1989 Ibanez 540S

Details

I grabbed this one online for a good price and figured it would be a great way to dip my toe into Ibanezes and try out some Lace Sensor pickups while I was at it. Little did I know that this guitar would set off a chain of events where Ibanez suddenly became on of the largest parts of my collection - especially these late 80s 540 series guitars.

This particular one has a neck plate serial number, as opposed to others which have it on the headstock, and is missing the factory pickups, instead replaced with a JB in the bridge, a Lace Blue in the neck, and a Lace Gold in the middle. I find the Lace Blue to be really exceptional sounding, but I love high output single coils in the neck position - this pickup is described as being near P90 output levels. I’m not sure if that’s true as I’ve never had a P90 equipped guitar before, but it has plenty of output for smooth distorted lead lines. The Gold in the middle does a nice job cutting the output back in positions 2 and 4 for more strat-like clean tones, and used alone also sounds quite pleasant. The JB is just as expected, high output and with a very strong midrange tone.

This body shape is one of the most unique parts of this guitar, where it is thicker down the middle by the pickups and bridge, but thinner out to the edges. This is a really comfortable shape especially while played standing up. The neck has large dots, unlike earlier models, but no “Custom Made” inlay on the 22nd fret like 1991 and later years. Sadly this neck has seen better days, although it has perfect frets and board, the headstock has been refinished and a fairly poor logo job done, and the back of the neck has been stripped and oiled as well - I prefer the factory glossy finish over this but it’s still an excellent player. Cosmo black hardware all around, including the Edge tremolo which is an amazing bridge system, very comfortable and stays in tune as well as any Floyd Rose. I don’t particularly love the pop-in arm though, but I like to have the arms on my floyds fixed in place and the pop-in will always be loose as far as I can tell, so that’s more player preference than anything wrong with the guitar.

I no longer own this instrument