FEATURE: Cool Guitars They Don’t Make Any More, Part 4
Time for the latest in this regular series. If you want to play catch-up, check out the first 3 entries:
Cool guitars they don’t make any more 1
Cool guitars they don’t make any more 2
Cool guitars they don’t make any more 3
Starfield Cabriolet
If you read I Heart Guitar regularly you’re probably aware of the epic battle that takes place in my mind between my love of Ibanez shred axes and my lust for Telecasters and the like. This monumental struggle is akin to the earth-rattling clashes of Othello and Iago. Daltry and Townshend. Megatron and Starscream. I’m not sure if it’ll ever be resolved but I know this much: the Ibanez-owned Starfield brand comes as close as anything ever has to pacifying both warring factions of my internal monologue. Ok, so there are two main Starfield models: the Altair and the Cabriolet. The Altair is similar in many ways to my beloved Ibanez Talman model, while the Cabriolet mixes Telecaster and Les Paul vibes with some stylish bevelling. For a while Richie Kotzen was rocking the Starfields before finally jumping from the Good Ship Ibanez to take up with Fender. David Williams used Starfields on Michael Jackson’s Dangerous world tour, and Live used them around the early Throwing Copper era. The Starfield brand was originally used for Gibson-inspired designs in the 70s. While it was revived in the early 90s it only lasted a couple of years – from about 92 to 94. I guess the closest you’re going to get to a Starfield Cabriolet these days is the
Ibanez FR series.
CLICK HERE to see Starfield Cabriolet guitars on eBay.
Washburn P series 
These neat little axes were heavily associated with Nuno Bettencourt around the time of his Schizophonic solo album. Derek Trucks was another high-profile user for a while there. While these aren’t Nuno signature axes in the same way as his N2, N3, N4, N5 and N6 models he did have a degree of design input to the P series, and their streamlined Les Paul-ish vibe suited some of the material on Schizophonic perfectly. Structurally they have a lot in common with Les Pauls – mahogany body, maple top, 22 frets, stop tail piece and Tune O Matic bridge (and a Bigsby option, woohoo!) but with more noodle-friendly access to the upper frets and an expanded tonal palette courtesy of coil-splitting. There were various versions of this guitar including the quite deluxe P4, the more reserved P2 and the lower-priced C-II.
CLICK HERE to see Washburn P2 series guitars on eBay or CLICK HERE to see Washburn P4s.
Ibanez RG560
There’s something undeniably fun about 80s-style superstrat axes. Whammy bars, fast necks, humbuckers, big fat frets that make it hard to mess up a note once you’re holding it down… Most of my guitars are in this style but every now and then I find myself missing the sound of a single coil pickup in the neck position. I guess 20 years ago Ibanez somehow knew I would be feeling this way some day, and their Jedi-like foresight led them to design the RG560. Very similar to the RG570, the 560 differed in its use of a single coil at the neck position, but in terms of popular acceptance they may as well have replaced the neck with a trumpet and put a rabid bat where the whammy bar should go. For Ibanez this pickup layout just didn’t catch on like the twin-humbucker and humbucker-single-humbucker arrays of other RG and S series models, and eventually the RG560 just kinda faded away. That’s a shame but it’s also kinda awesome at the same time because you can find these for pretty reasonable prices on the used market now. I saw one at a secondhand guitar store recently for an obscenely low price and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t pick it up. One particular fan of the RG560 is Lewis from the Japan Guitar Journies blog. Hi Lewis.
CLICK HERE to see Ibanez RG560 guitars on eBay.
Fender Performer
This Japanese-made oddity is one of the more adventurous and futuristic of Fender’s latter-day designs. Unusual-for-Fender features include a 24-fret neck, floating System I tremolo, unusually-shaped pickups, and relatively complex electronics including a coil tap switch and a stacked tone controls. These were produced by Fender’s Japanese factory for only one year, 1985, before they were ditched from the catalogue. They’re quite hard to find today, and once you get one you tend to hang on to it. I guess the radical shape could be considered somewhat controversial, but I love it. I like how the body angles are echoed by the angle of the pickup; how the pointy headstock kind of finishes off the visual flow established by the cutaways; and the ‘not-quite-neck, not-quite-middle’ placement of the second pickup. I have a feeling that if Fender were to retool this design – maybe put a ‘real’ Floyd Rose on it and shift that second pickup forward to a more conventional neck placement, this guitar might fare a lot better today than it did back at the time of its original run.
CLICK HERE to see Fender Performer guitars on eBay.
Cool guitars they don’t make any more 1
Cool guitars they don’t make any more 2
Cool guitars they don’t make any more 3
10 Responses to FEATURE: Cool Guitars They Don’t Make Any More, Part 4
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I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), guitarworld.com, Tone Deaf, Beat and The Brag. I started I Heart Guitar in 2008. I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18 (I'm 33 now). I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week) and a setup tech. I live in Melbourne, Australia. You can check out my guitar playing at Reverbnation or on YouTube.
You can email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com
Yes the 560 gets a mention! Best guitar ever for it's price range. Sure some like the HSH RGs more and they obviously are more popular, but that neck single pickup does it for me.
My favorite guitar is a Starfield Cabriolet SJ Limited in red. They're very nice guitars. I suspect they made less than 1000 of them considering how rare they are on the web, ebay, etc.
I ran into mine sitting in the Used section of Guitar Center for $250… Luckiest day ever.
You have one? I'm so jealous! I've never even seen one down here in Australia. How do they sound?
It has a great sound – the semi-hollow body gives it a good (but quiet) acoustic tone.
With the pickups it has a nice bluesy sound – more Les Paul than Telecaster. The neck pickup is on the clean side and the bridge a bit more crunchy. The bridge pickup's more consistent – from the neck I occasionally stumble across a volume/tone setting that gives it this bizarre metal sound that will overdrive with even the most conservative amp settings.
There are coil-tap settings on the 5-way and both of those sound great too – the neck with coil tap sounds almost acoustic – but there is a bit of a 60Hz hum.
I've considered replacing the pickups – mine has cheap unlabeled pickups, while some of the Cabriolets had real SD's – but it does sound amazing with a tube amp so I'll probably keep it authentic.
(I've only been playing for 2 years, so I'm still learning. When my guitar teacher played with the Starfield it sounded incredible, though.)
As far as I can tell the Cabriolet SJ Limited was made only in 1994, and probably not for very long. Mine was made in Japan but there are some American-made deluxe versions.
I've been watching eBay for about 6 months and I've only seen two of them for sale, both in the UK. How I found one in Utah is anyone's guess. :)
That Fender Performer is sick! It kind of reminds me of a Fender Jaguar which I've wanted for a long time now, but the odd curves and sharp angles on the Performer are really sweet.
I share your struggle man. I cut my teeth in the 80's so the shred style guitars are big part of me but as I got older I really started gravitating towards the classics. My man guitar now is Partocaster.
It's nice to see that there are still bargains in the off-shore brands of electric guitars.
Quality has improved over the years, but the resale values haven't kept up with the great quality of some foreign electric guitars.
wow the Fender Performer is awesome… I love its shape and the pickups config seems pretty cool.
Just received my P4 Deluxe from the most awesome guy in the world in Chicago. He wasn't the biggest fan of the sound and, rather than swap out the pickups, decided to observe the integrity of the guitar and sell it to me. Been hunting one down for nearly a decade (couldn't afford one when they first came out). I am so unbelievably excited right now, I can't even handle it.
http://twitpic.com/ene26
http://twitpic.com/ene4a
Hey Pete!
I scored a 560 off craigslist for US$100 with a (crappy but still cool) hard case a few years ago. It's pickups had faded and the paint on the bridge (black) was blistered, but I threw a used FRED in the bridge, and a couple HS-2s in, swapped bridges with my white Jem (more for the Jem's sake, honestly), put in a killswitch just because I had gone to too many Buckethead shows at the time .. and it's been a fantastic guitar to me since. :)
~A