The Ibanez LA Custom Shop is home to some of the most legendary custom guitars on the planet. Unfortunately for most, top-tier Ibanez artists are the only ones with access to it (Such as James Monteith of TesseracT). This means that there are no outside orders, so luthiers can work to make every single guitar to come out of there an absolutely perfect specimen. I hunted through the Ibanez LACS Instagram page to see what kinds of models I think would sell very well to the public. These guitars would absolutely dominate the market!

 

1- Brian Maillard’s Custom RGD

This guitar looks so much like the beloved Music man JP. It has a dark purple burst over a beautiful quilt top that sits on an alder body. What separates this RGD from others (other than the finish/top) is the scale length.  Historically, the RGD line had a 26.5’ scale length. Brian’s RGD is actually the more common 25.5” scale! The guitar has Dimarzio D-Sonic/Air Norton pickups, and an Edge-Zero trem with the ZPS3 system. The neck is a Wizard HP neck, 5 piece maple and walnut, with titanium reinforcement rods! If this was mass produced, it would slay the market as a Prestige model!

 

2- Fredrik Thordendal’s Stone Man

Thordendal has always been a fan of vintage ibanez guitars, in 2012 Meshuggah’s lead chug machine designed an Iceman one off called the Stoneman. The Stoneman is an outrageously sexy guitar. It has a 5 piece Maple/Bubinga neck with Swamp Ash wings, 22 frets, a 27” scale, and two Lundgren M8’s with coil tap available! To add class, there’s even a pickguard on the lower half of the guitar extending to the lower horn. It featurea a fixed Edge 3 bridge that you can find on his current signature models.

 

3- Chris Broderick’s RGA

Before making the switch to Jackson, Chris Broderick repped Ibanez! Up until 2011, he had access to Ibanez’s sweet LA Custom Shop. There, he got himself a sweet RGA style guitar with a purple dyed quilt maple top over a Mahogany body. An interesting feature is that he doesn’t have a locking nut to go with his Edge Pro but rather a graphite nut. He also went with planet waves autotrimming locking tuners instead of typical choices like hipshot or sperzel. Chris originally had  Dimarzio Evo and Air Norton pickups installed (bridge and neck, respectively) but later switched to Bareknuckles. If production RGA’s looked this awesome, then no one would be able to resist!

 

4- Ryan Knight’s FR

While the production model FR guitars are really sweet (We did an FR6UC Review a few months ago), Ryan Knight of The Black Dahlia Murder owns what I consider to be the sickest Tele style guitar ever made. His LACS FR is made from a basswood body, a flame maple top, and a maple fretboard. The body is dyed blue and they left some room for a really nice natural binding. For hardware, it has a ‘59 duncan pickup in the neck and an SH-4 pickup in the bridge, and Ibanez’s own Lo-Pro tremolo system.

 

 

5- RGD 8 String Neck-Thru

There aren’t any RGD 8 strings in production right now, but holy hell, this would be one hell of a treat! The RGD pictured below supposedly belongs to Dino Cazares. There isn’t much information about this guitar, but we can assume that it has a mahogany body with a maple and bubinga neck since these are the woods currently used in his signature. The world needs an 8 string RGD!

 

6- Javier Reyes’ RG 8 string

This guitar is arguably better looking than Tosins TAM signature. If Reyes was an ibanez artist, this would probably be his sig! It features a quilt maple top with a sun/tobacco burst style finish. It most likely has his Dimarzio Eclipse pickups, which sound pretty great! It’s finished off with a classy, white pickguard!

 

 

If you’re interested in purchasing an Ibanez, we are authorized Ibanez dealers and could get you your dream Ibanez at the best possible price!

This article was written by Mike Azernov, our editor located in New York

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