The Yamaha Revstar Detailed Review

[Music] in today's episode we're gonna be checking out the new rev stars by yamaha i'm going to reviewing this model which is the standard this is the middle one so they have the first model which is like 500 and then it goes to 2000 the 2 000 model is made in japan this one is made in indonesia so very impressive it comes with a deluxe gig bag which is a very nice gig bag at this price point and i just want to tell you in the current climate in the current market where the prices have been skyrocketing and you're getting less for your dollar i think this is yamaha literally coming at it and saying we got to give you something more than what we gave you before and i think that's what we're seeing here because the feature list on this and the quality on this uh is next to none i can say that to me to be really clear okay so specifications we have a three-piece mahogany neck and a mahogany chambered body that says it's a tuned chamber that they just didn't randomly drill holes that they thought about it and how the holes would affect how the strings would vibrate now this guitar is not light this one right here i'll get the weight right there uh when i weigh it later i'll tell you um and so it's not heavy but it's not super light considering i thought it was going to be chambered or it is chambered i thought it would be a little lighter than it is but it's uh it's very nice like i said mahogany body with a maple cap and so whether they paint it or not it's a maple cap you have a rosewood fretboard with 22 stainless steel jumbo highly detailed frets this fretting dress on these stainless steel frets is fantastic the nut is made of graphite and the nut width is 1.692 inches which means it's going to feel really comfortable when you're making those cords you have a standard tuning keys which are just probably yamaha branded they're not even that non-locking keys but they are very nice it has a satin feeling neck so satin neck even though the body is gloss which is a nice touch as well you have two of the yamaha pickups these are their pickups and uh we'll check them out of course when we do the sound sample you have a volume and tone control and a five-way switch but more importantly you have this hidden push-pull pot right here which is essentially a boost switch now this is the important part that i want to talk about when we get the geeky stuff in the specifications this boost switch is passive there is no battery in this guitar yet this is boosting the guitar about 6 db so you are getting a legitimate boost at first and i look like i said we're covering the geek stuff i thought it was a trick and a trick meaning maybe they were doing something to suppress the pickups output and then by pulling this up you're just letting the pickups do what they want to do but actually they came up with something way more ingenious than that it's a legitimate boost it is powered but it's powered by your amplifier and we'll talk about that you have beautiful inlays done in the neck and i think they're kind of subtle right here just like these little lines really nice something else to point out is that it's a 24 and three quarter scale length like a les paul but another cool feature again showing the really high attention detail and extra features is there's two carbon fiber rods in the neck with the truss rod that just takes it that extra mile okay so let's get started with the geeky stuff and first what we're gonna do is check all the frets to see if they're level and uh and let's go ahead and start with that like i've said in previous videos you can use a fret rocker to test each fret but i like to just play the notes one by one to get a feel for it i find the more you play your guitar the more you'll get a better feel of how it plays okay so the frets are absolutely perfectly level no dead spots at all let's go ahead and check the uh relief on the neck and it looks good just a little bit of teeny play just a little bit so that there's a little bit of relief in the neck which is nice i mean like i said you don't always want it bone straight although um this looks good this looks good thing that really sticks out about this guitar before we get into just how it sounds is these frets now one of the things i love to do is to show you how you bend on them [Music] it's effortless this is 10 to 46 gauge strings on it [Music] it feels amazing yeah just the fog the frets are polished that well before we do the sock test i want to show you a couple things on this guitar you can see the highly detailed front ends on this guitar and you can see how there is no blade of the frets because there's binding i want to show you how they do this because it is very work intensive what they do is they basically round off the edges of the fret especially the stainless steel fret before it even goes on the fretboard then they go ahead and remove a section of the blade underneath so they can drop it right into the fretboard and have a perfect fret end as you can see right here let's go ahead now and do the sock test rub the edges to see how nice they are one to five five being they're amazing and one meaning they need work so let's go ahead and you can see right here just a tiny little mark right there which is nothing like i said that's pretty fantastic let's go ahead and walk to the other side like so and this side just a little bit more a couple little marks right here i would give this a four and a half out of five next let's check the nut and we can do that by pushing down third fret and just seeing there uh how much of the gap is there and looking at this it's absolutely perfect the low e is probably the most shallow and one way shallow it means the the string is the highest the nut the slot was cut the least deep if that makes any sense and uh it's still perfectly fine and why that's important is again i call it like when you're playing those bard f chords when you're pushing down right there you know some of us know that's a little tricky even for us players been playing for a little while and uh so that's a great way to check the nut and the nut is cut beautifully so again i would give that a five out of five so let's go ahead and check the action and right now i'm looking at it as 1.75 millimeters off the 12th fret on the low e one and a half on the high e pretty consistent measurements across the board so pretty good like i said on average we've seen most of the guitars on the box are coming with two millimeter action off the 12th fret this a little bit of relief with that action feels great that's probably why it plays so nice now as we mentioned it's a 12-inch radius fretboard which is pretty flat let's see if we can determine what kind of neck profile they call it the yamaha neck profile so definitely a c shape i'll put the measurements on the first fret and the 12th fret very comfortable what i call the goldilocks neck in other words right in the middle now let's look at the back carve you can see where they've kind of angled this in a set neck position right here and they have a little bit of there i like to call this the handshake where i hold the guitar right there the reason i call it the handshake is how comfortable is it to hold the guitar right there because it lets us know when you're playing up there how easy is the access how does it feel and um pretty good i can tell you that you'll feel pretty comfortable up to the 21st fret that 22nd fret is a little bit of a weird awkward kind of like this is just kind of in your way so let's go ahead and meter these pickups i'm really curious to see what happens when we do that the bridge is at 8.68 k so 8.68 which is very low output i'm very shocked to see that i want to go ahead and go to the neck we're at 8.29 or 8.30 k so again very consistent in that again uh in the paf territory for sure lighter output pickups for sure but uh there you go and when we go to this position four nothing's happening so just be aware of that so in position four where it simulates the single coil tone and we said it's not a single coil it's because nothing's changing it's 8.29 as well again we're going to go to the position two just to see if it's coil splitting anyway it's not 8.68 it's actually staying very consistent so let's take a look inside at the electronics we obviously have a five-way super switch which is how they're getting those out of phase positions with the two humbuckers the wiring seems very clean and done really well there's no burn marks from soldering irons or any other issues that i can see the push-pull tone pot is pretty standard there's nothing special there with a basic capacitor the volume pot is an alpha pot again very basic the cavity is shielded and i did test that so that is true but the big thing we have to talk about is there's a transformer and what they're doing is they're taking the very little voltage that's coming out of your amplifier into your guitar and they're basically amping that up for the boost let me demonstrate okay let's go ahead and show you the boost and how it works let's go ahead and strum the guitar [Music] so as you can see here it actually works they are using a passive amplification system to boost the guitar to start with some clean tones we're going to go ahead and use my fender 65 deluxe reverb with an sm57 [Music] it's a beautiful balanced sounding guitar it doesn't sound very bassy it sounds very clean in this neck position and the intonation is so good [Music] that's nice [Music] this is for someone looking for that full rich mid-range tone that cuts through a mix and just sounds really really good one thing about mid-range sounds in guitars especially is that they are very easy to sound bad they're very easy to be nasal where this guitar is the mids or in your face but they're beautiful and that's the thing about making a beautiful sounding instrument is you don't have to compensate for it when you play you just feel like whatever [Music] whatever you want to play just comes hanging out let's go to position four [Music] and now what you're going to have is a single coil tone that's out of phase and that gives you what i call the honk factor which is different because if you notice a lot of times when i talk about out of phase in other videos i've always said it's very nasal and this is a little nasal but it's really got the honk sound [Music] which is great for those that just fat notes that stick out because the mids this is a great frequency again [Music] [Laughter] [Music] we go to the middle position it's going to be the two humbuckers and it balances out which is nice because one reason i was a little concerned about that is because usually the bridge is going to be bright the the neck is going to be dark or bassy right so troubly bassy kind of thing and when you hit the mids you get that sweet spot in the middle really really common on telecasters with a guitar where the neck has more mids to my ear i'm really afraid that all of a sudden when you go to the middle it's just going to get brighter mid-sounding but in this case [Music] just freaking awesome [Music] now we're gonna go position two and again more of a single coil tone with again out of phase and you're gonna get the this has got a little bit of that nasal but i think that's on purpose [Music] now let's go to the bridge [Music] now you can feel it's got a little push to it so it's really pushing the amp i can feel the amp just want a little breakup at the end of that one of the best sounding bridge pickups i've heard in a long time where it doesn't have a shrill high tone it's not brittle it's it's it just sounds warm in fact these sonically are not much different it's really interesting like i said usually used to the bright and bassy sounds of the bridge and then the neck and in this one you got like i said you're in the mids a lot and you get the bridge and if you want like here [Music] again it just darkens up [Music] it's just nice okay so we have a tone control we're going to get to that in a second let's talk about this boost and again they're going to call it something else i forgot what they call it i'll put it right there but it's a boost control now this is not only boosting the what how much signal is going back to the amp but also it seems like it's boosting again the low mid frequencies so i just want to give you a taste of that i'm going to start with the bridge with a cord okay and it gets a little muffly because it's again it's it's kind of pushing that mid kind on the tone control halfway point and you can tell you can actually usually still use your tone control in this position or without it so here you go [Music] [Laughter] so let me take you and show you why it's pretty cool so let's go instead of starting with the neck i'm going to start with the fourth position which is that out of phase single coily thing [Music] boost that [Music] and i want to show you why that's great instead of playing a lick just play a note that's all you need [Music] without it [Music] again it sounds like when i pull the boost not only getting that signal punch but you're getting a lot of this blow in bass that again feels like turn the tongue control back now there's a reason why that's cool so what i've done is i went ahead and engaged the small box by friedman pedal and it's again a lot of mids a lot of a lot of precise attack [Music] [Applause] [Music] now here's why i like the boost because uh even though we're using a good amount of gain [Music] i want to show you that now if you were playing that go to the neck pick up and solo [Music] that's pretty nice but you can also just use the boost and what i love about this is even though we're staying on the bridge pickup when i boost you'll notice that it kind of goes into that neck territory because it's getting that adding that low end kind of warmth okay so [Music] and what i love is listen to how long those notes hang now because i'm boosting the amp [Music] so let's go ahead and see if how it sounds with the in between sounds this is that again uh coils a single coil simulation because it simulates a simple with outer face tone got that uh cocked wall kind of sound [Music] um [Music] [Music] and what i want to now see how well the pickups clean up that's halfway [Music] okay i want to try something i'm going to try and sustain with the bridge with and without this boost engage here's without it the boost [Laughter] [Music] final thoughts on this guitar although i try to reserve myself to ever say this is the most amazing guitar ever or this is the best guitar at this price point i've ever played very rarely do i get to kind of shell that out as a statement i will say this it sits in a place where i think um if you are looking for something different you found it if you're looking for something you haven't tried before and one thing i love about this guitar is um is that as you know on the channel we talk about modifying guitars at this price point maybe if you want to go to locking keys because you don't want to spend you know the extra few minutes uh restringing locking keys and that's it i wouldn't change a single thing i wouldn't change the pickups because the way that they spent the time to make these sounds work this is actually it's selling point this isn't a guitar where it's like if you upgrade it it'll be something a lot nicer i think you get it out of the box and this is the way it goes locking keys would be the only suggestion which is a very very cool thing considering i review guitars that are a thousand dollars that haven't impressed me like this as always guys i want to thank you so much for joining me if you enjoyed the video to this point and you haven't subscribed please consider it i appreciate that and also if you could give it a like because it makes me feel a little better as always guys thank you so much for your time till the next time know your gear you

Channel: Phillip McKnight

Views: 242,878

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Id: rNK5Rm9INd8

Length: 19min 40sec (1180 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022