Jun 22, 2016

New Guitar Day: Ibanez RG8


          A few days back in a fair trade I swapped my Douglas Hadron 727 out for this Ibanez RG8 eight string guitar.  It needs a bit of work and I'll get to cleaning it up and tweaking it as soon as I have a good set of strings, but for now, first impressions:

          This being my first 8-string, the fretboard feels like the deck of an aircraft carrier.  With the trademark flat Ibanez neck profile, however, it doesn't feel too terribly unwieldy and I think it'll just take a little adjusting to.  Electronics all seem to work fine, the pots are a little scratchy but nothing some oil can't fix.

          The pickups are weak, as is a common complaint about eight strings.  If it weren't so difficult to find parts for eight string pickups, I'd be inclined to engineer my own solution; if good eight string pickups weren't prohibitively expensive, I'd just swap in a nicer set.  Ah well; the sound is still usable with some tweaking.  Otherwise, everything else seems quite manageable; the body has taken a little bit of damage but the natural wood finish absorbs damage far better than a high gloss finish, and the multi-piece neck is very nice indeed, as is the curved neck heel.  More in-depth review and description of any fixes/mods coming up in a bit, stay tuned.

3 comments :

  1. I'm glad you like it bro, The Douglas seems to be pretty good too. I had to do a lil tweaking to the Floyd that was on there. I tightened the spring tension to level out the trem a little, lowered the action, changed the strings and adjusted the inotation and straightened the neck. It plays like butter now. But yeah, the pickups on that guitar (rg8)were probably my biggest complaint. I have the Emg 57/66 set on my schecter hellraiser hybrid c8 and they are awesome. They have a passive feel but are active pups but still have that really big bite that emgs deliver... All in all, I'm glad we traded and I'm looking forward to seeing some demo videos in the future and I hope you enjoy the ibanez rg8.

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    1. Good to hear! I cleaned up the RG8 and oiled the fretboard, got new strings to put on it and by chance the 8 string set I got only had 6 strings in it, waiting for a new set to really get rolling but so far so good, hopefully I'll put it to good use in the album I'm working on now.

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