Jackson Fusion EX

This is another Fusion guitar to help satisfy those who love the shorter scale guitars but want that super strat versatility. The guitar has a basswood body with a maple bolt-on neck and rosewood fretboard, 24 jumbo frets, offset dot inlays, a licensed floyd rose, HSS configuration, one volume, one tone and a five way switch. Unlike the FX1, this has a pickguard to mount the pickups.

UTILIZATION

The guitar had the standard fair going on with these guitars. The frets were fairly crowned, but they could have been done better. The edges were a touch sharp and could have been rounded a bit more to make it feel better when you're moving your hand up and down the neck. The neck joint was pretty good, so no issues there. The floyd on this isn't that great. In fact, I'd venture to say it's pretty bad. What I like to do with these guitars to improve both the tuning stability and tuning is replace them with a real floyd rose. This will make the guitar a lot better and help when doing those crazy dive bombs.

SOUNDS

I'm not a huge fan of these basswood Jacksons. I'm more of a traditionalist when it comes to what woods guitars are made out of. I like my basswood Ibanez guitars, but it just seems wrong on Jacksons. The stock pickups in this are pretty trash. The bridge is dull and muffled. It doesn't have that defined sound that higher quality pickups have. The singles in the neck and middle were average at best, but they lacked that single coil quality that I really love. They work decently on cleans, but since I'm a metal player, I don't put too much effort into clean tones to begin with.

OVERALL OPINION

The biggest reason to choose this over the FX1 is for the pickguard. If you're a fan of that chambered pickguard tone, check these out. The quality is average, but I'm not a huge fan of these guitars being basswood. I would much prefer that they were alder or mahogany. Be sure to pay attention to detail when buying these to make sure you get a good one.