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Ibanez AS50 AS50
AS50

‎04-08-2007 12:00 AM

Overall Rating: In the past I've either played P90 guitars like Juniors or assorted Teles and Strats; I've had two Gibson semis before (a ¿¿¿68 Trini Lopez Standard and a ¿¿¿67 355) but this is the first humbucking guitar I've liked. It's actually my...
Overall Rating: In the past I've either played P90 guitars like Juniors or assorted Teles and Strats; I've had two Gibson semis before (a ¿¿¿68 Trini Lopez Standard and a ¿¿¿67 355) but this is the first humbucking guitar I've liked. It's actually my third AS50, but I got rid of the first two back in the early ¿¿¿80s because I couldn't stand the V2 pickups and I was much more inhibited about PU-swapping back then (plus we didn't then have the wide variety of choices available today). I recently got nostalgic about it and started an eBay hunt, which was amply rewarded. The size and weight are far comfier than a real-life 335/345/355; the sound ¿¿¿ post-Wilkinson, that is ¿¿¿ is the perfect LP/335 compromise; it looks lovely (though the cherry version might be nicer: bitch-whine-moan-complain); and it was ludicrously cheap: even with the new PUs and a professional set-up/installation/rewiring, the whole thing, including case, came in at not much over ¿¿400. Anyone excited by the Gibson ES-336, Hamer Newport or the new Collings and in the market for a downsized 335-alike should seek out one of these. It's not (yet!) a cult guitar and can therefore be picked up for chump change, they're INCREDIBLY well-made and if you're lucky enough to find a Mk II, you won't even have to change the pickups. In fact, I'm seriously considering going back to eBay to see if I can find a red Mk II with Super 58s. In fact, I'll race you ...
Features: Okaaaaay ... 1981 Mk 1 Ibanez AS50: a downsized 335-alike 25 years ahead of its time: everybody from Gibson themselves through upmarket competitors like Hamer and Collings down to cheeky punks like Vintage are doing them now, but as far as I know this was the first. This one dates from the Golden Age Of Japanese Luthiery, when Gibson and Fender had lost their way and companbies like Ibanez and Yamaha were proving that they could not only build a cheaper guitar than the faltering US giants, but a better one. This lovely creature has a tobacco sunburst (laminated?) maple body; 22-fret 24.75" scale glued-in birch neck with dot-marked bound rosewood fretboard; a plain version of the most elegant 3-a-side headstock Ibanez ever had; Quik-Change tailpiece; Gibsonesque control layout with four goldish 50s-style knobs and unbranded Schaller-style tuners. The Mk 1 was fitted with Ibanex V@ pick-ups ¿¿¿ Super Distortions in all but name and, for all I know, made by DiMarzio, and they were totally miscast pn this instrument: it was like a movie which seemed to have been written for George Clooney arriving on screen starring Sylvester Stallone. The Mk II swapped the birch neck for a maple one, replaced the V2s with the far more appropriate Super 59 PAF-alikes and was also available in red. The Mk III was outsourced to Korea, had a bolt-on neck and should be avoided at all costs.
Sound Quality: The 10 rating applies to the way the guitar sounds now, with the V2s drop-kicked into the middle distance and a set of Trev Wilkinson's Platinum Series 'Lemon Drop' Peter Green-style PAF-alikes installed. With low-to-medium gain PAF-style HBs replacing the grotesquely overgained V2s ¿¿¿ which have rated a 5 at most ¿¿¿ this guitar sounds lovely: like a cross between an airier Les Paul and a less woofy 335. The previous owner had installed a pair of minitoggles: one to throw the PUs out of phase and the other to split the neck ¿¿¿bucker, as well as wiring the neck tone so that it was full off at 10 and full on at 8. I now have both minitoggles as coil-splits and the tone control operating normally. The result is a sweet-sounding, versatile guitar that works for blues, rockabilly, funk, reggae and most forms of rock up to and including punk. I haven't yet tried it with my two main amps (Fender Super reverb and Vox Valvetronix AD120VT) because they don't live at home, but it sounded fantastic through a real-life Fender Bassman and as good as anything else would with the Twin and AC30 models on a MicroCube. can't wait to open it up through the Super Reverb or the VT's AC30 models.
Reliability/Durability: This guitar is over 25 years old and, apart from the odd microding, looks brand new. The previous owner told me that he played it A LOT, so its current state is a tribute both to his careful handling and the sturdiness of its construction and finish. I would be reluctant to take it out by itself, partly because I'm fundamentally a Fender guy and I get hysterical, neurotic and insecure without a Strat or Tele in easy reach, but I consider that ¿¿¿ for the first time in my guitar-playing life ¿¿¿ all my humbucking needs are finally catered for.
Customer Support: A 25-year-old used guitar? What do YOU think?
Fender JD Telecaster JD Telecaster
JD Telecaster

‎07-18-2006 12:00 AM

Overall Rating: Been playing so long I ought to be way better than i am ... other guitars: Jeff Beck Custom Shop Strat; MIM 50s Strat w/Kinman PUs; real -life 63; various cheapo solids in permanent slide tunings. This is one of the best non-Custom Sh...
Overall Rating: Been playing so long I ought to be way better than i am ... other guitars: Jeff Beck Custom Shop Strat; MIM 50s Strat w/Kinman PUs; real -life 63; various cheapo solids in permanent slide tunings. This is one of the best non-Custom Shop Teles ever built, and if I lost it I'd be screwed, since (a) Fender don't make ¿em any more, and I am (as we say in the UK) sick as a parrot that the JD Tele has been discontinued - Mr Donahue currently has a signature Peavey guitar which I have yet to try

And (b) because I gave this Tele a 10th birthday present in the form of a leather scratchplate from Montana Leathers ( Phone: 01387-248290) and a pair of new Bare Knuckle( Phone: 01326 341313 ) PUs - Yardbird bridge, Irish Tour neck - which have turned it into the hottest, sweetest, meanest blues Tele anyone could desire. The stock Fender JD-approved pickups were cool, but i wanted to take this guitar from Very Good to Absolutely Superb, and thanks to the Bare Knuckles, I succeeded. If you play blues and you love Teles, the best recommendation I could possibly make would be to get a JD (used; via ebay or wherever), give it the Bare Knuckle upgrade, plug in, turn up and ... STAND BACK.
Features: This is a 1996 model - according to the 40th Anniversary badge stuck to the back of the headstock - Fender JD Telecaster (Japanese version of the Fender Custom Shop Jerry Donahue Tele) purchased brand new in 1998 for ¿400 UK sterling and worth every penny! Specs as standard: special 50s-style one-piece maple V-neck, Strat neck PU, 5-way switch (neck PU straight through; neck PU w/tone control; both PUs w/tone control; both PUs w/Strat-style quack, tone control; bridge PU w/tone control), bound 3-tone sunburst body left over from temporarily discontinued 62 MIJ Custom Tele reissue. Purchased after a brief A/B w/ a neck-HBed Fat Tele. To cut a long story short, the best Tele I ever owned. But I wanted more ...
Sound Quality: As originally supplied, the Tele bridge/Strat neck combo platter enabled this guitar to deliver jusrt about any classic fender sound you can think of. The stock pickups were cool, but ...
Reliability/Durability: As a rock. Like a brick shithouse. Think of every metaphor for solidity and reliability you've ever heard or read and then double it. The only reason it would never be my sole gigging guitar is that I'm a wiggle-stick addict and I'd never leave the house to play unless I had a Strat as well.
Customer Support: Never dealt with the company re this product: no need (yet or hopefully ever)!
Purchased From: Camden Rock Shop, London (long out of business)
Price: $400.00 USD
Fender Custom Shop 015-0061-801 Limited Edition Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Electric Guitar
Jeff Beck Custom Shop

‎05-30-2006 12:00 AM

Overall Rating: Considering how long I've been playing - forty-some years - I ought to be a lot better than I am. I've owned a whole heap of Strats over the years: bought my first 1963 model in 1980 and my second - sadly now stolen - in 1981, not as ...
Overall Rating: Considering how long I've been playing - forty-some years - I ought to be a lot better than I am. I've owned a whole heap of Strats over the years: bought my first 1963 model in 1980 and my second - sadly now stolen - in 1981, not as investments or out of vintage snobbery, but because I despaired of finding a decent, usable modern one. The Strat Plus I sold to help finance this purchase had the right hardware (LSR, locking tuners), but a nasty skinny shred-friendly neck and glassy Lace Sensors; my 63 Strat looks, sounds and feels lovely, but the trem and tuners are cranky and unreliable; my MIM 50s Classic (retrofitted with a superb set of Kinman noiseless pickups) was great value and a thoroughly decent and usable spare ...

But I can't imagine anything beating this as a last-a-lifetime working Strat which'll handle anything you throw at it and won't ever let you down. It won't make you sound like Jeff Beck - jeez, IF ONLY - but if you're a Strat person, it WILL make you sound like the best possible version of yourself.

I got this guitar in a private deal at an unrepeatable price, but if - godforbid - I was somehow separated from it, I'd start saving to buy another one at whatever the going rate happened to be. It's the ultimate nuthin-fancy players' Strat.
Features: According to the documentation, this Olympic White Fender Jeff Beck Custom Artist Strat was completed in February 2006. Alder body, maple neck, 9.5 radius rosewood fretboard, 22 medium-jumbo frets, LSR roller nut, Sperzel locking tuners (rather than the Schallers listed on Fender's spec sheet), American Standard 2-point trem bridge, Hot Noiseless stacked-humbucking pickups, regular 5-way switching except that the second tone control works on the bridge as well as the middle pickup, black hardshell case with black plush lining, leather strap (not a particularly nice one) with StrapLoks, Fender/Whirlwind cord (too short for anything except home use), assortment of Fender Custom picks (only one heavy one, unfortunately) plus a few other bits of case candy ...

I have another Olympic White Strat (a MIM 50s Classic), but the two colours are noticeably different. The 50s is halfway towards that creamy almost-yellow Fender call Vintage White, whereas this one is an incredibly pale greeny-grey: much closer to Fender's White Blonde. The knobs and pickups are a nicely aged off-white, and the scratch-plate is parchment, halfway between 50s dead-white and 60s mint-green.

The hardware is gleaming chrome and the maple of the neck is plain and almost unfigured. Nothing about this guitar screams EXPENSIVE!!!. No figured exotic woods, elaborate inlays, gold hardware or mission-control switching. If I'd ordered this guitar as a money-no-object tailor-made master-built one-off, I'd probably have gone for the full-on creamy Vintage White finish and mint-green scratch-plate, and had them build in S-1 switching and/or Clapton-style active electronics (and had them deliver it in a tweed case with red lining), but it's JB's spec not mine, and he's gone for plain vanilla (with just a few sprinkles), rather than a whole bunch of bells and whistles.

As it comes, it looks exactly like an ordinary Strat. Except that it isn't.
Sound Quality: Played unamplified, the JB Custom sounds phenomenally loud, crisp, rich and sustainy. Plugged in (so far, to an old Super Reverb, two different Roland MicroCubes, a Vox Valvetronix AD120VT and a POD), it sounds ... like a Strat. To be more precise, it sounds like a Strat, only bigger. Naming a pickup set Hot Noiseless might suggest that they're overwound Mondo Distorto supergain monsters. Instead, they're fuller and richer than bog-standard Strat pickups in just about every position. Yes, they do drive an amp's input stage harder when the guitar volume is all the way up, but simply knocking the volume back to 8 or so gives you all the vintage twang you want.

Any Strat tone you need from Jimi/SRV neck-pickup blues to bridge-pickup rockabilly or Robert Cray/Mark Knopfler/Nile Rodgers cluck tones is in here. Roll the tone off the neck pickup, take the volume down and you can do fake jazz. Pick a bridge/middle combo, pile on the gain, roll the tone back and you've got serious hard-rock faux-humbucking. Take the gain off, roll the volume back, and there's a highly usable fake-acoustic tone (well, good enough for rhythm if not for single-string parts).

To paraphrase the name of a now-discontinued model, think of this as the Strat Double Plus. It's a library of great Strat tones, plus a few sounds other Strats can't reach.
Reliability/Durability: I've only had this guitar for a couple of months, and it hasn't done much travelling, but everything about it seems 100% solid.
Customer Support: I've had no reason to complain to Fender about any aspect of this guitar - if I do I'll let you know!
Vox AD120VT Valvetronix 212 Combo AD120VT Valvetronix 212 Combo
AD120VT Valvetronix 212 Combo

‎05-29-2006 12:00 AM

Overall Rating: I'be been playing a long time: I'm 55, started fooling around with guitars at 13 or so; first electric at 18, first real gigging band in mid-20s. I used to play AC30s, switched over to a Peavey Deuce in the 80s for the added versatili...
Overall Rating: I'be been playing a long time: I'm 55, started fooling around with guitars at 13 or so; first electric at 18, first real gigging band in mid-20s. I used to play AC30s, switched over to a Peavey Deuce in the 80s for the added versatility, reliability and power, realised that dull sound was too high a price to pay for those qualities, and ended up with a Super Reverb which I still own, but which is too big, loud and heavy for what I currently need, though it remains my all-time favourite-sounding amp. Guitar-wise, I used a Gibson SG Junior with mu first working band, though these days it's pretty much straight Fenders.

If I lost my Valvetronix I'd seriously consider another one, though I'd also weigh up getting something ultra-portable like the new Fender Jazzmaster set-up, and creating my sounds in the Vox Tonelab SE, which has the same brain as the Valvetronix. The reason I chose the VT in the first place is that the tube in the power section really DOES make a difference: everybody to whom I've demoed it has been impressed. A committed POD-user conceded that the VT's versions of his favourite sounds were more lifelike and 3D than the POD's. And a hardcore pro Marshall user who lives and dies by his JCM800 took less than three minutes screwing around with the VT's 'Brit 80s' model before shouting, "That's my sound!"

Two things you need to know about the Valvetronix: (1) Like a 'real' tube amp, the VT gives up its best sounds (on any model, at whichever output setting you choose) with the output stage (ie the master volume) doing as much of the work as possible. There's a tube in this sucka; make it work for you by cranking the master and turning the gain down.

(2) it's tempting to go for your sounds by twiddling the 'amp select' dial, and setting your volume with the output selector, but you won't be doing your amp any favours (which means that it won't be doing you any). Treat each model as if it was a 'real' amp; work with all the controls - gain, eq, volume - to dig out each model's sweetest spots and optimum sounds. This is a very hip amp (especially paired up with the VC-12 floor controller), and it's worth spending a little time exploring it.

It's not perfect - let me repeat: can't have wah and overdrive together; no Super Reverb model' no whammy pedal - but until we win the lottery or our careers take off to the point where we can buy every amp we want and pay a team of guys to cart them around everywhere we go, the AD120VT is the next best thing.
Features: This combo's extensive (and mostly fabulous) feature set has already been discussed fairly thoroughly in the previous entries. I'd just like to add that one intensely annoying aspect of the way the 'pedal' section is organised is that you can't run overdrive and wah simultaneously: instead you have to set up a second preset for your amp of choice with a higher gain level, which makes it harder to alter your drive level on the fly. To get SERIOUSLY picky: it would have been nice to have models of my all-time favourite tube amp, the Fender Super Reverb, and the best new pedal of recent years, the Digitech Whammy. Otherwise, this amp offers you pretty much everything you're likely to need.
Sound Quality: The main guitars I match with this amp are Strats (Jeff Beck Custom Shop, Mex Classic 50s with Kinman pickups, real-life 1963), a Tele (Japanese JD model) and an Ibanez Destroyer X-Series set up for slide). I play mainly blues, and various rock styles from 50s and 60s through punk, and the models on the left-hand side of the dial work fine for this stuff. (I approach all that major Marshalls-and-upwards overdrive stuff with some caution). I've also used the amp with various humbucker- and P90-loaded guitars, which require a touch less gain than the Fenders if you're going to prevent all your carefully set-up sounds turning to mush when the guitar volume goes all the way up.

The V'Tronix is nicely clean and quiet on all but the most heavily cranked Fender and Vox sounds, but higher-gain models behave pretty much like their real-life equivalents in that they're noisy as hell. (Maybe i ought to dig out the manual and reread the section on how to use the Noise Reduction.)

I've ditched the factory presets and built up four banks of four sounds each which suit my needs. Bank One is a selection of clean sounds starting with 'fake acoustic'; Bank Two is a selection of Fender sounds with progressive increases in dirt level (clean Twin, cranked Twin, cranked Bassman, cranked Deluxe); Bank Three is a similar selection AC30 sounds from clean through crunch to filthy, and Bank Four is a Marshall collection which starts at dirty and goes all the way to pure mayhem.

The VT is certainly phenomenally loud. I live in a fairly thin-walled apartment, and I've had neighbour complaints even with the output selector switched all the way down to 1+1. Be interesting to use it full-on and see whether it keeps its cool against a loud rhythm section.
Reliability/Durability: Since I haven't gigged out for a while, this amp's only been used for low-level jamming, practice and recording. I've had it two or three years and nothing's gone wrong, but then it hasn't yet been in the wars. If a real gig came up I'd use it without hesitation, and I'd certainly use it without a back-up; I've never taken more than one amp to a gig in my life, and I've only been caught out once.
Customer Support: Never had to deal with the company (see above) so the jury's still out.
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