Ibanez PN12E Parlor Acoustic-Electric Guitar Vintage Mahogany Sunburst

Most Liked Positive Review

A great guitar that is ready to play right out of the box

This is the first guitar that I have ever seen that was ready to take out and lay right out of the box. This is a guitar that would be particularly good for guitarist who play mostly on electrics as this guitar is almost as easy to play as a well setup electric guitar. In addition the neck has about the same dimensions as an electric guitar. The nut is about 1 3/4" wide and about 1 7/8" wide at the 5th fret. Because this is a parlor style guitar the instrument has a short scale of 24 1/2". Thus, you can use a heavier gauge of string that you might ordinarily use and still be able to do some deep string bends. On acoustic guitar I prefer the extra light gauge strings (0.10). The strings that came with the guitar appear to be approximately that following gauges: .12 .17 .25 .32 .44 .54. Also because this is a parlor guitar the neck and body come together at the 12th fret. I tried several different tuners on this guitar and compared this with the onboard tuner. In each case the onboard tuner and my other tuners seem to indicate that the onboard tuner was doing an excellent job in getting the strings right on pitch. The build-in preamp is simple and has a volume knob and a bass and treble knob. I ran this guitar through 3 different kinds of acoustic amps and it sounded great. The amplified sound was clean, clear, with stable well rounded tones coming through the amp. I placed a high end tuner with a needle type of meter in front of the amp and the needle did not waver. All overtones appear to be well managed on this guitar. The strap button at the heel of the guitar was located on the bottom of the heel. I would have liked to seen this strap button located on the underside of the heel. With the strap button on the bottom of the heel this tends to make the guitar move away swing out and down a little. If it had been located on the underside of the heel this would have kept the instrument a little closer to your body. I am going to install a strap button later on the underside of the heel as many guitar makers are doing today. I originally bought this is a travel guitar, but I think that it will become my favorite guitar for use in live performance situations. I like this better that many other instruments that cost 10 times or more than this instrument.