Does anyone know of any premium/prestige Ibanez RGs that don’t have a floyd-rose style bridge? I’m specifically looking for Ibanez guitars that aren’t currently in production
Thank you 
I bought one last year, BUT it is still in production so it doesn’t fit the criteria.
I am happy with it overall though.
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I have seen the trem version of that one before, but not the hardtail version - thanks for showing me!
Out of interest, do you know of any places - aside from Reverb - which sell specifically music/guitar related 2nd hand equipment?
Thanks again
Other than eBay, I don’t. You could try searching for authorized Ibanez dealers and seeing if any of the them have used stock. That’s probably a lot of work. I’m sure there’s other stuff out there, I’m just not very knowledgeable about gear. I buy things infrequently and when I do I tend to splurge and get new stuff. I bought the Ibanez last year and also a nice Taylor…I think I may be done buying guitars for the next decade lol! It’s probably been that long or longer since my last purchase.
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https://ibanez.fandom.com/wiki/RGIX6FDLB
The RGIX6FDLB was once the poster child of the Iron Label series, but it was discontinued in 2019. There were significant disruptions to the Ibanez lineup in 2019 and 2020. There you have it: it’s not in production, it is an RG, and it has a hard tail.
You can find more by looking through the catalogs: https://www.ibanez.com/usa/support/catalogs/
I am particularly fond of the Exotic Woods series of RG guitars that ran from 2018 to 2020, standard RGs loaded with Dimarzios from the factory. These guitars were Ibanez’s first run of roasted necks.
I must admit to being a shameless Ibanez fan. I can’t even pass a new Gio in Guitar Center without sitting down to play a few notes on it.
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Daaang Joe - that’s a cool guitar! I myself find myself a lot less interested in a tremolo system these days…
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rg7621 if you’d like a seven, rg652ahmfx if not
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The reason I never used one is pure laziness, I can’t be bothered with the changing string hassle 
Changing strings always used to bother me too, but then I came across this interview with Thomas Nordegg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG_W3uqEFf0
In this interview, which Thomas gives from his workbench with EVO on the table, many secrets are revealed, one of which makes the locking trem string change only slightly more onerous than a regular hardtail string change. Thomas puts the ball ends through the tuning pegs (instead of cutting them off), then trims all the strings with one cut at the bridge of the guitar.
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In my teens I had a cheap Washburn with a Floyd Rose and somewhere I stumbled across that same method. Probably some article in GW but I don’t recall. HUGE time-saver. From there I’d say the initial “stretch out” period was slightly longer than a fixed bridge. BUT once that was out of the way the guitar rarely went out of tune.
For whatever reason, in the decades since, I have only purchased fixed bridge instruments.
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Slightly off-topic question - does anyone have any experience with the guitar brand ‘Eart’?
Thanks again
If you are in the US, Sweetwater, Music Go-Round, Sam Ash and Guitar Center also have their own listings for used gear. Also Shopgoodwill.
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This looks like a great technique for guitars without locking tuners. It is strange how brand new guitars even in 2023 often don’t have locking tuners and stainless steel frets.
A whammy bar has huge downsides, particularly if floating (break a string and the guitar is offline, etc.). However, it is a huge spatula to apply frosting to whatever one is baking. I think that EVH configured his guitars dive-only so he could drop-D and also survive a broken string, and yet do dive bombing theatrics; that might be a good compromise vs. Steve Vai (floating). Even Paul Gilbert doesn’t use a tremolo system, he says (if I recall) that it “sucks tone” (and I’m sure that he is right). But I’m a frosting whore so I always need to have a floating whammy bar, it’s just stupid but…
Absolutely. Even without all the dive-bomby screamy stuff, It has note/phrase shaping capabilities that aren’t possible to get other ways. Beck and Holdsworth are 2 great examples. And David Gilmour would even use it for his vibrato at times (though in those cases I can rarely hear the difference between that type of vibrato and what he typically does from fret hand vibrato alone).
[Rant approaching…]
Well you just reminded me of the other reason I stayed away from them. I remember hearing somebody say this in my younger years. I believed this back then. Plus, most of the players who’s tone I admire just happen to play either fixed bridge instruments, a traditional whammy setup (i.e. non-locking-nut, floating bridge, such as your standard strat)…other than EVH who I’ve always thought had some of the best tone in the business. I’ve like his sounds with and without the floating trem through the various VH eras.
I’m not technically qualified to talk about the physics of it…but something about this now strikes me as more conventional wisdom that quite possibly isn’t true. I know they have convincing sounding arguments like “fixed bridges are anchored right into the wood and you get more of the natural sound/resonance of the instrument”. Yeah…then why is it if we swap out different pickups in ANY guitar we can get such drastically different sounds? Why is that we get such a different sound even when switching from our bridge to our neck pickup, or adjusting our tone knobs, or even something like playing notes on a different string (i.e. play frets 2, 4, 5 on the D string then try 12, 14, 15 on the low E)? Most of these are the electronics, doing their thing. Then there are of course more organic elements like pick attack and edge picking…all these things have pretty drastic effects on the tone. I dunno…quality materials certainly matter. My main stock of guitars are 2 PRS’s and then my new Ibanez. The PRS claim they use high quality tone woods and they do sound great. Even with no amp, they have a nice resonant sound. They also have great pickups though
I think part of the reason I bought into the whole argument in my younger years is that so many of the dime a dozen shredders in the 80’s didn’t have what I considered very good tone and they also mostly had floating trems. They probably also set their amps up in a way that they didn’t produce a sound I liked and/or the overall recordings they were on just weren’t great quality. The whole thing, looking back, seems like the Emperor’s New Clothes lol!
I’m sure someone has done this, but I’d love an actual scientific approach like taking a good model Ibanez that comes in fixed and floating bridge (but otherwise the same hardware) and get a recording of each playing the same thing and analyze the frequency responses and see if it really matters. I’d suspect the difference is less apparent than we could hear from the degree of edge picking a player uses.
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The tone knob thing is passive electronics. The other two are just physics.
But I agree you’ll get way more tone-shaping mileage out of your electronics than out of tweaking your bridge hardware choices. Unless it’s set up badly it can usually be compensated for in the amp settings.
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You make a whole series of interesting points. To me, the most significant concerns involving tone are likely (a) how far down the neck I pluck the string, (b) where I “listen” to the string (which pickup), (c) which string I select for a particular note, and (d) pickup details (how much area they sample, etc.). This part isn’t so hard to understand, it’s likely Fourier analysis is enough to match experiments.
But now we get to the magical areas:
Regarding “tone woods,” etc., I really have no idea. I’d love to see a double-blind test about expensive “tone woods,” because it has been done before for violins, and the results were surprising. When I make a Warmoth guitar I just pick pretty wood 
. (Somebody could attempt all kinds of fancy finite element analysis, etc., but ordering bodies from Warmoth and experimenting is likely the best way to go.)
For a Floyd bridge, it does have a few strange properties: Can it do a “double-stop” [where one note is bent] without raising both notes sharp? (Probably not.) I also wonder about their springs, e.g., if they have any strange resonant behaviors… I also wonder if a dive-only setup sounds different than a floating setup (as the dive-only could have really strong contact with the body). I also wonder why they sell heavy “sustain” blocks; I have a tungsten Floyd “sustain” block (one of my favorite metals) as a paperweight!
But overall, you’re right, some good experiments would put ALL of these questions to bed.
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Stuff matters and it’s additive. It’s the combination of things that changes stuff. I have 3 electric guitars, different woods, different construction, different scale length. Same hardware, same pickups, same electronics, same wire. Guitar A is lower mid heavy, Guitar B is bass heavy, Guitar C is top heavy. I measure the pots before I solder them in, same for caps. They are all identical, height of pickups is identical. Distance of pickup from bridge is identical. Yet the guitars sound radically different than each other. Guitar A also has different dead spots than the other two guitars.
Guitar A has a real Floyd with a large brass block, Guitar B has a Gotoh 1996T with no modifications, guitar C has a Floyd Rose 1000 with no modifications. Guitar B used to have a real Floyd on it, but it sounded exactly the same so I don’t think the hardware makes a lick of difference.
So, that doesn’t leave a whole lot to explain the tonal differences between the instruments other than Wood and Construction. Guitar A is Alder with a maple neck and a rosewood board. Guitar B is neck through with a neck made of walnut/maple 7 ply and a rosewood board. Guitar C is Mahogony set neck and Ebony board.
When I initially bought Guitar A back in the 80s, there was a dozen of the same guitar in the store. I played all of them and chose that one because it sounded and felt the best. I worked in a shop for almost 2 decades with thousands of guitars going through my hands. Of 10 of the same model, 2 were great, 1 was amazing, 2 were dogs, and 5 were middle of the road. All same HW, same pickups, same construction, same materials. Some were closer than others, but the good and amazing ones there is little to explain the differences, sometimes vast, that they could have between the dogs. These were all levels of guitars too, very inexpensive to very very expensive.
Go down to your local GC and try it yourself.
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Yes, this would be the most interesting thing to study, to see what happens between these supposedly “identical” guitars!
Manufacturing tolerances are even tighter now, is it a good or bad thing? I’d be interested to find out if the “middle of the road” was the intended outcome or not.
If that was the case, then I’d rather the tolerances not be so tight so we get some truely amazing instruments again at the expense of a few bad ones. Goes for amps and pedals too.