Yamaha AES800-B Bigsby

I think this guitar was made in 2000 or 2001.
22 frets, Solid body, 5-way selector, two volume and one tone.
Two Dimarzio humbuckers, passive.
Blue metalic, bolt-on neck, Bigsby tremolo bridge.

This guitar is simply great. I love it because, in a time with low cash flow, I could afford a guitar that handled and sounded like a good 70's Les Paul. (Without the noise and heavy weight.) I had tried a various of different "vintage remakes", but this came out as a solid winner.

When I'd used it (abused it) for almost a year, things started to fall apart, but I know some good people, that healed my sick guitar. I've parked this guitar for about a year, but when I started using it again, I don't know how I could live without it.

As I pointed out, this guitar may have som flaws, but at the end, it sound great, and performs well.

Well, I don't see any reason to do this, knowing a handful of guitartechicians.

I've always been playing something. I have a bunch of great guitars, basses and amps. But I wanted a vintage feel, and a great sound. That's what this piece of wood and metal is all about.

No point doing a blow for blow with the other reviews here! Only to endorse that (nearly) everything works fine. I have two of these guitars, the second bought when I discovered it had been discontinued

Only gripe is the tacky plastic jack mounting which broke the first time someone tripped over the lead. I think I have tracked down a chrome plated replacement (which should have been fitted from day 1, and which I shall now fit to both). This is a pro guitar, and details matter (take note Yamaha). I would have given a nine, this oversight lowers it a notch.

It is more than a 'not quite Les Paul' or 'nearly Strat' and to judge it that way is to miss the point. Besides, Les Pauls are boring aren't they? The 25.5" scale is great, the pickup and control configuration very versatile. The same electrics 'out-Gretsch a Gretsch' when fitted on the AES1500 so this gives some idea of the sonic territory. It is the ideal complement to a telecaster, and the sort of thing that is both familiar and quite different in turns depending on the amp. Best with valves (isn't everything?) and will plug straight in without sugar boxes to great effect.

Everything about this guitar is of professional quality and the workmanship and finish generally reflect this. It is difficult to fault, things stay in tune, electronics don't crackle, even the Bigsby is in the right place. However, it not perfect..

Apart from the rubbish jack mounting (see above) my other gripe is the thin acrylic(?) lacquer used on the back of the neck. I bought one off eBay and found the neck had a very slight ding which had cracked the lacquer, that had already started to peel. As I also have a Yamaha MS511 (with bare wood neck) I followed the example had the lacquer removed. It feels (and looks) great now. The second does not display any problem with the lacquer so maybe it was one of those things.

Plastic jack mounting wouldn't survive tea and cake on the Vicarage lawn.

The neck finish is fussy and should either be a substantial lacquer or nothing at all. It's like something from the local DIY that dries on half an hour. Luckily(?) it comes off easily.

The rest looks set for well up the Richter scale. I'll give it an 8 because everything else is so good. The same faults on another guitar would have dropped it to a 7.

Been playing the same licks too long. Despite faults mentioned I still bought another!! It is a sweet guitar, does everything a solid electric could reasonably be asked to do from Rockabilly and Surf to Jazz and Lounge.
If it were between a Strat, a Les Paul, a Gretsch and this as a single guitar for a gig or session then there is no competition, the old Yammy every time (just remember to get a decent jack plate).

2002 Yamaha AES 800-B. Haven't got a clue whereabouts it was made, except that the review below says taiwan, so i guess is that. Standard 22 fret 25.5" scale, solid alder bodied ugly bastard of a guitar, but with so much hidden usefulness it's a crying shame it's discontinued. 5 way switch for 2 humbucking P90-esque dimarzios (Q100s?), giving some weirdarse sounds. Rosewood on maple neck, shiny spakly blue finish, yamaha tuners, bigsby bridge with a tune-o-matic. No case, but luckily (is it's a very strange shape) it fits into the standard Rockbag flying V soft case (i don't miss the hard case, the rockbag's bout 2 inches thick and beats my crappy brown gibson hardcase). Would be a nine, but unless you get a rockbag you're screwed for a case.

Mostly a mixture of blues, rock, little bit of metal, and some other stuff with phasers, delays etc. But mostly blues-rock through a Peavey classic 30 with new valves and speaker (great lil amp), occasional gigs. It's great for getting a whole range of sounds. I must admit, i only use it as a backup for my les paul, but whenever i break a string i'm not exactly worried. Can pretty much cover all the bases of my les paul, only slightly less sustain, but far more adaptable. Can get kinda raunchy, slightly weaker and less laser-cutting than my les paul at the bridge (i've got a jb in that one) but the extra brightness comes in handy at the neck where my les paul's a bit muddy. Love the random (phase?) knob, can pretty much emulate an acoustic at position 2 (well, i did at my last gig, and i didn't get bottled off :) ) I love these pickups, i did consider getting some SD antiquity mini-humbuckers (yes the axe is worth it) but these are so adaptable. Libertines to Kiss to BB. For the money, pretty unbeatable.

Bought new, it'd been hanging on the wall for some time though. The crazy shape, lack of hardcase, bigsby and sparkly blue finish (can you pull it off?) were all sticking points which had prevented it selling sooner. Soon as i plugged in though (thought i'd try it, i only went in to test a JCM800 combo) i knew it had to be mine. Eccentric yes, playable HELL YES. Love the neck, yamaha's usual fine workmanship, had also been set up at the shop since coming in so was playing wonderfully. Fretting and hardware was all fine, not top notch american, but damn close for a quarter of the price. The first bigsby i've ever found that stays in tune. All very good.

Has withstood live playing. Hardware's pretty hard to destroy, the bigsby's more built than my wrought iron front gate. Neck's stable, tune-o-matic's still rust free, tuners are pretty good. Replaced strap buttons with schaller straplocks as i do on all my guitars. Very dependable, it's not my baby (have intense connection with my les paul) but it's damn close.

n/a. Never needed repairing.

Played for 7 years. I own a heavily modified les paul standard, classic 30, carl martin hot drive n boost mk2, phase 90, a few delay pedals, cry baby, a few danelectro pedals, this beasty, a few other cheapy guitars (including a pacifica, my first guitar). Get all my leads from stringbusters.com, made up. If it got nicked, would try to track one down, though i don't know whether i'd get one (am currently a very impoverished student). Favourite feature has to be the pickups. Never been a dimarzio person in the past (SD all the way), but these have converted me. For the money you can't get much better or much more eccentric.

Retro-styled solid-body electric guitar reminiscent of a '60s Gretsch or Rickenbacker. Manufactured in 2000 or 2001. Alder body finished in metallic blue, maple bolt-on 22-fret neck, rosewood fingerboard, two DiMarzio Q100 soapbar humbuckers. 25.5" scale length, like a Stratocaster. Tune-O-Matic bridge, like a Les Paul. Nice neck with a matt finish and a profile somewhere between a Strat and a Les Paul. Big, thick, heavyish body (like an LP) with comfort profiling (like a Strat). Good balance when worn on a strap.

Really retro Bigsby USA trem unit (think of the Rickenbacker that Lennon used with The Beatles), which accounts for the "B" in the model name. See the Harmony Central reviews on the AES800 for more about the vanilla version of the guitar without the Bigsby.

An interesting special knob mixes the coil-tapped output of both pickups in varying degrees of out-of-phaseness (it works only in the pickup selector's No 2 position). One volume control, one tone control. Five-way pickup selector: 1) neck humbucker, 2) both pickups coil-tapped, 3) both humbuckers, 4) bridge pickup coil-tapped, 5) bridge humbucker.

Don't be misled by frequent references to this guitar as a "semi-acoustic" in Yamaha dealers' online sales literature. It is not. Presumably someone confused it with the top of the AES range, the AES1500, which is an ES335-like semi.

These guitars are made in Taiwan but don't let that put you off. Really.

You've gotta see a pic to realise how odd the AES800B really looks, so check out
http://64.95.118.51/images/ext/inst/52/instElectric_GuitarsAES800B.gif

The AES800 has been replaced this year by the AES820 and apparently there's no "Bigsby" model in the new lineup, which is a pity, because this guitar really looks odd, in the nicest way.

An "8" for features because the guitar doesn't have separate volume and tone controls for the pickups and because it has only 22 frets.

I play both rhythm and lead lines in styles ranging from tuneful pop to new-waveish punk with some blues, funk and reggae in between. I play metal sometimes (with the door closed). This guitar can just about do it all, and with authority. All it lacks is the twang and quack of a Strat but that's okay because I've got a Fernandes Strat clone to do that job.

The AES800B is capable of sounding a lot like a Les Paul, which is why I bought it. You might think that with an alder body and a bolt-on neck it would be brighter, and maybe it is, but if you consider all the confounding variables that contribute to amplified guitar tone, you can buy one of these guitars with confidence that it'll go 90% of the way to doing what a Les Paul does. (At a fraction of the price. And more besides.)

Don't believe anybody who insists that a bolt-on-neck guitar necessarily suffers in the sustain department. This thing has astonishing sustain, quite possibly as good as a real LP, though it's been a while since I had my sticky fingers on one of those. It has a big, heavy body (though not as heavy as an LP, 'tis true, and thank god). Certainly the AES800B shits all over the Epiphone LPs with which I compared it before buying.

Generally, the DiMarzio medium-output humbuckers sound full, mellow and rounded, and tend to be a little dark by my previous standards. Great jazzy clean tones are available from the neck pickup and nice cutting tones from the bridge, which never lose a certain plumpness that prevents them from unpleasantly assaulting your ears the way a Strat set for treble can do. I love the way that this guitar sounds *pleasant*, for want of a better word, at just about every setting and through all the gear I own.

Fat bluesy tones can be got from both pickups with a touch of amp distortion. Overdrive a high-gain amp with the bridge pickup and thrash with the best of them.

This is not a guitar of vast extremes, which to my mind is no bad thing, but it is very sensitive to playing style -- you can squeeze a lot of different tones out of it with nothing more than your pick and fingers. Though I hate the audio-wank term, the pickups seem to be rather "revealing".

The out-of-phase knob deserves a special mention. By, in effect, cutting away the bass and lower mids from what starts out as quite a full and fat tone, the knob gives an interesting and usable sound that is hard to describe -- trebly with a ghost of bass and lots of attack, with a character like a harpsichord played pizzicato (if that were possible) with snap. For funk rhythm playing, that out-of-phase sound is stunning and hard to beat. The setting can also help the guitar to do the sonic duty of an acoustic.

Over on the AES800 vanilla page you'll see reviews lamenting that the DiMarzio Q100 humbuckers aren't hot enough to drive an amp into truly insane shredworthy distortion. That may be so, depending on your definitions, but I think it depends largely on your rig. These pickups aren't pussies: according to DiMarzio (see web address later) their output is 380mV, versus a measly 200mV for a PAF and only 420mV for a Super Distortion. Even the Evolution 7, beloved by shredders, is only 404mV. But look at the graphs on the DiMarzio site and you'll see that the Q100 is less middy. Which translates nicely to some top-end sparkle and chuggy bass when you need it.

What is true is that it's very hard to make the AES800B's signal distort in such a way that the musical note goes adrift in a sea of fuzz; even the most crazed attempts at distortion leave tonality largely undamaged. If you don't like that, tough. I think it's an asset.

I usually play the guitar like this: AES800B => Morley Wah => Line6 POD => Mixer => Spirit Absolute 2 monitors (at home) / House PA (at gigs). But I also run it into a couple of obscure valve amps (Ibanez Starfields, if you've ever heard of them) and sometimes through a dire-sounding Boss ME-30 multieffects unit as well. I also someti

I'm fussy about guitars and I'm amazed to report that this one is fine. All the important stuff feels solid and well put together. It has the feel of high quality and precision manufacture. It is, in fact, the best-made guitar I've ever owned, and that includes some embarrassingly big names. Made in Taiwan? So what?

I do have a few gripes: the pickup selector switch crackles a bit. Nothing serious; just a bit, but it's annoying when everything else about the instrument is of a high standard.

Also, I would have liked the bridge's intonation adjustment screws to be more accessible -- the Bigsby gets in the way -- but I quickly discovered a workaround.

Some people on the AES800 page complain that their fret ends have not been filed properly. That may be so, but I've got no complaints about mine.

I got the last (only?) model in the shop. The action was much too high for anyone (except maybe a slide player) and the intonation was way out. But 30 minutes of adjustment sorted that out and the guitar now has the sort of slick action and perfect intonation that used to be the preserve of top-of-the-range US-made guitars. The neck is very pleasing to the hand.

Oh, and the tuners are fine. Very smooth. Guitar stays in tune (unless you get really brutal with the Bigsby, but I guess you shouldn't do that).

Yamaha makes a custom hard case for this model but unfortunately there weren't any available in South Africa. And here's a problem: the guitar's body is wider by an inch or so than just about anything. Which means it won't fit into most aftermarket cases. In the end, I had to get one of those styrofoam-and-nylon semi-hard cases and do some surgery on the styrofoam. Fortunately the shop threw the case in free.

I'm only giving this category a score of "8" because there's nothing fancy about the finish -- no inlays, no binding -- and because of the crackly switch and the bridge accessibility problem. Otherwise, this guitar is a beautifully made pleasure to play.

This is a dumb category because it's impossible to predict how well a finish will last or a strap button will stay attached. On the strength of what I can see, and how the instrument feels, it should be okay. The chrome on the bridge assembly is the only thing likely to come off, as far as I can tell, and even that may stay on because it looks like a decent chrome job.

The Bigsby trem looks like heavy-duty ironmongery out of the Industrial Revolution (except it's aluminium) so I'm sure it'll last.

I'll probably have to replace that scratchy pickup selector switch with something of higher quality, and no doubt the pots will need replacing in the fullness of time. They always do.

I might consider changing the plastic nut for a bone one, but all in good time.

Otherwise, everything looks fairly promising.

Customer support for a guitar? Whatever for?

I've been playing for 25 years, off and on. My dedication to music comes and goes, but I've been in a serious patch for about the past four years. I've owned all sorts of equipment; at the moment I have five guitars (eek!): the AES800B, a 1984 Jackson USA superstrat, an early-'90s Fernandes fake Strat, a Cort flat-top acoustic and an early-'60s Hofner bass (evidently a loose copy of a Fender P-Bass). I have an Ibanez Starfield VT-100 2x12 valve combo amp with Celestion G70M speakers, an Ibanez Starfield VT-50 1x12 valve combo, a Line6 POD 2, a Morley wah and a vile-sounding Boss ME-30 multieffects unit. I've played for the past three years in an original pop-rock band.

The Yamaha, which I've had for just over a month, completes my electric guitar palette. I have the fake Strat for twang, the Jackson for thrash and shred, and now the AES800B for everything else. I love the Yamaha's full yet present sound. It's civilised and refined, but it can get filthy dirty too. I'd say it's an excellent guitar for blues, jazz, pop, rock, funk, reggae, even metal. It isn't a Strat, it isn't an LP -- it's something in between, leaning heavily towards the LP.

It would be even more versatile if it had one single-coil pickup in the middle position like an Ibanez Jem. I can't see myself butchering it to put one in, though.

I know one shouldn't judge instruments on their looks, but it's such an endearingly ugly guitar that it's beautiful.