An Ibanez Strat when you're not having a Strat.

Looks funky, sounds funky, is funky!!

I sat down today with the Ibanez TM300M Talman just to see how good it was, how it sounded, how well it was finished, how heavy it was along with a couple of other things. Ibanez produce two versions of this, a Prestige model made in Japan and the Standard made in a friendly country elsewhere in that area. Being the cheap ass I am I tried the Standard model.
Ibanez tell me the colour is Bright Metallic Blue and it certainly is that. I don't remember seeing a blue quite like it before in a guitar, it really is stunning. The TM300M has an alder body as any good solid bodied guitar should and a very sturdy feeling maple neck with a (nearly matching) maple fingerboard finished in a nice curry tinted satin. After having many one-piece maple neck guitars I think the glued on finger board is the way to go. I have found and still do, some, I say again, some one-piece maple necks can cause resonance issues creating dead notes. Generally no biggy but it frustrates the heck out of me. I like the idea of the glued on slab fingerboard, be it rosewood or maple as I haven't noticed dead note issues with either rosewood finger boards or glued on maple boards. With rosewood you have that slightly mellow/woody tone and even with the glued on slab the maple will give you that traditional maple sting we love to love.
The adornments are chrome which is what we would expect from an Asian instrument but if looked after with a wipe down after a session it should be fine.
Electrics. I paired the TM300M with the Boss 50 watt Katana, a great little modern amp but it's the guitar we're talking about here. Three familure single coil pickups layed out in the usual format. C'mon Ibanez, the angled bridge pickup is soooo 1950's. Straight up and down would have made this instrument, well unique. Though having said that, the trem unit is a bit of a giveaway that it's a Stratocaster 'copy'. The trem wasn't functional, too many stolen trem bars I suspect but it looked probably as good as the crappiest units out there. I did find this a little disappointing as it's usually the hardware that Ibanez are best at. The pickups themselves sound very nice and sympathetic to the touch, very responsive. I think Ibanez in their attempt to create an original instrument could have designed a slightly different shell to house the mags and coils as the first thing anyone is going to do is replace the pickups with a boutique set costing three times the price of the guitar. The controls feature the typical five-way blade switch and just a simple one volume and one tone control. The latter is mounted on a cast plate housing the jack socket. Yep, it is an Ibanez original design first seen on the Noodles guitar, love it or hate it? Unfortunately Ibanez have fitted a treble bleed circuit to the volume pot, quite possibly a good feature for a pedal user but not good for the guitar/lead/amp kind'a guy like myself. The tone pot also seems very logarithmic with no decrease in top end until you back it down to 2 and then it's kill from there. In fact it wouldn't surprise me the wrong value pots have been used, not uncommon in Asian made guitars.
There is one more design feature that Ibanez don't even mention that I think it's pretty cool. On giving it the once-over I noticed something in the body shaping that I've never seen before in any solid bodied guitar. The curved route around the top edge of the body is actually tighter than the bottom edge (back). Why is this? A CNC machine malfunction or is it one of those very cool features you're not meant to notice other than how comfortable the guitar is to wear.
If you're thinking about a Strat guitar with a twist then take a look at the Talman TM300M. It comes complete with cardboard box in either the stunning Bright Metallic Blue or a Tri Fade Burst. Expect to pay around the same you would pay for a Squier Classic Vibe. All I can say is that the Prestiege version must be one hell of a guitar at three times the price.

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