Ibanez AZ427P1PB-CKB

Initial Impression

I finally received the order after 4 months waiting and was exited to start playing, but first impression left me very confused. The guitar wasn’t playable at all. I’ve never had worse experience in my life when trying guitar first out of the bag. Even $50 Harley Bentons have felt and sounded better than this Ibanez. It’s $1500 guitar and not the cheapest one, so one would expect it to be at least playable for that price and have some factory tuning done.

The guitar sounds like a broken banjo. When I got the guitar, the neck was bent forwards and it had over 1mm relief. All strings from B to A were hitting to frets and giving bad fret buzz. Also the tremolo springs and the plate are making high pitch noise as well that is also heard trough amp.


Production Quality

The production quality was somewhat questionable for the $1500 price. Truss hole was full of dust and dirt and it looked like the guitar has been standing a long time in some dusty warehouse. The casigns in the back had so much glue in the plastic sheet covers (that were full of scratches) they left glue marking on panels. The casings also look like some 6-year old kid has cut them with scissors, as they are not even and a bit too small for the holes. They are made from weird different materials (two has silver backside and one is thinner and black) and look like leftovers found from the workshop with dirt on the inner side. The inner work in the backside look very poorly done with wood chips sticking there and there and different colors (at least grey, white and black) of paint spatter covering some parts of the wood. The soldering looks poorly done and there are some cold joints seen (no static at least, so at least electronics was working). The mic mountings look bad with wire and glue leftovers that are seen. This looks very amateurishly made guitar. I’m really angry and disappointed.


Trying to fix

It took 3 days to setup and fix the guitar to be somewhat playable. It was a trial and error run but final steps are these. I put some foam between the tremolo springs to prevent high ringing noise. Then I straightened the neck back to having something like 0.25mm relief using string as a ruler and trying to get just enough space for all frets. After I got the strings ringing somewhat nicely I fixed the intonation. I had to crank the E and B screws to maximum to just to be able to get intonation correct. Then I lifted action of the strings from a little over 1.5mm to 1.0mm.


After the fix

It is now much more playable and the fret buzz is not that bad anymore. It is still heard trough amp especially when playing hard long notes with low B and E strings and some frets with A also, but it isn't instant and dominative sound anymore. The sustain on A, D, G, B, E strings is insane. That is one positive thing about this guitar, but on B and E with higher frets the notes are dampened out quite quickly. With open strings and low notes the sustain is very good for those as well. Even though the sustain is good, there is something fishy with some notes that start to resonate higher after initial picking. Like when I play E3 it smoothly rises almost to E# after a while. The sound is not too loud, but it is noticeable and very annoying when playing slowly. If playing quickly it doesn't bother.

It has definitely more like a steel-string acoustic feeling than electric guitar feeling and the string tension is quite high with standard 0.10-0.59 strings. I definitely like the clear sound and awesome sustain on higher strings and e.g. for tapping (at least other than low B and E) this guitar is very good. My playstyle is more snappy fingerstyle and riff playing and I feel that this guitar doesn't suit that purpose too well.


Summary

All in all, I gotta say, this is worst guitar (with at least $300 price tag) I’ve ever played during my 20 year old journey. I have never had any issues with Ibanez 6 strings guitars before, so this is why this surprises me. One would expect $1500 guitar to be at least playable. Also the manufacturing and delivery looks suspicious to me. The QC inspection note said that it was inspected 14/6/2022 with some markings like IBZ-P23 EKO, U-2, T-2 I don't understand. Anyways I wonder what have I've been waiting for months if the QC was done in June already and the serial number in the neck of the guitar says 05/2022.