PunkKitty
The fates already f'ked me sideways
I recently picked up a IYV-ITAP-200 from Amazon as an experiment. I'm honestly surprised how nice it is. But there's a better description of the issues with this guitar in the review on Amazon when I got it. Basically, this is a poor person's Acoustasonic. One thing to note is that this guitar is thicker than something like a Thinline Telecaster, and it is hollow. So the magnetic pickup makes it sound like a hollowbody. That might be an issue for some people.
"I'm giving this 3 stars because I had to modify it to get a balanced volume with the magnetic and piezo pickups. The piezo pickup sounds great. But the stock magnetic single coil pickup was not loud enough to balance the output. After much experimentation, I found that a bridge Seymour Duncan Hot Rails was the best option that I had on the shelf. It's 15.98k, so it can be a loud pickup. I needed to use Dremel to enlarge the hole for pickup and then use a Strat pickup ring. I had to raise the pickup as high as possible. Then I had to tweak the preamp to balance the volume. The preamp has 3 trim potentiometers that you need a small Phillips screwdriver to adjust. The volume pot for both pickups had a yellow wire going to it. After I adjusted that, I had to adjust the other two trim pots to make everything work together. Note that the wires going to the trim pots just pull off, so if they get pulled down a bit, just push them back into place. After some trial and error, I finally got everything balanced. If you do use a Duncan pickup, green goes to the yellow wire and black to black. Outside of that, the guitar is very well made and was set up perfectly out of the box. This will be useful for live sets."
"I'm giving this 3 stars because I had to modify it to get a balanced volume with the magnetic and piezo pickups. The piezo pickup sounds great. But the stock magnetic single coil pickup was not loud enough to balance the output. After much experimentation, I found that a bridge Seymour Duncan Hot Rails was the best option that I had on the shelf. It's 15.98k, so it can be a loud pickup. I needed to use Dremel to enlarge the hole for pickup and then use a Strat pickup ring. I had to raise the pickup as high as possible. Then I had to tweak the preamp to balance the volume. The preamp has 3 trim potentiometers that you need a small Phillips screwdriver to adjust. The volume pot for both pickups had a yellow wire going to it. After I adjusted that, I had to adjust the other two trim pots to make everything work together. Note that the wires going to the trim pots just pull off, so if they get pulled down a bit, just push them back into place. After some trial and error, I finally got everything balanced. If you do use a Duncan pickup, green goes to the yellow wire and black to black. Outside of that, the guitar is very well made and was set up perfectly out of the box. This will be useful for live sets."
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