Cheap G.A.S.
man...you gotta see this.......I just scored a 20th Anniversary Limited Edition Ibanez RG 550xx off eBay.
Actually got it cheaper ($886.00) than if I would have bought it from
Musicians Friend last Spring, when they first came out.
There were very..very few of these even offered in the USA.
Here is a cool announcement from Paul Gilbert on the Ibanez website.
http://www.ibanez.com/eg/featured/rg20th.aspx
These photos make the fluorescent red look lighter then it actually is.
Plastic on the pick guard...this is an un-played guitar. They came with
matching cases with special edition picks and strap.
Comments
I think there were only a couple thousand of these even offered.
They were not kidding when they said \"Limited Edition.\"
These sold out real quick.
They mounted the original Edge tremolo...which I like, and the neck is redesigned;
The original RG550 models sometimes suffered from catastrophic neck warpage,
owing to the ultra-slim carve of the neck - the very thing that
made the RG550 such a unique instrument in the first place.
Instead of recreating the 2- or 3-piece neck of the late 1980s,
which usually had a head piece and a longer neck piece glued together
obliquely just behind the nut, Ibanez have revised the entire neck
construction with the 20th Anniversary model.
The neck on the new RG550 is a 5-piece laminate, with three strips
of hard rock maple and two thin strips of walnut.
The maple strips are arranged so that the grain on the outer two pieces
is parallel, while the grain of the center strip is perpendicular to
the other two, thereby granting the neck far more resistance to
warping than the originals had.
I know with the older RG 550's...before you buy one...
you need to pull the neck off, and look for stress cracks.