i bought a yamaha pacifica

If you took a Fender Stratocaster and tastefully modified it for modern play, what you would end up with is the Pacifica. This is the guitar Yamaha can build that Fender can't because they're not "allowed" to.

I'll explain.

Pacifica comes in many flavors that I'll detail in a moment, but just to get this out of the way, what I bought was the PAC112VM model.

Why I bought it

There were two main reasons.

The first is the fact on both the PAC112V (rosewood board version) and PAC112VM models, the tone knob is a push-pull to split the humbucker to single-coil.

I was watching videos about this guitar, saw a person demoing it who then pulled the tone knob, to where my eyes widened and I thought WHOA THERE, WHAT IS THAT? I learned yes, single-coil can be had at the bridge side, and that right there is what put this guitar on my radar. If it didn't have that very specific feature, I never would have bought it.

Long time readers of mine know that I don't like HSS guitars, but I like this one because it's arguably the only guitar that gets it right.

The second reason is the neck. It is not like the Pacifica guitars of the past with that skinny neck garbage. This one has some actual shoulder to it. If you look at the measurements, it's close to Fender but with changes that make it easier to play.

Fender American Stratocaster Pro neck has a scale length of 25.5", zero-fret neck width of 1.6875", 22 narrow-tall frets, 1st fret neck thickness of 0.82", 12th fret neck thickness of 0.92", and 9.5" fingerboard radius.

Yamaha Pacifica PAC112VM neck has a scale length of 25.5", zero-fret neck width of 1.6141", 22 medium jumbo frets, 1st fret neck thickness of 0.82", 12th fret neck thickness of 0.90", and 13.75" fingerboard radius.

The zero-fret neck width (a.k.a. neck width at nut) is a little easier to visualize when stated in millimeters. Fender Am Pro neck is 42.8mm and Yamaha Pacifica PAC112V is 41mm. In other words, a 1.8mm difference.

If the Fender neck kept its thickness but had larger fret wire and its fingerboard flattened to allow for lower string action along with much easier string bending without fretting out, that's the Pacifica neck.

And there are also some other things about the Pacifica that make it Fender-esque.

Body is alder. Not basswood. Not poplar. Alder.

Pickups are all alnico V magnets, hence why "V" is in the model name.

Knobs are metal, knurled and tightened into place with a side screw, just like on the Fender Telecaster.

Most Pacifica guitars are under 8 pounds total. They usually weigh in around 7.4 to 7.8. In other words, about the same as a Fender Strat.

And you get all this for less than the price of a Squier Classic Vibe.

Speaking of which, there are three things about the PAC112V where cost cutting is seen. Electronics use mini pots, the nut is plastic and the tremolo block is the skinny type. However, all of that can be swapped out easily...

...or you just get a higher level model Pacifica so you don't have to mod anything. If you were to get any model with PAC612 in the name, now you get Seymour Duncan pickups, Grover locking tuners, TUSQ nut and a Wilkinson bridge - and it still costs less than a Mexico made Fender Player Stratocaster.

Above that, things get expensive with Pacifica Standard Plus and the top tier Pacifica Professional.

Why I went with the PAC112VM

There was a demo model available from Sweetwater and it had the best price. The only difference between the PAC112V and PAC112VM is the latter has a maple fingerboard, hence why "M" is at the end of the model name. And yes, the all-maple neck is two-piece with the fingerboard laid down on top with no skunk stripe on the back. This is not a Fender, after all.

I was originally totally set on getting the PAC112V, but then I went to check the maple board models before making the buy, and the demo was there. It has very small cosmetic issues due to it being an in-store guitar people picked up and played before I bought it. These little cosmetic things didn't bother me, so I bought the demo instead since it was cheaper than a new PAC112V.

Fender can't make a guitar like this

I said above that Fender isn't "allowed" to make a guitar like this, and I'll explain that now.

Any time Fender strays from tradition, people don't buy. This is why the recently released Indonesia-made Fender Standard Stratocaster pretty much follows what the Mexico Standard used to be. True, manufacturing location has changed, the body is poplar, the bridge is 2-point and not 6-screw, and the neck doesn't have a skunk stripe on the rear. But in all honesty it's really not that far off from what used to come out of Mexico.

Let's say Fender changed just one thing one the Indonesian Standard, the fingerboard radius. The radius is changed from 9.5" to 12" and everything else stays the same so the price doesn't change.

If Fender did that, people would freak out even if it made for a better playing guitar and not buy it. That being the case, Fender almost never changes anything for standard production run models, because that's too much of a profit risk.

The only time Fender gets a little (and only a little) wiggle room is for highfalutin models where it's okay to stray from tradition, such as the Fender Ultra II Stratocaster HSS. That model has a 10"-14" compound radius fingerboard, and oh, look at that, it also has S-1 switching to split the humbucker...

...and that's literally the only Fender model with a flatter fingerboard with HSS pickup configuration where the humbucker has a coil-split feature.

What about other brands?

At the price point of the Yamaha PAC112V, the Ibanez AZES40 has a thing call the "alter switch" (seen easily between the volume and tone knobs) that gets you all the single-coil tones EXCEPT bridge-side which is all humbucker, all the time.

The same thing is going on with the Ibanez AZ22S1F. Yes, great looking guitar (it truly does look really nice), but again, you can't get single-coil-alone at the bridge side, but can get everything else. And at this point you've gone significantly above what the PAC112V sells for, so you might as well go a little further and get a PAC612 Pacifica model.

It really is all about the Pacifica neck

As I've said before, it's the neck that makes or breaks a guitar. If the neck isn't good, the guitar is bad.

Amazingly, the lowest cost Pacifica, PAC012, still has the same neck shape. However, on that bottom tier model, the body is mahogany, the pickups have ceramic magnets, and the electronics to split the humbucker to single-coil aren't present. But still, that neck with its great shape and flat fingerboard radius is there.

It took me a while before I finally found something other than Fender and Squier that could truly suit me. I wanted a Strat style body shape, the SSS pickup layout, a neck that wasn't skinny piece while at the same time having a fingerboard radius that is flat, and have it be reasonably priced.

Yamaha Pacifica is that guitar. True, it's HSS, but it's thankfully a lower-output humbucker that can be switched to get SSS tones easily with one pull of the tone knob. It's a tastefully modernized Stratocaster, with the modernization applied only where it needs to be. That, and pretty much nothing else touches it concerning what it has for its price point.

Published 2025 Mar 11