IYV 6 String IP-350 TBK PRS Solid-Body Electric Guitar, Trans Black

I have been playing guitar & doing my own guitar mods & setups for 50 years. I have another IYV guitar which I am greatly impressed with (IYV IJZ-300 TSB).For the price, this guitar is an excellent value. It is playable out of the box.All guitars need to be set up for best playability. Even high-end guitars require initial, and ongoing, setup & maintenance. I had to do very little to bring this guitar to a pro level of playability. The neck was dead straight. As is typical of all lower-priced guitars in my experience, the frets did need some work to get them perfectly level. Before leveling and crowning frets, I first use a fret hammer to tap frets down. Shipping, especially from overseas, subjects guitars to temperature & humidity changes which seem to dry out the fretboard & cause frets to lift up slightly. On this guitar, tapping frets down with a fret hammer where they were a little high leveled them out perfectly. I did not need to file down any frets.I like a low string action, and with straight and level neck and frets I got the action down quite low. The nut was cut correctly. I usually swap out nuts with adjustable brass or titanium nuts, but I don't need to given the good quality of the stock nut.As others have mentioned, there are minor blemishes in the finish where the neck joins the body, which is to be expected at this price level. However, the rest of the finish was flawless. As others have stated, yes, this guitar is BLACK. Which I like. The tuners are solid. In fact, this guitar stays in tune better than my expensive guitars (without locking tuners).The pickups are quite good. I tend to swap out pickups on guitars, but after tweaking the pickup and pole-piece heights I got the tone and individual string articulation to a nice level. Not perfect, but good enough to not swap them out for something more expensive.The neck is very playable. I find the neck shape to be comfortable.Bottom line, for the price this guitar is an outstanding value in terms of quality, appearance, playability and tone.

First off, I can’t say I’m an expert on guitars in any way. I’ve had an acoustic stilling my my closet for over a decade and when the pandemic hit I bought a second had squire strat. I’m perpetually a beginner just try to put a few chords together. Although, I do like learning about guitars and I have even taken apart and fixed a junk guitar.Anyway, I just I wanted a guitar with a full width fret board (unlike my squire) and in particular I wanted a PRS style guitar — both, I figured, would motivate me to practice more. I saw other IYV guitars on Amazon for bargain prices do I started digging into the reviews and found particularly positive reviews on the IP-350, so when they became available I bought one. I have to say I am REALLY glad I did.My guitar came a day early which I wasn’t expecting because it happen to be Easter Sunday. (Amazon, I hope you pay your drivers extra for working holidays!) it was packaged in only a simple guitar box and protective wrapping so I could understand how one of these could be damaged in shipping. Mine, however, was undamaged. The guitar came without a gig bag; the only accessory was the Allen key for the truss rod.Unpacking it, I found the guitar to have good craftsmanship. The maple flame top is beautiful. At first I thought it was substantial in thickness (at least a 1/4”), but removing the pickups allowed me to see it is a 1/16-1/8 veneer. The top seam is just barely crooked, being centered at the bridge and angling up towards the low-E by the neck pick-up. The binding, which nicely imitates a 1/4” maple top is nearly flawless with just a couple of spots of the top black finish on the binding. The body finish was almost perfect with only the most minor chip by the upper horn.The neck is relatively flat (350 mm/ 13.7 in radius) and has 24 frets. I think the fret work is okay, but it’s not as good as the squires I have. There was one sharp fret around 22 that I filed down. The fret ends have significant tooling marks and are inconsistent in visual quality. The top of the frets are gritty. The fret markers and logo inlays seem to be natural material (shell or abalone) and the nut is bone!! There was a drop of top coat on my headstock logo.The tuners are unbranded but seem to work fine. They feel better than the ones I have on my squires. The 3-way switch feels solid as do the volume and tone pots which have to scratchiness. I opened the back cover and pulled off the humbuckers to look at the electronics. The back cavity reveals Korean made Samsung dime-sized pots. The wiring is a thicker gauge than what I have seen on other budget guitars and the soldering looks good. The back cavity is shielded with cheesy-looking foil tape but is otherwise not conductive. The humbucker cavities, on the other hand do have a black conductive paint or liner. The humbuckers themselves are branded “Destiny CNC Wound”.My guitar weighed 7 lbs - 14 oz, which seems light for a mahogany body guitar. The body is 2” thick, or perhaps a bit over 2” thick at its thickest but don’t feel thicker than my 1.5” squires thanks to a belly cut and the arched top. The guitar is really well balanced. The neck does want to dive or pop up in my hands, a least.The guitar came nearly perfectly set-up out of the box. Action is low and intonation is perfect. I just had to fuss with the E string tuner. I did change my strings from the stock 10ga to 9ga after just a day as a matter of personal preference. The setup only really required a minor adjustment at that point. However, I did find out that the string-through ferrules weren’t set in very tight and could fall out fairly easy. My understanding is this could be fixed with a drop or two of a semi-permanent glue, but I left mine alone. While I had the strings off I oiled the fret board and cleaned up my fret ends.I don’t play well enough to comment on the tones but to me the guitar sounds full or heavy. Unfortunately, the pick ups are microphonic. I have read this can be reduced by removing the metal covers, but I have not tried that.Overall I think this guitar gets high marks for the overall look, bone nut, natural inlays, mahogany body and maple top. The tuners and electronics are at least okay, if not very good, for a budget guitar. The fret work and pick-ups and ferrules are okay and just might be what you expect from a budget guitar.Put that all together, in my very NON-expert opinion, this guitar is still an very good buy at less than $160. Just looking at the basic features and craftsmanship (mahogany body, maple top, natural fret markers and logo inlays, bone nut) you could easily pay 2 times what IYV is selling these for. If you are looking for an inexpensive PRS-style guitar, my advice is when this becomes available, don’t think about it, just buy it. You will be happy you did.

I was pleasantly surprised with this guitar. It was returned by someone to Amazon so I got it as a Returned Item and a few bucks off. I was worried why it was returned, but there doesn't appear to be any obvious reason why it was returned.The fit and finish is quite good. I found no flaws. I'm not sue if the top is a photo or real maple top, but it looks great.The neck is nice, and feels good to play. I'm not sure what wood The fretboard is made with, is a lighter brown colour but the finish was good except in fret 1 near the low E, a bit rough.It's a bigger neck than most guitars I own, probably more like a Gibson 50s style neck. But I like it.The nut is a cheap plastic piece and needs replacing with some kind of up grade.The strings were bad and I replaced them. I went to lower the action and went to remove some neck relief but there's not tension on the truss rod. So I got to look into that a bit more, but I lowered the bridge height and the action is nice with no buzzing.The pickups are okay, and a medium output sound.I might change the bridge pickup one of these days along with the nut but it's quite playable right from the factory other than the strings needing replacing.