Ibanez GRG170DX Review

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Ibanez GRG170DX
Ibanez GRG170DX

Contents

General Information

Original Author: Matt23

Weapon: Ibanez GRG170DX

Make: Ibanez

Model: GRG170DX

Price: £150


Specifications

Neck: GRG neck Neck Type: GRG Body: Basswood body Frets: Medium frets Fingerboard: Bound Rosewood Inlay: Sharktooth inlay Bridge: FAT 10 bridge NeckPU: PSND1 neck pu MiddlePU: PSNDS mid pu BridgePU: PSND2 bridge pu HW Color: CH

Sound

The sound is quite good considering the price. It is nothing special but isn't bad. The neck humbucker has quite a nice round sound to it but is very muddy if you use it on lower strings. The bridge humbucker is nothing special though does make the notes squeal with a bit of coaxing (half pinch harmonics etc). The middle single coil is a bit pointless as it doesn't sound good as a single coil for playing with lots of drive and the volume knob on the guitar on full. And if you do get a sort of bluesy sound then this pickup sounds too metally so I think it is a bit useless, apart from when combined with the bridge it sounds very good for a clean setting. The sustain on this guitar is not good, as notes end up dying in about 5 seconds. Overall the sound is not bad, but is nothing special.

Ease Of Use

This guitar is very easy to play compared to other guitars (some even expensiver) that I have played. The action is low, and there is not a lot of friction on the fretboard. The guitar also has 24 frets which comes in handy time to time, although the 24th fret is so small it's very difficult to play and will not sustain for more than a second or two. The main problem with this guitar is the tremolo. It sounds fine, but makes the tuning on this guitar terrible. I should have expected this when I bought a cheap guitar with a whammy bar, but I knew barely anything about guitars then. If you use the whammy bar then the guitar will be guaranteed to start detuning itself, and sometimes very drastically (strings a quarter tone out of tune). It is impossible to play anything that need you to use the whammy bar at the beginning as you will play out of tune for the rest. The problem doesn't just stop with the whammy bar. The first problem is that if you change the tuning to DADGBE without a tuner, you will actually be in EbBbEbF#BbEb, or something close to that, and horribly out of tune as this huitar cannot adjust to alternate tunings. The last, and worst problem, is this guitar goes out of tune without you even doing anything except playing it. This is partly the fault of the tremolo as when you do a bend or vibrato the bridge moves and this sends the guitar out of tune, but I also suspect the tuners are partly to blame, as the guitar does go out of tune without bends or vibrato. Also when you are tuning a string sometimes you can turn the machine head about an eighth of the way round and the pitch of the string won't change at all so I think the tuners aren't very good either. Having said all this if you tune the guitar about ten times in a row (as after you have tuned each string seperately the first one you tuned will be out of tune again) it does settle down for a little bit, and you do get used to having to tune your guitar all the time or play out of tune, and it isn't as annoying as you might think once your used to it.

Appearance

I loved the look of this guitar when I bought it as I was a complete metalhead then and was going to buy a BC Rich, but decided against it. The super-strat shape, sharktooth inlays, and gloss black finish are very nice, but there not what I like in the look of a guitar so much anymore. I'll point out that the body of the guitar fingerprints very easily, and if your anything like me you won't bother cleaning it. Also you make be taken in by how black the front of the guitar is but the back of the neck is light wood colour and white.

Overall Impression

This is quite a good guitar for it's price, but if I was buying a guitar for this price again, I would not even think of buying one with a tremolo. Although this guitar does have good metal looks, and plays very nicely, I can't recommend it because of it's tuning problems, though I think these would occur on any cheap guitar with a floating bridge.