I bought a "real" Les Paul

I remember my first experience with a "shredder" guitar neck, and it sucked

Many moons ago back in the '90s, I was at a guitar store in Southbridge Massachusetts and there was a Jackson guitar in stock. I don't remember what model it was, but it was probably a Soloist. I do remember the guitar was new, stark white in color, had a double cutaway Strat style body and a pointy headstock.

What I do remember is picking the guitar up and strumming a few chords on it. I hated the neck almost instantly. Even though I didn't know much about guitars back then, I knew that neck just felt wrong to my fret hand. It felt so bad that I didn't even bother plugging the guitar into an amp to hear how it sounded.

Before playing that guitar, I had never felt a neck so thin and flat. What bothered me the most was the fingerboard edge. The board felt like it was stabbing at my fingers. It just felt terrible.

Was the guitar bad? No, because it was brand new. It was that damned neck shape that really put me off...

...and this brings me to:

What happened with my Ibanez guitars and why I got rid of them

In December '18 I had discovered the 25.5" scale length didn't agree with me anymore, so I wanted to try something shorter. It had to be cheap and available. Two options presented presented themselves, the Ibanez GAX30 (24.7" scale length) and the Squier Bullet Mustang HH (24.0" scale length).

A local Guitar Center had both, so I went and tried them out. The Squier was first. It sucked. Then I tried the Ibanez. It was fantastic. I bought it.

Literally a month later, I liked the GAX30 so much that I bought a second one that was a little more upscale (but still cheap), the AX120. When I got the AX120, that was when I parted ways with my Telecasters (I had two). Now I was a full-on Ibanez guy.

But then something happened a few months later. Fret hand pain.

The pain wasn't in the wrist but rather at the pad directly under my index finger on my left hand palm. I best describe this pain as a dull soreness. It wasn't a sharp nor shooting pain.

At first, I thought this was just my fret hand getting used to the different thinner shape of the neck on these particular Ibanez guitars, and that the pain would eventually go away.

It didn't. It got worse.

After one particular marathon session where I played guitar for 4 or 5 hours straight, that's when the pain got really noticeable.

The pain didn't clear after 24 hours either. It carried into the next day and even the day after that. That's when I knew that no matter how much I liked those two guitars, they had to go. My fret hand was saying, rather loudly, "don't play this neck shape".

Published 2019 Apr 22