conFUSION

Final re-string entry of the year & possibly the final entry for 2018- Ibanez RGDIX6MRW. This is one of the extended scale length guitars I own (26.5"). It's tuned down to C# because who would spend good money on such a guitar for standard tuning, yes?

I kept this one aside especially for this guitar. Flatwound means I get less noise on the lower end strings should I choose to slide up/down for quick movements. Generally, I spend more time on the thicker strings in this tuning so it's a worthy investment.

This is how serious the DR people are when it comes to freshness. My thumbs up to them 👍👍

The guitar comes equipped with a pair of DiMarzio Fusion Edge humbuckers. I've been enduring these pickups & holding back from some performance appraisals but here goes:

• You might have probably read glowing reviews about them elsewhere but as far as I am concerned, after hearing them perform through my set up, these pickups are not my kind of pickups.
• They are DiMarzios so they must be good somehow, no? Brand name means nothing with regards to performance. The fact that they are in this guitar means somebody at Ibanez believes this is how this guitar should sound like given the specs. We can choose to disagree especially if they don't meet our needs. We buy this instrument because we believe it would suit our needs not because someone else thinks it sounds good according to their interpretations. 
• The bridge pickup does not hold low tuning well. Notes are muffled & sound fuzzy at higher distortion/ gain settings. No amount of external treble injection could cure this deficiency. From my perspective, it's a let down.
• The neck humbucker isn't any better when it comes to clarity. Unlike other dedicated neck DiMarzios, I can't even manifest a smooth top end here. Very frustrating.
• Because I had Beez instal a coil split switch here, there's an opportunity to hear the pickup in a tampered manifestation & I must say, there's a little more clarity in single coil mode. The neck humbucker sounds decent with tapped notes but we don't always tap our notes, in fact, majority of us pick more than tap so these aren't quite the winner from this standpoint. 

Maybe, being a Seymour Duncan fan through & through, there's no way I could bring myself to hear good things from the Fusion Edge but that's not true. I hold some DiMarzios in high regard but this one is simply below the liking point to begin with. There is no reason to keep them for long.