Review: Ibanez RGD7421

Features: The Ibanez RGD7421 is a metal machine through and through, sporting 7 strings. It comes with a basswood body and a maple neck with two walnut stripes and a rosewood fretboard. The neck is connected with an All Access Neck Joint (AANJ). It features two humbuckers, a 3 way toggle, and a single volume knob. Lastly, the bridge is a sturdy Gibraltar 7 string string-through bridge. Perhaps the most distinguishable feature in this guitar is its 26.5" scale length which adds extra tension to strings.

Playability: It's Ibanez. They make very comfy guitars. The Wizard II-7 neck is very flat which makes fast movements very easy. The 26.5" scale length did take a little bit of getting used to; it's amazing how you can be so used to 25.5" and have just ONE inch throw you off!

This guitar was my first experience with an AANJ and I must say, the joint feels so natural, much like a neck-through or set neck. It's very comfy; so much better than a standard block bolt on.

The bridge, however, is a little less-than subtle. It's rather big and chunky, and can sometimes get in the way of my palm or wrist. This gets annoying sometimes. If it had a lower profile or was just generally smaller, I'd love it. The Gibraltar bridge is probably the biggest negative in the playability aspect.

Sound: Oof. Okay. The default pickups were, to my ears' dismay, terrible. They sounded so dull; so lifeless. I really needed to get rid of them quickly. I quickly picked up a set of DiMarzio D Activators (got them for cheap, so why not?) and dropped them in with the help of a guitar tech at Rustic Music in Philadelphia.

With the help of the D Activators, the sound is very clean and crisp. I love it. The D Activators sound like active pickups with a passive feel. It's a neat sound. Another gripe with the sound is that it's really just meant for metal; there's no tone knob. The pickups don't get a lot of versatility. As a metal player, I don't need a tone knob a lot, but sometimes it's fun to see what kind of tones I can get just by tweaking a few knobs.

Aesthetics: Most Ibanezes are a rather boring cookie cutter formula of: Black body, rosewood fretboard, maple neck. The RGD isn't a giant exception, except that its color is a more of a shadow color, which makes it a little more distinguishable in the vast sea of pitch black. But what's really killer about the RGD series is its sleek carved top. It's definitely one of the sexier Ibanez bodies, in my opinion.

If I could change the color, I'd probably get it in a white, dark purple, a blue (like a cobalt blue), or maybe something different, like an orange!

Thoughts: All in all, it's a solid guitar. I really dig the scale length; 25.5" 7 strings feel... like they're not what they could be. It was annoying to pay for pickups, but I feel it was worth the upgrade for such a sleek guitar that I would gladly use as a main 7 string.


Notable Players: 
(Note: This includes the Prestige model, Ibanez RGD2127z)

• Ihsahn - ex-Emperor
• Acle Kahney - TesseracT
• James Monteith - TesseracT
• Nick Conser - Oceano
• Devin Shidaker - Oceano
• Christian Vidal - Therion
• Christian Münzner - Obscura

Here's my baby! Her name is Stella.