Re: Need a cheap guitar just for practice. What's the best I can get?
As far as I'm concerned, Ibanez is the go-to make for inexpensive and HIGHLY DECENT guitars. It is possible to find an expensive Ibanez, but my Artcore AF55 came to me for less than $300 (< 260 Euros). Incidentally, I also own an Epiphone Les Paul and a Squier Stratocaster, which are the perfect guitars to compare it to as they're in the same price range; they pale in comparison, for reasons I'll list below.
One, my Ibanez has the highest level output of any of those others. Add to that the fact that I rewired the pickup leads and added a switch plate for coil-splitting (and I keep it in single-coil mode almost all the time), and accidentally wired the pickups perpetually out of phase. So, in single coil mode, with both pickups selected and out of phase, the signal is STILL louder than both the Squier and the Epi. That's impressive. (NOTE: The pickups are not 4-conductor-wired, they are 2-conductor - I had to take the pickups apart and attach separate leads to the coils' start and finish in order to be able to split them. Hard work, never doing it again, but you're welcome to try.)
Two, it's semi-hollow. This means that it gets decent sound unplugged, so if you don't have an amp, or don't want to use one, you can practice quietly and still hear yourself. (I've wanted for a very long time to add a piezo transducer under or in te bridge, but wiring that together with the magnetic pickups is very difficult. You could put a microphone next to it if you wanted to go acoustic on stage.)
Three, IT'S SEMI-HOLLOW. This means that it's all around a beautiful guitar and a joy to play. It gets marvelous sustain, and if you add some gain to your signal you can get some cool harmonic feedback. LOADS of fun there.
One or two things that I wished were different. I got the floor model, so I don't know if this is typical, but the truss rod needed tightening and the bridge needed heightening, or else there was some fret buzz when I played up high. The other thing is, well, it's a semi-hollow. There's no pickguard on the front or access panel on the back, so if you want to make any changes to the wiring, it all has to come out the f-holes or pickup routes, and it all has to go in again when you're done, and that's HARD. I still believe it's well worth it just because semi-hollows are a blast to play, but if you like getting down and dirty with the wiring, you might not like the challenge this one provides.
There's my two cents, generously given.
- Aero
