Ibanez GRGR221PA-AQB

This is a beautiful and amazing project guitar. You don't need much to make it awesome! Just change the pickups. Although that amazing looking matched top looks like wood, it's not. It's printed, but who cares? It looks great anyway! The nut is good, although a little high for my taste. Tuners are decent and keep the guitar in tune well. The frets are a decent enough job with no protruding extremities, but they'll surely benefit from a nice polishing job. The fretboard was somewhat dry, but a little lemon oil solved that. The neck is a one piece bolt on with a glued headstock. Not the strongest combination but as long as you don't use insane tension on the strings it will be fine. String action came pretty high but intonation was not that bad. Nothing that a nice setup can't fix. Besides, even much more expensive guitar have the same issue and need a setup anyway... The pickups are absolute garbage. Muddy lows and lack of highs (even when in single coil mode). Do yourself a favour and change the pickups right away. Even cheap Chinese aftermarket pickups sound better than this. Personally I put some Fishman Fluence Devin Townsend pickups and WOW, this guitar really came to life right away! Now it sounds amazing! The reason I'm mentioning the Fishman pickups is because these are active and need a 9V battery, and the electronics cavity on this guitar is small. Also, the jack plug is plastic and seems to be of a proprietary design. It's mono and in my case I needed a stereo one (because of the active pickups). The jack input and cover are one piece only, so I ended up cutting the jack input to keep the cover and through that cover I inserted a Switchcraft barrel stereo jack input. The guitar's potentiometers are small and fit in some recessed holes. So, keep that in mind if you need to replace them. I did (stock ones are 250K and active pickups require 25K). Mine were big, so installing them required a little massaging here and there. As I deleted the tone pot and put the volume pot in its place, I ended up with plenty of room for the battery. I also changed the pickup selector switch and installed an extra (small) switch. The cavity size is more than enough for my specific needs, but please plan accordingly beforehand. Overall, a really good guitar for the price. You don't need to change much, but changing pickups is a must.

I was guitar shopping, as an intermediate non-professional player, for an electric guitar, mid-price range, meaning under a 1000eu. I play at home with a 15watt Vox and/or a DAW. I am happy to own a Ibanez AS 120 vintage. But it’s hard to get to the high frets and i was looking for something with 24 frets. I was able to have shipped a number of guitars, that i could easily return, thanks to this site and other similar sites. I went through a Epiphone SG; a Fender Player Lead III; a Yamaha Revstar standard (the $800 version): an Epiphone ES 335 (came with a busted tuner!); a Charvel Pro-mod DK 24; a Sire Larry Carlton S7; I also played in a shop all the Fender Players, Squires and imports that you could shake a stick at; and a PRS SE; and from a private person a Gibson SG (used for 700eu).

All of theses guitars were stiff, without personality, expensive for what they could and could not do and just did not feel like my guitar. Then I tried in a shop this Ibanez GRGR221PA. It’s cheap; plays damn well for the price and the neck is player friendly for me. I stripped off the ugly fake Poplar Burl paint down to it’s original wood. The layer of Poplar was so thin the Okoume started coming through as I sanded away the fakes Burl spots but i am leaving it rough like this. The Okoume is quite lovely on the sides and back. Maybe I will upgrade the electronics later: the switch, pickups and wiring are all quite cheap and so I am having to learn how to solder now. The tuners holds tune well and bridge hardware is fine; the intonation is easy to set-up and the fret and neck action is OK for this price range.

So my point is: why pay a thousand euro for a mediocre guitar when I can have a decent guitar for a third of the price of all those I tried? (esp. given today’s guitar technology.) Sure i would like a $3000 custom/high end guitar but I am not even sure that would be worth it. All in all I am happy with this budget guitar that i can adapt, change and switch out the parts. Highly recommend as a first guitar or something to have as an alternative.

finally i have own this brand, looking at this guitar it looks good and sounds good the action is already low good for playing but i have an issue with my unit it hums even with clean sound maybe because of the humbucker pick ups or maybe need to be properly ground and sometimes it goes out of tune and with the 6th string high E string it sounds little not the same define sound with the G string and B string open i dont know how to describe it thats the only downside i see probably with my unit only i dont know if others who buy this guitar experience it because most youtube videos i see all reviews of this guitar is good thats why i bought this hoping for good sounding guitar with not so much price but overall it is playable good for practice.... i use this guitar for almost a month now with my headrush mx5 using headphones only still looking forward to buy a guitar amp..