Chasing a Perfect Guitar

Disclaimer #

A guitar or its sound is a very subjective topic. I don’t claim that I know the best about guitars and any related gear. Everything written here is my personal opinion according to my preferences and experiences (which I don’t have much of).

How It All Started #

I can’t remember exactly when my parents bought me my first guitar, but I have this picture from May 20th, 2005, where I play my very first guitar ever.

I just turned 16 here, but I had been having this guitar for about a year already. I even bought a pickup for it so I can record and apply guitar effects to the tone. This guitar was not expensive, just a very low-priced acoustic guitar. At that point I was not sure whether I wanted to start learning how to play guitar or I just liked the idea of being a guitar player.

First E-Guitar #

After I learned some of my favorite songs (which at that time were Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Rammstein, etc.), I made a decision for myself: the acoustic guitar is fun but I really like the idea of having guitar effects and playing rock/metal. Perhaps even recording or playing in a band. So, I need an electric guitar.

I asked my parents to buy me an electric guitar for my birthday. But it turned out that an electric guitar was way more expensive, and naturally it needed some additional gear, like an amplifier. We could not spend much money on it, so we bought some of those Gio Ibanez Jumpstart sets that had a guitar, gig bag, tuner, strap, and an amplifier included in the set.

I now have this awkward picture of me playing a metal riff using this guitar. My friend and I were trying to write a song for our band. Yes, my dream came true – I played in a band.

If you take a closer look you may notice that I used very thick-gauge strings. We played in dropped B, or even sometimes dropped A. Mainly, because KoЯn (one of our then inspirations) did that at the time. But KoЯn had 7-string guitars for such low tunings, and I could not afford one. So what I did was I bought a 7-string set, and I put it on my 6-string guitar shifting the strings down (7th as 6th, 6th as 5th, etc.). I lost the higher octave but gained the monster low range. It was great for what we played.

If I’m honest, knowing what I know now, I can tell the guitar was awful. It had a lot of background noise — the only possible option to play was using a noise gate in the effects chain. The frets were not aligned which caused a lot of buzzing with a low action height. I did my best to adjust everything, but it was not enough: either you had no fret buzzing and an enormous action height, or you had a lot of fret buzzing and a playable instrument. But I had an electric guitar.

This guitar is still somewhere on my mom’s balcony. It’s now dead after years of my experiments with its electronics and adjustments.

The amplifier included in the set stopped working after a year. Some part blew up inside. I tried to find a place to repair it, but the worker told me it would be more expensive to repair than to buy a new unit.

Another picture of me playing with my band in a studio. Sorry for the quality; we didn’t have good cameras in our phones back then.

We were renting a place with equipment that included a Vox amplifier (I don’t remember the exact model) with a built-in noise gate. I liked it very much; it was the only amplifier that made my guitar sound better than it was.

Break #

When I turned 18, I graduated from school and started studying at university. I didn’t have enough time to practice guitar. Also, my band membership came to an end for the same reason. I stopped playing completely and, as I’ve already mentioned above, also broke my guitar with my mad experiments. Nobody wanted to pay for repairing that cheap guitar or buying me a new one. As a poor student, I was not making any money at that time.

Second Attempt #

After graduating from university, I had some time on my hands, and I decided to try again.

At that time I had already been working for a year and could afford a guitar better than before, but still I was not sure if I would be interested in playing guitar long-term. So, I bought an Ibanez with active pickups and a solid-state Marshall amplifier which had a reasonable price. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the exact model names (especially for the Ibanez guitar), but I have a picture:

After my previous “jumpstart” model, this guitar was wonderful. However, it turned out that I lost all my skills after 6 years of studying at university. My playing was not going well. I was demotivated and burned out. In 2013 my wife and I decided to move to another city, and I sold the guitar and the amplifier because I didn’t want to bring them there with us.

I thought everything was over at that point.

New Inspiration #

In December 2015 we moved to Berlin, Germany. Here instruments were way more affordable for me (compared with my past salary). I met a friend who also played guitar and inspired me to make another attempt.

Right after moving to Berlin, I bought an Ibanez S521 and I still love this instrument to this day even though I sold it (read further).

It was my very first experience with the S-series by Ibanez, and I was amazed how lightweight it was. Also, what a great tone it produced with its mahogany body! The neck shape was perfect for me, and all the frets were perfectly aligned. I used a very low action height with thick-gauge strings (D’Addario NYXL1156), and I had the sound I always wanted.

This time I didn’t buy an amplifier. It would not be practical for playing at home, especially in Germany, where people are used to being quiet (which I very much like, by the way). My friend suggested to buy the Zoom G3 processor. It’s a great device for its money and more importantly it was small (I had used a BOSS GT-100 for some time before, which is huge but very powerful).

I started practicing guitar again, playing in my headphones this time.

Playing guitar after a long break was very painful, literally. My fingers were very soft, and, of course, I installed thick strings due to my old habits. The pain went away in a couple of months.

Now I’d suggest using 9–42 or 10–46 strings for the first few months if you’re just starting after a long break. No matter what gauge you’re used to.

Now I’m sure! Level up? Buying Gibson SG #

After some time I was finally sure. I wanted to continue playing guitar and to improve my skills. Maybe join another band?

I thought, “Maybe it’s time to buy something more expensive and professional then?”

I ordered a Gibson SG Standard HC 2015. Because, you know, it’s Gibson. Everybody knows that Gibson guitars are great. That was an important lesson for me.

After playing a lot of different guitars from a lower price range and having owned 3 Ibanez guitars including the worst possible “jumpstart” model, I was very disappointed in a guitar that cost me €1,000. How is it even possible?

I think it would make sense to list more details:

• The Gibson SG is a badly balanced guitar when it comes to body vs. neck weight. I had seen such feedback online before but didn’t think it would be that bad. Every time you stop holding the neck, the guitar just falls forward.
• The strap button is situated on the back side of the body, just behind the neck. Who came up with this? Even using a 6cm-wide leather guitar strap it got unbearable after a while (the strap scratched my neck). It could be my personal issue, of course, but I still think this was a bad design.
• Another problem — its weight. I get that the famous Gibson tone exists because of the wood they put in guitars, but I also thought that SG was a kind of slim model for Gibson, like the S-series for Ibanez.
• Pickups — it had the “57 Classic” pickups, which, as I found out later, were supposed to give you a very vintage sound. This is not what I was looking for. It had so much background noise that I could compare this €1,000 guitar to my first Ibanez Jumpstart. Furthermore, when I touched the back plastic cover, it made weird loud clicking sounds. Was it defective?
• The G-Force tuner — to be honest, I had concerns about this device before buying this guitar. I even wanted to buy the 2016 version just because it did not have this automatic tuner. I decided to give it a shot. This automatic tuner constantly tuned the strings almost half a step higher, and even doing that it was not accurate in terms of intervals. I’ve read the manual and found the calibration procedure. I tried that and other possible options like adjusting the 440 Hz pitch, but it was still working very unreliably for me.
• Adjustments — out of the box the guitar had a very good action height, but the intonation for the low E string was far off. I tried to adjust it, and it turned out that it was not possible to set it up properly at all. The given span of adjustment on the bridge was not enough to get the E note on the 12th fret of the low E string. I had never had this problem before with any guitar.

To be fair, even after all of these problems, there was also something good about this guitar.

The neck was very comfortable for rhythm playing, the hard case it came in was very good and sturdy, all the hardware was very high quality, and it looked very good. Also sounded good if we ignore that background noise. It’s not a huge problem if you don’t use a high-gain amplifier or distortion.

Anyway, I had to return it back.

The lesson I learned here was to never listen to anyone about guitars.

You must go and try every guitar before buying, and only then could you decide for yourself if the guitar is worth the money. I didn’t try that Gibson at a store. I was sure that a Gibson guitar must be great, like everybody says. People have their personal preferences, which could be very different from one person to another. Music is subjective.

Breaking Bad, Testing New Guitars #

I bought that Gibson online, and it was quite painless to return it back. I decided, “Why not buy and try another guitar if it’s so easy to return it?”

I started looking at guitars that the local store didn’t have and that I could not come and try. Basically, I was picking new guitars just because of their look and specs on the official website, sometimes watching video reviews on YouTube.

My next guitar was the Ibanez RG921WZC-NTF Premium. As it’s written in the model name, it’s a guitar from the premium Ibanez range. It had a hard-ish case with it. Its natural finish looked great, but the guitar didn’t sound as I would like. The guitar tone had very deep bass, too much low-end in general (because of the pickups or wood, I don’t know). But the red flag was the fretwork, something that made strings buzz even on a relatively high action. For me this instrument was not playable enough. Returned.

Next guitar was the Ibanez SIX6DFM-DCB Iron Label.

As I mentioned above, I already had some positive experience with the S-series. I had also played Iron Label guitars at the local store before. So, it was a reasonable choice for me. There are two models: SIX6DFM and SIX6FDFM (see the additional “F” letter). The only difference they had was the bridge: the first guitar had a Floyd-like floating tremolo system from Ibanez, and the second guitar had a fixed bridge. I had never had any experience with floating tremolos when I decided to try this guitar. I thought, “Why not?”.

After 3 days of adjusting the tremolo and watching countless tutorials, I understood that it was not my thing. I just wanted to have a ready-to-play guitar after spending 15 minutes on restringing it. My reason to return was new strings: I installed a thick-gauge string set again, and it turned out that the spring tension of the guitar was not enough to compensate for the strings. Looked like I needed to buy another spring somewhere.

Well, I didn’t want to buy additional springs and to spend more time on this. I reverted all my changes and sent the guitar back.

But I had to admit, the only thing about this guitar I didn’t like was the floating tremolo. The rest of it was totally fine for me. Right after returning this guitar, I ordered the version with the fixed bridge instead.

SIX6FDFM has arrived.

I still enjoy playing this guitar and haven’t found any problem with it to this day. Awesome neck shape and fretboard, awesome-sounding passive DiMarzio pickups, it has locking tuners and no tone knob. It had much better sound than the S521 I owned before. It had all its upsides and looked just gorgeous.

As a result, I had 2 S-series guitars from Ibanez, which didn’t make much sense to me. Especially when the new S-guitar was that great. So, I sold the S521 to a colleague and had a free slot to fill in my guitar stand.

I decided to look at other options from Ibanez and even thought about buying a 7-string guitar. Then I found this great FRIX6FEAH-CSF telecaster shape metal guitar with active EMG pickups. It sounded great. I had never tried EMG pickups before. The idea of changing batteries was always a concern for me. But, you know what, it’s worth it. Using these pickups, the biggest difference I noticed was in how pinch harmonics sounded with distortion. Besides that, high output and low noise.

Despite the body being bigger than the S-series guitars, it still was not that heavy. It had locking tuners and no tone knob. Besides that, it had a kill switch (which I found useless for me, anyway). I liked it and kept it as a second guitar with a different tone for recording.

This time I switched to a different string gauge for both guitars. I installed the D’Addario NYXL1154 set that has more balanced tension than 11–56, which is supposed to be better for the neck, and sounds the same.

Found Perfect Guitars, Is That Over? #

No, it’s not.

I will definitely keep SIX6FDFM and FRIX6FEAH-CSF for now.

They are very good guitars, and I like them, but I will keep exploring. Recently I started looking at .strandberg* guitars mostly because of Sarah Longfield and I got very curious to try such instrument. It’s a completely different concept from what I’ve held in my hands before. Unfortunately, I could not find any .strandberg* guitar in Berlin, and I could not try it at a store. The official online store is currently out of stock for the Boden OS 6 model. So, I ordered the purple Boden OS 7 model, which would let me try a 7-string guitar at the same time. I’m currently waiting for the delivery. This guitar deserves a separate post.

Conclusion #

Some life lessons I had during this time:

• If you’re inspired and motivated enough, you can start playing again after a long break. Someone in your circles can serve as an inspiration.
• You can learn a lot from guitar lessons on YouTube. I wish I had had it when I was 16. I won’t recommend any particular channel. Just find a person you like and stick to that channel.
• Follow some professional guitar players or bands who vlog. They will share a lot of useful information about tours, gear, and the recording process, and they would just inspire and motivate you even more.
• Set your goals! Like “I want to play the major scale shape in the 120 bpm tempo”, it does not matter what exactly it is, but it should be achievable and measurable somehow. It’s good for motivation.
• Choosing a guitar is very subjective. Everyone has very different preferences and expectations. If you tried a guitar, you liked playing it and you liked how it sounded — that’s your instrument. Don’t look at the specs or reviews.
• If you can, take guitars home and try to adjust them as you like (if you know what you’re doing; otherwise ask a professional). Only after you adjust your new guitar as you like, after you spend a lot of time with it trying your favorite presets or gear, only then can you make an informed decision. Sound is an equation with a lot of variables. Nobody would be able to understand a guitar by only watching a video on YouTube or by playing it only once at the store.

I don’t consider myself a good guitar player, but I’m a motivated one. I want to write and play music. Anyway, I’ll be in touch.