I bought a new guitar, and it arrives today! As with all my gear purchases, I spent hours and hours researching my decision online last week. At the same time, I’m trying to sell my other two electric guitars to retroactively fund this purchase. My candidates were:
All of these guitars have excellent reviews and look stunning (although I haven’t seen any of them in person yet). I went back and forth for days trying to decide. I asked Jill which one looks better about 20 times, and she actually didn’t like the guitars with inlays on the fretboard or the ones with a double cutaway. I know it’s sort of silly to buy a guitar based on looks, but I had researched everything else to death and was still having trouble deciding.
I finally went with the ARC500 for a nice double-humbucker Les Paul sound (that I miss since trading my LP Studio). There is VERY little information about this guitar online. It was produced in 2007 and then just drops off the map. Several vendors have it in stock, but it’s not on the Ibanez site at all, and there’s less than 10 reviews online anywhere. So I had little to go on, but everyone I asked said it looks the best, and it had the features I wanted while being simple in design. Ibanez are known for their high-value guitars on a budget. $750 for a guitar may seem expensive, but for a professional instrument it’s very cheap.
As with all my large online purchases, I contacted several vendors and got the price significantly reduced from retail ($150 off for a brand new one, or 20% off). It worked out for them too since I completed the sale outside of ebay, saving them big fees.
I’ll try to let you know how I like the guitar tomorrow, but I’ll probably be too busy playing it to blog 🙂
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