Hey there everyone! It's been a while. Been dealing with mental issues. The usual schizophrenia stuff, but that's for another post! Gize, I bought a guitar!
Spoiler
It's a Yamaha Revstar Element (RSE20L). And yes, for the astute, I am left-handed and it was such a curse finding a guitar that fit my aesthetic, that was within my price range ($600 or less), and that had the features I wanted.
Right now, I am in the learning stages. I've always wanted to play guitar and even though my dad did play, he was right-handed so I could not use his instruments. Let's just say upside-down and backwards is not fun, easy, or comfortable and playing right-handed meant I could never play at speed. Now I have one of my own.
I actually like bought this one because I loved the looks of it. It's just a beauty. But what's even better: this has to be one of the nicest guitars I've ever held. The neck has a satin finish on it and when I was practising I noticed it didn't get sticky or hard to play when my hands started sweating. The fret work on it is very nice. Yamaha did a great job with the inspection and while it did come out of tune—it was made in Indonesia and the warehouse shipped it from Ohio. No surprise it was out of tune! Simple fix. I also noticed some fretbuzz on low E, but I ordered some set-up tools. In a couple weeks I plan on checking the set-up and making some adjustments.
Plugging it in: it sounds great. One of my requirements was double humbuckers. Out of the box it plays very bright and clear for a humbucker set-up. It will make a great ax for playing classic rock, blues, and country. While the other Revstars have a focus switch that adds more to the low-end, the Revstar Element has a dry switch that gives more focus to the treble allowing more brighter, twangy tones. If I ever learn to chicken-pick like Brad Paisley, I won't stop. Really glad I bought this just for that feature alone as it's very unique.
A bit about my setup: I am running the guitar through a Focusrite Scarlet USB audio interface. With this box I can do loopback monitoring or I can launch Guitarix on my Linux box, set the latency as low as it will go, and I basically have a whole effects chain and amplifier through that application with the ability to download preset effects. So far I am using the following applications:
- Guitarix: Guitar Amp and Effects Application.
- GMetronome: Metronome application.
- Fretboard: Fretboard chart for displaying chords.
- Chromatic: Tuner application.
- Tenacity: DAW for sound recording / editing.
- Ardour: DAW sound studio.
- Helvum: Pipewire patchbay for routing audio.
My entire setup is currently running Fedora 40 and the apps are from Flathub and thus should be available no matter what Linux distro you run and all of them are free.