Ibanez RG7421PB - Sapphire Blue Flat Reviews

It was a bit of a journey getting this guitar, but it was made so much easier thanks to Ryan McKowen. He was there every step of the way with updates and advice, even when the guitar was stolen from my porch! Most other companies might say "sorry, it's your own fault" but not Sweetwater. After filing some cases, they sent me a replacement within a week! Thanks so much to Ryan, my boyfriend loves his new guitar!!

As for the guitar, it's incredible. The colors are beautiful, the sound is incredible. It was a gift for my boyfriend and he can't stop showing it off and has put in at least 17 hours of playing it. I can't wait to hear the songs he comes up with on this beauty.

I have three 7 strings and this one is a go to for low tunings. It's perfectly fine for a first 7 string and will do you justice. I did mod mine a bit. I swapped the pickups for the Seymour Duncan alpha/omega set and wow...it Really turned this thing into a beast of a guitar. I also had it plekd and set up with 11's. Might throw locking tuners in it this year. This thing is a beast. The feel is great and out of all 10 of my guitars, everyone who sees them always says this is their favorite. It's Really eye catching

I got this guitar wanting to get back into playing after a multi year hiatus and I couldn't have picked a better one. It looks awesome and feels better. I can actually play this better than my main guitar which is an old epi LP custom from the late 90s and that alone has made me feel like actually playing again. First Ibanez and the wizard neck is so good that I'm now looking for a higher end 6 string to replace my main guitar. Only downside really is the pickups aren't anything that will blow you away but that's to be expected at this price range.

I've been playing a 6 string iron label for the past few years and finally decided to try out a 7 string since most of the bands I listen to use them. For the price I am extremely impressed. The quality was excellent, the pick ups are slightly muddy but can't complain for the price tag. The PB top is great quality and the neck is fast. If you're looking for a 7 string ... I'd highly recommend.

Got this for Christmas; plays great, fretwork is great, smooth as butter and sounds amazing with that signature Ibanez growl. Everything you could ask for at a modest price. If you're thinking about testing out a 7 string, you will not be disappointed. This is my first 7 and it felt very welcoming to play and get used to. Thanks Sweetwater team!

This is my first 7 string, so I don't have another 7 string to compare it to.

Sweetwater did a great job with the set up. The intonation was perfect and the action was low.

The neck is smooth and fast. I really love the recessed neck joint. Also love the cut-aways on the body, they make this guitar really comfortable to hold and play.

As for the pickups, I'm not an expert, but they sound good to me. If you really don't like them, you could always swap 'em out and still be saving money over a higher-end guitar.

The 5 position switch gives you the 3 standard options (neck, bridge+neck, and bridge), but also 2 extra modes (neck+bridge split [inner] and neck parallel). If you look this guitar up on the Ibanez website you can see all the details about it.

My only complaint is that the volume knob on mine is a bit tough to turn. It's such a minor issue (for me anyway) and it may just be mine.

Also, if anyone out there is wondering, it fits great into a String Swing CC01.

I got this axe from Sweetwater a week ago. Sounds great, feels great, plays great right out of the box thanks to Sweetwater's 55-point evaluation an set-up they do on every single instrument they sell. Here's what really blew me away. Since this guitar has a beautiful figured poplar burl top, each and every of those guitars is unique, like a fingerprint. That being said, on any other website you normally get a generic picture of the guitar model, you order the instrument and keep your fingers crossed and hope your guitar looks good and you like it when it arrives. These people photograph EACH guitar, so that when you want to buy one you get to see all of the guitars of that same model that are in their warehouse and take the time to choose the one you like the most, and you DO get the one you chose, believe me. Sweetwater kicks butt!

Now, as for the guitar, I'm a professional touring musician and I've been a guitarist for over 20 years. I own a bunch of really nice fine guitars of different types so I know what a good guitar sounds like. This guitar sounds AMAZING and it does it all. You can go anywhere from jazz to funk to rock and roll to heavy metal to djent and it just happens to fit like a glove on everything. It is a superstrat, and I've always thought of the lack of personality in the sound of superstrats as a problem, but it's a blessing in disguise. It doesn't sound like anything in particular because of that, unlike the undeniable bluesyness of a Strat or the twang of a Tele, for instance, but that gives it an incredible versatility. It doesn't sound like anything so it can sound like everything beautifully. The stock pickups are REALLY good. Before I recieved the guitar I was thinking about replacing them down the road, but now that I've had the chance to play a whole bunch of different styles with it, I'm definitely gonna keep those. The only "issue" I saw was that positions number 2 and four of the selector switch, the ones that split the humbuckers and hook them up as single coils sound really nice, but to me they sound a little quieter that the bridge, middle and neck positions, and that could be a problem in some particular situations. It is a slight difference, though, but still I think it's worth mentioning. Other than that, I'm just in love with this beauty. I named her Lucy

Man this guitar has treated me right so far. I"ve had it about a week now, and the first thing I did was put some 11-72 strings on there (it came with 9-54, I tune pretty low). Since I put way heavier strings on there, it needed a proper set up, but now it plays great. If you don"t know how to set up (action, intonation, and adjusting the truss rod), definitely spend the money to have sweetwater do it, or have it done in by somebody else in general. This guitar was playable out of the box, but a set up took it to the next level. I"m not sure who expects a guitar you bought online to be 100% perfect right out of the box, it will usually just needed a little adjusting in the right places. Other than that, fretwork is great, pots and switch feel new and tight, and the tuners are the perfect tightness. The nut seems good despite being presumably plastic. Truly beautiful wood and paint job. Love the "matte" finish.

After unboxing this guitar I was very pleased to find there wasn't a single flaw in this guitar other than the tuning which I fully expected so that's fine. The guitar plays amazingly it's a lot faster than my other Ibanez and has incredible sound no matter what I play whether it's clean songs or distorted whether I'm sweeping or strumming chords this guitar sounds incredible and on top of that IT LOOKS SPECTACULAR the blue really pops especially when you see the red rosewood on the other side this guitar is a must buy!

My first guitar 23 years ago was an Ibanez RG350DX in Lazer blue. I absolutely loved that guitar and was sad to sell it a number of years later. I was checking out Sweetwater, just thumbing through and found this guitar. Always wanting to explore 7 strings and get another Ibanez. I decided to go with the demo model. The color was more pronounced and they took 50 dollars off for a scratch that I can barely see....if the light hits it correctly. Alex handled my purchase and even took the guitar off the website before I even bought it!! The guitar was set up beautifully, 55 point inspection!!! It traveled from Indiana to Virginia, opened the box and it was even in tune. It is an extremely well built guitar, the neck is very Ibanez, the pickups are well balanced for several styles of music. Buy this guitar today.

This is my first 7 string. Amazing quality for 500 bucks. The pickups will need a swap out with some duncans but besides that its fantastic. Sweetwater had Amazing speed on delivery also

This is the perfect guitar for someones introduction to 7 string guitars! I used Sweetwater gift cards that I got for Christmas to get this guitar. I absolutely love it! Took it to my favorite luthier here in town and got it set up. Also had a Nazgul pickup put in the bridge. This guitar is a monster now! Sounds amazing! The flat finish looks gorgeous in person. Great price for a great guitar! Definitely worth the money! Sweetwater is beyond amazing!!! Always has super fast shipping!!! Highly recommend.

This is my second 7 string guitar I've owned and played for an extensively long time and it's comparatively 10x better than the 200 dollar budget J22 Jackson that I just recently sold to afford this. I will give you this pros and cons of this guitar, some opinionated based on my experience and the rest are facts.

Pros:

-With the Wizard Neck on this guitar this guitar is smooth to play on. Chords are easily accessible and I'm not uncomfortable with constant fret wear on my hands like most affordable guitars that I've played before.

-The paint Job is outstanding! It's a little different than the picture on the web site (I got the Poplar Blue finish), but way better looking as there is a little bit of fade into a deeper blue on the outside of the top. They also did a good job on the mahogany, really deep stained and oiled finish to that and the top as well.

-Was ready to play outside of the box with no adjustments to be made, except maybe to tune it just a tad, but besides that it sounded really good running through my 120W stack. It has a 5 way blade switch which allows me to get an arrange of tones from this guitar which all sound good and have their own uses from chugging, to a nice smooth clean tone, to nice distorted leads, and other tones I haven't really messed with yet. The mahogany paired with the Poplar top really gives it great natural sustain, which is perfect for those of us who like to hold our notes out for awhile!

Cons

-Don't have anything really to bad to say about this guitar. It's a 500 dollar 7 string guitar so there's not going to be much more to it. Meaning that it doesn't come with fancy hardwear like locking straps, locking nut, or high grade electronics (like pickups, tone knobs with a better frequency rates, etc), but all this stuff can be purchased for more or less than 350 dollars if you want a guitar with the supreme quality of an almost 1500 prestige model Ibanez. Which isn't a bad option if you want some customization.

- No shark fin or piranah fin fret markers, just dots. I've never really been a fan of the dot markers (See I said this review was going to be a little opinionated, but does that mean you shouldn't grab this baby? HELL NO! GET IT NOW BEFORE IBANEZ STOPS PRODUCING THESE!)

This is my first 7 string and due to its cheap price I figured I'd probably have to replace the pickups and I was right. I do like the paint color although I wish it had a gloss coating. I put in a 7 string version of a Seymour Duncan SH-4 JB. The stock pickups sounded so bad that it was unusable for my recording purposes. After the upgrade, it now has great tone and I now have a new favorite pickup line.

Now for the problems... It doesn't have a proper pickup surround so the pickup is screwed directly to the body. Even while being extremely careful, one of the screws stripped the hole when replacing the pickup so I had to glue up the hole and bore it from scratch.

The second issue is that it just WON'T stay in tune. The neck seems really bendy and poor quality so I STILL don't have a usable 7 string for recording. This was my first Ibanez so I'm trying not to let it discourage me from the brand. I was hoping it would be cheap in price but not quality (like my new Danelectro 6 string which is a real gem and even a little cheaper than this Ibanez).

So between the guitar, strap, strap-lock, gig bag and pickup, I'm already in over $700 and don't have a usable instrument to show for it. I'll probably try to replace the neck if I can get one that'll fit but in the end I could have gotten a much better instrument that would have worked from day one without upgrades for the same as I'll end up putting into this sub-par guitar. At this point my choices are to bring it to a luthier for a new neck and setup or just throw it out with the weekly trash pickup to cut my losses. Such a shame.

Save yourself some grief and keep saving money until you can afford a better quality 7 string. One of my songwriting partners has a 1990's Ibanez 6 string which sounds and plays great. I don't feel this one is worth the trouble in spite of its good looks.