Ibanez JS1600 Joe Satriani Signature

Joe Satriani has long been a player of both basswood body guitars and floyd equipped guitars. Why they continue to release these hard tail models, I'm not exactly sure. The guitar has a mahogany body with a maple neck and a rosewood fretboard, 22 frets with dot inlays, a LoPro Edge bridge, two DiMarzio humbuckers, one volume, one tone and a three way toggle switch.

UTILIZATION

The guitar itself is put together fairly well. The frets are in great shape. They are perfectly crowned and have a very nice bevel on them at the edges that makes them feel great when moving up and down the neck. I was able to get some nice, low action with this guitar. The biggest gripe I have is that this guitar has a hard tail bridge. Satch has always been known as a floyd user, so I don't really see the point in releasing these hard tail bridge equipped guitars. I guess there's a market for them, but it's a lot smaller than the normal Satch market.

SOUNDS

The guitar sounded really good, I'll give it that. The mahogany body actually sounds better than the normal basswood body, in my opinion. Where as the basswood body is great for leads and fusion tones, I find that mahogany is a better "all around" wood, especially with the thinner S series bodies. The FRED in the bridge got these real cool harmonics, but it also had some nice girth to it that the other basswood bodied models didn't have. The neck sounded a bit fuller, too. There wasn't as much annoying treble, and the midrange was a bit more complex instead of overwhelming.

OVERALL OPINION

I really dislike the hard tail bridges on these guitars. That said, they're high quality guitars that sound pretty good. If you're into hard tails, you might enjoy this guitar. I recommend looking elsewhere in the Ibanez line up, but there really aren't too many that have the specs that this model does.