With my birthday and therefore an excuse to get over my aversion to buying things for myself coming up at a frankly terrifying rate, I've been thinking of replacing my current second-hand Strat copy with something new. After some searching around on the Guitar Center site, I think I've picked out the one I'm most likely to choose:


This is an Ibanez RG350DX, and seems to come very highly recommended by everyone for whom white guitars don't immediately spark terrible flashbacks to Dieter Bohlen.

The important question is: is this any good? The vast majority of reviews for it say that it's the best guitar they've ever owned and that it's good both physically and... sonically for metal, but on every site that invites comments there is always one review that is about 200% as long and 2000% as pompous as the others saying that everyone else doesn't know what they're talking about and that it's actually terrible unless you replace the pickups with new ones that cost just about as much as the entire guitar. So I'd appreciate any first-hand information, or just advice from anyone who can tell at a glance.

With a remarkable sense of timing I noticed yesterday that my Stealthplug has now reached that stage that audio hardware gets to where it only works if it's sitting at exactly the right angle, the sockets aligned to the nanometre and you hold your head on one side, so I'll be replacing that as well - I have my eye on the Pod XT at the moment, although I'm honestly not entirely sure of the practical difference between any of the bubbly pieces of hardware that you can see along the top row of the site. Again, any recommendations would be very welcome.

I'm going to see if I can try them both out along at the Guitar Center this weekend.