Okay, I’ll admit a slight bias as I own a couple of these guitars but I think that they are the best guitars Ibanez have ever produced. I agree that they are suited to the shredder but the fact is that they looked rather conservative when everybody was still buying neon pink guitars. As far as I’m aware, this was the reason for the demise of these guitars. I would suggest that they suited to a much broader range of styles – the neck position (seymour duncan) on my Altair USA custom is a huge round sound that works equally well for a blues/jazz sound as it does for that bass-heavy butch vig/smashing pumkins sound.