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Hatsubai « Roland equipped bridge »
Published on 09/12/11 at 17:52A lot of people are looking for ways to explore music differently, and Roland has a pretty cool system for enabling MIDI with guitars. The problem is that it requires a lot of fabbing for the thing to work, so buying a guitar with it already equipped is probably the better idea. The guitar has a basswood body with a maple neck, rosewood fretboard with 24 frets, dot inlays, an Ibanez Double Edge Pro tremolo, HH configuration, all access neck joint, one volume, one tone, one balance, two mini toggles and a five way switch.
UTILIZATION
The guitar's fretwork was really good. I was able to get some super sick action with the thing without any issues at all, although the neck did need to be shimmed a touch as the trem was a bit too sunken in the cavity for my liking. It was a simple fix, though. The ends were nice and round, so no issues there. The bridge on this is a very good tremolo, and I especially like the extra features that came with the guitar. I'll describe those more in detail in the sounds section.
SOUNDS
The guitar had some bland pickups in it. They're the standard pickups that Ibanez puts in most of their guitars, and they kinda suck. They're good for lower gain things, but once you start adding a good amount of gain, you start to lose clarity. By installing some nice DiMarzios in this, you'll get much more bang for your buck overall. The coolest feature about this was the versatility once you hook it up to one of those Roland Synth module things. I was able to get all kinds of wacky tones out of this thing.
OVERALL OPINION
I really hate heavily modifying guitars, and I would never install a Roland MIDI device into my guitar. Thankfully, we have companies like Ibanez that are willing to install them in their guitars, so it's much cleaner. This is the guitar you want to buy if you're looking to do that crazy Roland Synth stuff. Just be sure to replace the stock magnetic pickups as they're pretty bland and weak. Aside from that, it's a crazy solid guitar.
UTILIZATION
The guitar's fretwork was really good. I was able to get some super sick action with the thing without any issues at all, although the neck did need to be shimmed a touch as the trem was a bit too sunken in the cavity for my liking. It was a simple fix, though. The ends were nice and round, so no issues there. The bridge on this is a very good tremolo, and I especially like the extra features that came with the guitar. I'll describe those more in detail in the sounds section.
SOUNDS
The guitar had some bland pickups in it. They're the standard pickups that Ibanez puts in most of their guitars, and they kinda suck. They're good for lower gain things, but once you start adding a good amount of gain, you start to lose clarity. By installing some nice DiMarzios in this, you'll get much more bang for your buck overall. The coolest feature about this was the versatility once you hook it up to one of those Roland Synth module things. I was able to get all kinds of wacky tones out of this thing.
OVERALL OPINION
I really hate heavily modifying guitars, and I would never install a Roland MIDI device into my guitar. Thankfully, we have companies like Ibanez that are willing to install them in their guitars, so it's much cleaner. This is the guitar you want to buy if you're looking to do that crazy Roland Synth stuff. Just be sure to replace the stock magnetic pickups as they're pretty bland and weak. Aside from that, it's a crazy solid guitar.