make this guitar sound like one that doesn’t exist?” Guitar synths have a terrible reputation gained in the 80’s, when they were unwieldy, unreliable and ludicrously expensive. But that isn’t the case now, and I think that the truly creative companies will make great strides in this direction.

So, the Variax failed to take over the world, not because guitarists didn’t want to innovate, but rather because they did.

Verdict 3/5

Your revolution is a joke.

Review: Ibanez JEM 555

I blame Ibanez. It’s all their fault. They owe a large number of people an apology. They owe all my ex-girlfriends an apology. They owe all my ex-bandmates an apology. And, most of all, they owe all the people who sat in the audience from 2001-2003 and heard me play an apology.

It all started innocently enough. I was in my second year of university, realising that I was having a good time with this guitar playing thing, in a somewhat sedate indie band, and that I needed a nice new guitar to take me to the next level. Now, knowing next to nothing about guitars, I took a peek through a magazine, and noticed that some Ibanez models had 24 frets, compared to my existing 22. 24 frets was, like, 9% more, and 9% more notes to play had to be a good thing (this is the kind of rigorous thinking that gets you a degree these days). So, I ordered something in fetching metallic purple with 24 frets that turned up the following week.

Like I said, it’s your fault, Ibanez. Before I picked up that guitar, I could strum my way through Radiohead covers without a care in the world, and certainly not any hint of a deranged competitive streak. But from the moment I experienced the wafer-thin neck and ultra-low action, with the silky-smooth fretboard that shrieked ‘play me!’, I was a man possessed. I could play loud, I could play fast. Really fast. I could play along to Gary Moore at his most mental. I could play even faster than that. I was going to play faster than anyone. Goodbye indie, hello progressive metal! That’s when I formed that band.

Perhaps I do share some of the blame for what happened next, but Ibanez made it possible. Now, when I said I could play fast, I do not imply that I could play accurately, tunefully, or indeed produce any sound with any aesthetic appeal whatsoever. I procured a tuition video featuring Michael Angelo Batio, a man who turned guitar playing into something resembling Formula One, in terms of both speed and sound quality. I hooked up with three other like-minded maniacs and formed the Princes of Insufficient Light.

We thought we sounded like Dream Theater. To gain an understanding of what we actually sounded like, you will need a cheap Casio keyboard, a cat (colour according to preference) and a tape recorder. Allow that cat to wander all over the keyboard, taking care to change the settings on the keyboard as erratically and as often as possible, especially through the drumkits and comedy sound effects. Record about 45 minutes of this, rewind the tape, and play it on fast forward, at at least five times the original speed. Add the worst singing in the known universe (the cat will also be ideal for this, especially if you tread on its tail) and you will come pretty close to recreating the whole audience experience.

Anyway, the guitar responsible for that atrocity was an RG series, the baby brother of the Steve Vai-endorsed JEM555 I have before me here (eventually, in a noble act of self-sacrifice worthy of a Purple Heart, the RG’s trem disintegrated after one dive-bomb too many). Ibanez may have branched out now into all manner of different guitars, some of which, notable its jazzy semis, are really rather good, but the spirit of shred haunts the company’s soul, like some big-haired, loud-shirted ghost of hair-metal past, widdling away for all eternity as a warning to others. Thin-necked, big-fretted speedsters are the bread and butter of Ibanez, so it’s important to see here if they have taken their eye off the ball in their efforts to diversify.

I’m sad to say that, in all honesty, they have, if this example is anything to go by. The first gripe here is the build quality. I am not Tom Morello. I do not want my wang bar to rattle in its socket, so I can make wacked-out clunking noises in an effort to bring down capitalism through broken-guitar weirdness. I want a guitar that when I press the whammy bar, gives me an instant trip to divebomb heaven, not a brief pause while the slack in the socket is taken up before the note starts to drop, and an even longer pause when I raise it again as the bar moves the other way in its socket. On this example, the microtuner on the 2nd string is so stiff it has to be adjusted with pliers, which is just what you need onstage (you don’t see Steve Vai doing that between numbers, do you?). The fretwork is shoddy, and so uneven you can’t lower the action to anything near the usual ultra-low speed setting without deadspots appearing all over the fretboard. Particularly infuriating is the jack socket, which is “stylishly” recessed into the body (so you can't use a 90 degree angled jack) and prone to working itself loose, so that your connection buzzes and pops until you unscrew the back (you can't get a spanner in the recess) and put it back. Until 2 weeks later, when it starts again, usually in the middle of your epic, played-on-a-cliff-and-filmed-from-a-circling-helicopter guitar solo. On a scale of 1 to annoying, this rates about Steve Guttenberg.

It’s hard to see how a Shred God like Steve Vai could put his name to an instrument so badly put together you can’t shred properly. My old RG played better than this, as do a great many other cheaper guitars. Perhaps Steve Vai looked at the prototype about 10 years ago, saw that it was good, and didn’t bother with the ‘cheap’ guitar in the JEM range any more, and the build quality started to drop – this model's move in production from Japan to Korea a few years back may have had something to do with it as well.

But this isn’t a ‘cheap’ guitar. The RRP on this thing is £900, and for that I expect at the very least a guitar that’s been through some kind of quality control. Yamaha can do this with even their cheapest models, so I can’t see why Ibanez can’t. Steve, if you can pull yourself away from the mirror for ten seconds, go to a music shop and play one of these things that has your name stamped into its 24th fret. Then tell Ibanez to get their act together. I know that £900 is about half your daily loud shirt budget, but most of your fans (and not the kind you use to blow your hair back on stage) are lucky if they can scrape that much spare cash together in a year.

Speaking of Vai’s taste in shirts, that brings me to the styling. Oh dear. This model, in black, is actually the more tasteful of the two styles available, and that’s not saying much. The scratchplate is finished in some kind of mother-of-pearl design in shades of grey, and whilst (unlike some of Italia’s more hideous offerings) you don’t actually feel that you’re playing some kind of customised toilet seat, it’s hardly the sort of thing that gives you any street cred in the modern metal fraternity. The same could be said of the ‘Tree of Life’ fretboard inlay, that manages to be both confusing (the positions of the leaves don’t match up with standard fretboard markings, but look as if they ought to) and in dubious taste. The alternative design is the same gaudy white and gold getup as is featured on the JEM7V that the man himself plays (Note to Ibanez: the last band to sell a lot of records dressed in bright white with gold hardware was Goldie Lookin’ Chain. Think about it.).

Unlike the RG series, which has had a major revamp in recent years, the JEMs have been pretty much unchanged for a decade or more, and they are looking tired and dated. Combine that with poor build quality for instruments at their price, and the reasons for metal guitarists to stay with Ibanez and not defect to rivals such as Maverick, Jackson and ESP are getting fewer and fewer. The only saving graces of this guitar are the astonishing DiMarzio Breed pickups, that deliver astonishing depth of tone and sustain, with a deep, throaty feel that is rare on a Floyd Rose equipped guitar. In fact, it sounds great, but so do a lot of other guitars at the £900 mark, and they have fewer flaws than this.

Sorry, Ibanez, this isn’t good enough. You’ve taken your eye off the ball and done the unthinkable, producing a near-£1000 speedster that isn’t much use at its intended purpose. With the market at this price bracket flooded with quality instruments from Maverick, Yamaha, Jackson and others, you can’t afford to trade on your big-name endorsements any more. Today’s young shred-monkeys don’t know who the hell Steve Vai is, and even those who do think he’s a freak from a bygone era who has declined with age. The same could be said of this guitar.

Verdict 2/5

Like Tom Petty, ugly, broke, but sounds ok.

Review: Yamaha Pacifica 112

Japan. Land of Karaoke, Sushi, and sexually explicit cartoons. And, once, not long ago, land of cheap guitars. Yes, in terms of guitar manufacture, the land of the rising sun has come a long way since it was a byword for shoddy imitations of American models that crumbled to dust in your hands and sounded like an egg whisk entangled in barbed wire. Rising quality of craftsmanship and experience means that serious musicians would be mad to overlook the likes of Takamine and Ibanez for professional-quality instruments.

With rising quality comes rising prices, and that has meant that Japan is no longer the nation of choice for building entry-level guitars. Take Fender for example. My first ever electric was a Squier Strat, built in Japan in the late 1980s. This guitar still stands up as a quality, playable instrument, and only excessive fret-wear and a troublesome pickup saw it retired from my collection. To save money, production was moved first to Korea, and then to China. I picked up a Chinese-built Squier Strat about 5 years ago and I can say that without doubt it is the single worst piece of musical equipment (I wouldn’t go so far as to call it an “instrument”) I have ever interacted with (I wouldn't say “play”). The dreadful fretwork and badly-adjusted action conspired to cut my left hand to shreds, and the sound, such as was audible between the hiss and feedback, sounded like a tennis racket being played by a chimpanzee.

I don’t know what the hell Fender are playing at, quite frankly. Since they acquired Jackson and Guild, they have become the biggest player in the world guitar market, bar none. There is barely a guitarist on the planet who will not purchase one of more of their guitars, amps, gigbags, t-shirts or fridge magnets at one point or another. Their fortunes will rise and fall with the market for guitars. Market share is no longer relevant, more guitarists is good for Fender, full stop. So why on earth are they producing an entry-level guitar that is so utterly, irrevocably awful that it will put most potential guitarists off the instrument altogether? One of the two things I have learned in my years as a musician (the other being never to buy recording equipment off Ebay when you’re drunk) is that a bad instrument will sound bad, no matter who is playing it. Joe Satriani may be able to stroke his fingers across the razor-wire fretboard of a Squier Strat better than you or I, but it will still go out of tune every 2.4 seconds and have that horrible frying-pan sound quality. A whole generation of potential Satches could pick up one of these contraptions as their first guitar, make a dreadful, atonal cacophony, give up the guitar for good, and go out and mug old ladies instead. They will be blaming their lack of talent when the guitar is at fault. That’s not only a shame for rock music (and old ladies), it’s also a disaster for Fender, who might otherwise be selling them a Custom Shop Strat or Custom Soloist twenty years down the line.

So, the moral of the story is, don’t buy a Squier Strat (or for that matter a Squier anything), even if the entire Chinese army attempt to torture you into doing so (by making you listen to one). They may be cheap, but you’re throwing your money in the bin.

There are plenty of alternatives. Unfortunately, many of them are just as bad. Even Ibanez, the iconic Japanese guitar maker, has outsourced its entry-level (and even some of its mid-range) guitars to Korea, and the quality of those instruments has dropped through the floor. They will sound and play better than the Squier (then again so would a plank of wood with a piece of string nailed to it), but they have a horrible tendency to fall to bits alarmingly quickly.

So is there a company that still makes its entry-level guitars in Japan, and hasn’t employed a semi-trained baboon as its head of quality control? Well actually there is, its name is Yamaha, and I have in front of me its basic entry level model, the Pacifica 112.

It’s a pretty-looking thing. This one comes in natural wood with a black scratchplate and pickups, which to my mind looks pretty sharp, but Pacificas are available in a range of colours so wide Dulux would accuse them of being excessive. It keeps the basic Strat shape, but is seems to have lost a bit of flab around the edges, looking more sleek and businesslike. It also has a well-proportioned headstock (Squier, for reasons known only to themselves and the various primates in Fender’s marketing department, have readopted the hideous bulbous thing from the 70’s that makes the guitar look as if its headstock has contracted dropsy). So the good news for self-conscious teenagers is that you won’t look like a berk while playing it (Squier, meanwhile, have produced a bright pink Fat-Strat featuring “Hello Kitty”, as the men in white coats circle ever closer). The intonation and action are great straight out of the box, the hardware looks in good nick and it’s lightweight and comfortable.

And the sound. My God the sound. Once you start playing this instrument, you have to look again at the price tag to make sure you’ve got it right. It’s just about the only guitar in its class to feature both a Bridge Humbucker and two single coils. The humbucker, whilst it’s not going to give Seymour Duncan any sleepless nights, is tuneful and versatile. It can even handle some pretty extreme stuff; one of my favourite guitars is a 112 modified for baritone tuning (B-B), and the depth and power this cheap guitar can deliver through a decent amp is astonishing – I recently played an £800 ESP 7-string through the same setup and I swear the little Yamaha sounded better. The two single coils are bright without a hint of fizz, and great for strumming or bluesy lead lines. This guitar can handle just about any style except the extremes of shred and ultra-high gain metal, as the humbucker doesn’t quite have the output, and the neck isn’t quite fast enough.

For the record, its RRP is £180, but you’d be doing badly if you didn’t find it new for about £140. That’s a lot these days for an entry-level instrument, but the extra pennies get you a guitar that has not been assembled by slave labourers or crazed gibbons, but by one of the world’s most advanced manufacturing concerns, who have been assembling everything from radios to motorbikes, with ruthless production efficiency, robust build quality and the famously obsessive Japanese attitude to quality control, for decades. That Yamaha can deliver an instrument of this quality for this price should cause all other manufacturers to hang their heads in shame. This is a £350 guitar for £150, and will last you through your guitar apprenticeship through to intermediate level and beyond.

If you are starting to learn or buying a beginner’s guitar for someone else, accept no substitute. From the first time, as a total beginner, you pick it up and play those tentative first few notes, it will sound good. You will only be fighting your own learning curve, not the instrument itself. Yes, you could save £40 or so and get a cheap piece of crap. But you will sound like a hacksaw and you’ll need to spend more money on buying a new guitar after a year anyway. This guitar, in terms of both its playing quality, which means that your ability will not be hampered by the guitar’s limitations for many years, and its build quality, which means that the guitar will stay intact while you do that, represents value for money compared to both cheaper and more expensive alternatives. And that’s as good as it gets.

Verdict: 5/5

At this price, perfection.

Why all the fury?

Guitar magazines annoy me. Frank Zappa said that Rock Journalism is “People who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read”, but guitar journalism is all those things with an added dose of trainspotterish tedium thrown in.

I think that part of the problem is that the people who write for these magazines are fundamentally guitar people, not music people. A life that could have been spent in rock n’ roll, one of the most exciting activities mankind has ever come up with, has been spent arguing about whether glued-in or bolted-on necks produce a better tone. It’s a bit like going to the World Cup Final and examining the variety of grass used on the pitch. They pontificate about whether Rosewood or Maple fingerboards are better for legato, when they could be investigating which makes the more satisfying explosion when you shove it into a live amplifier in front of thousands of screaming fans.

It takes a certain kind of personality to make guitars boring. A guitar can be a living, breathing extension of your soul, your ticket to triumph or disaster at ear-splitting volume, but they’re reviewed as if they were food mixers.

The first two thirds of any guitar review will be spent on an excruciating description of what the guitar looks like and what it’s made of. Guitar reviewers often seem more like frustrated electricians than frustrated rock stars, poring over the minute details of construction and the exact wiring of the pickups. What in the name of all that is holy is the point of that? If you want to see what the guitar looks like, you can look at the vast 2-page colour photos of the thing that the magazine have helpfully printed to fill up space. You can see that it has a pointy headstock or a forearm chamfer. I know that a lot of rock stars are pretty strung out most of the time, but if they’re too smashed to tell what shape the guitar is, then they’re too smashed to read the article in the first place. If we want to know its exact neck dimensions or what kind of battery the active electrics require, we can look at the little tech spec box or look at the manufacturer’s website. Don’t repeat them all in longhand in the article because you don’t have anything interesting to say.

After this exercise in pointlessness, the reviewer grudgingly takes off his anorak and starts to play the thing. But wait! They’ve cunningly thought up a way of making this pointless too! Yes, they will, when reviewing an electric guitar, tell you what it sounds like if it isn’t plugged in! I’ve actually seen magazines mark guitars down because of a deficient unplugged tone. That’s like criticising a car for not going fast enough with the engine switched off.

At long last, they will plug the thing into an amp and rattle off a couple of paragraphs about frequency response and sustain, before giving it at least four out of five and telling you to buy one.

Yes, that’s right. When was the last time you saw a review in a major guitar magazine that said that a guitar was utter shit? Someone actually wrote to a magazine once asking precisely that, and the response was something along the lines that “There’s so much great gear coming out these days that we only have space to review the really good stuff”. I don’t buy that. If I walk into a guitar shop looking to buy, rather than just play Smoke on the Water, I’m going to be presented with dozens of options. Some will be good, some will be awful, and if magazines are just reviewing the latest and most fashionable things, I’ll only have knowledge about a handful of the guitars in there, and I’ll have been told that they’re great, and that if I don’t immediately buy at least twelve of them, I will be summarily sectioned as mentally inadequate.

That’s the heart of the matter. A good magazine review will boost sales, even if the product is no better, or even worse, than the other instruments on the rack. This is where the rot sets in. I’ll put it frankly - guitar manufacturers and guitar magazines have a relationship that verges on the corrupt. The makers have the magazines over a barrel. If a certain mag won’t slaver all over their latest piece of junk, they will withdraw their advertising in favour of one that will. You can always tell that a guitar is going to get 10 out of 10, a gold star and a smiley face, when the magazine has, by complete co-incidence, a 5-page article on the company, the factory, or the guy who designed it. Do you think that a guitar manufacturer is going to let a magazine tour its factory and tread sawdust into the carpet if it was going to rip into its latest model? Of course not, there’s a quid pro quo here, written or unwritten. (Although, in my view, that would be the funniest article ever written: “Here we see the dodgy wiring department, where, presumably, drug-addled illegal immigrants wearing boxing gloves shove any old wires into the body, enduring that the guitar you buy will be as appalling as the one we review on page 94.”) Guitar journalists are simply too frightened to criticise the latest models.

In some areas of critical journalism, such as motoring or films, standards are higher, and there is an unwritten law which guarantees that reviewers are entitled to say what they like and still get advertising. If a certain film is less interesting than arranging grains of sand in size order, the journalists will say so. The world of guitar journalism needs to cross that bridge, or lose all its credibility.

And it’s always the latest models that get reviewed, because that’s what the makers want to push. Their existing models already have market share, and they want to achieve market penetration with their latest thing, so they get the guitar journos to plug them. That’s no help to Wayne or Garth down at the guitar shop. The majority of guitars on sale there will be designs that have been in circulation for years, if not decades – many places won’t even stock the fancy stuff that’s plugged in the magazines. That’s another point, actually, the mags often seem to review the top-of-the-range gold plated mega-guitars, not the cheaper models that the majority of us will actually buy. Of course it’s a good guitar, you morons, it costs £3000! But for every Les Paul Custom or PRS Custom 24 bought by a serious musician (and most professionals will be given their instruments for free by the makers as part of an endorsement deal), a hundred will be bought by rich city brokers undergoing a mid-life crisis who were too scared to buy a motorbike, and will spend their lives as room ornaments, dragged out once a year to play “House of the Rising Sun” at the family Christmas do. I want reviews of the guitars people actually buy, and actually play.

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not connected to any manufacturer, and I owe loyalty to nobody. Sadly, that means that the guitars I review will either be my own, or borrowed from friends. Whilst I will miss out on the latest and greatest models, what I will review are guitars you can find in your local guitar shop and actually afford.

I’m not interested in whether the tiger stripes on the flame maple are straight or slightly bendy, or whether there is a small dab of glue visible near the neck join. You can’t see that on stage, you can’t hear that on a recording. If you care about that kind of thing you are buying a guitar as a wall ornament and therefore I hate you. Guitar music is about feel, passion, image, and very loud noise, and reviews of guitars should be on that basis. I want to know what a guitar is like to play, what it sounds like, whether it will survive the rigours of the road, what it says about me and, above all, how it makes me feel. As such, my reviews will not be fair, neutral or remotely objective. Rock music is about strong emotions and strong opinions. If rock music was reviewed the way guitars are, the Sex Pistols would be criticised for being out of tune and only playing three chords, Bob Dylan would get two out of ten because he can’t sing, and Dream Theater would be universally regarded as the best band on the planet.

I hope that I can inform and entertain, and tell you something that you couldn’t find out by looking at an advert. There’s no set formula here, and I’m not going to rattle off a list of dimensions or go through the various aspects of the guitar in a pre-set order. Guitars are all about feel, and so I will write about how a guitar makes me feel, what it makes me think about, what it reminds me of. If there’s an aspect to the construction that is worthy of mention, for being very good or very bad, then I’ll say so, but on the whole I’m not going to dwell on that sort of thing because, to be frank, it’s boring. Guitars aren’t boring.