Price: £245
This guitar was donated to me in a very sorry state; but after cleaning and close examination, I was surprised to find that it was a very nice quality Taiwanese-made Yamaha RGX 121 FP. I’d never seen one of these guitars before and what really stood out was the full-sized clear ‘scratch plate’ covering the entire front of the guitar like a suit of armour. This was presumably intended for the owner to choose from a (limited?) range of pre-printed graphics to choose from and periodically change the whole look of their instrument. As there were none of these graphics with the guitar or any sign of any on eBay, I decided to put some of my wife’s pretend ‘gold-leaf’ sheets under there and make a kind of metallic feel. In reality, clear plastic over ordinary black really isn’t that impressive, so you do have to find something to go under there. Despite the gold sheets being slightly loose and wrinkled, overall it does’t look too bad.
The most surprising thing about this guitar was the quality of the neck to begin with. It feels very much like a Made-in-Japan neck from the Matsumoto factory. This guitar was one case where I upgraded the tremolo with a Wilkinson push-in arm unit with full-weight block; a vast improvement on any old-style screw-in unit. Pickups from the spares department was a HSH combination – two Warman humbuckers with a Warman single coil in the middle. Very nice mixture for this guitar.
The guitar features original Yamaha tuners and I retained the original nut on this one since it played perfectly without needing changing. The set up (precision fret levelled) is very low and light and the neck and playability are just surprisingly good.
Altogether an unusual and high quality feeling guitar with some character.
