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.