Ibanez RG350DX Review

The following is my Ibanez RG350DX review.

The Ibanez RG350DX is a superstrat type guitar for a rock, metal and shred player that wants fast playability and a modern hard rock tone at a very reasonable price. The ‘RG’ in the guitar’s name stands for Rock Guitar, and that’s exactly what this axe is.

The RG350DX Ibanez has a baswood body and a 3 piece maple neck with a rosewood fingerboard. This means that you can expect a cutting hard rock tone with crisp treble and solid low end but not as heavy or fat as mahogany which is often used in ‘metal’ guitars. This type of tone is great for shred solos and will also do job when playing heavier riffs. Thanks to the Ibanez Infinity pickups the RG350DX will also sound good played through your amp’s clean channel. There are five available tones – the bridge and neck positions are great for heavy riffage and soloing and the middle position as well as position 2 and 4 will nicely handle the clean sounds when you need them. While you are unlikely to get a good jazz tone from this guitar, you can easily play funk, blues or even country on the Ibanez RG350DX, which makes it pretty versatile.

The Wizard II neck has a thin D contour which is great for fast playing but may take a while to get used to if you’ve always played C shaped strat style necks. It has 24 jumbo frets, which makes those wide screaming bends easy as a pie and also aids fast legato runs.

The Ibanez RG350DX guitar features the Edge III floating tremolo bridge which is the latest model of its line. What makes it different from the previous models, are the low profile fine tuners and the saddles which are more bulky than those installed on the earlier versions of the Edge. Ibanez has always been one of the world leaders in terms of tremolo innovations and the Edge line of floating tremolos is their trademark. A cool feature of the newer versions of the Edge, including the model that’s installed on the RG350DX, is that you don’t need to cut off the ball ends of the string when changing strings. This really makes it faster and easier to replace strings and also eliminates the possibility of the string snapping out of the saddle when bending or using the tremolo extensively.

The hardware on the Ibanez RG350DX comes in black which looks great in contrast with the white body and the perloid pickguard.

To sum up, I can only say that I’m giving this guitar two thumbs up. It sounds good and plays great and is available at an insanely low price. If you are looking for an inexpensive shred machine, the Ibanez RG350DX electric guitar is an axe that you should definitely consider.