Ibanez AEF30E Acoustic Electric: In A White Room, With I-Ba-Nez, Guitar Demo
Ibanez makes so many acoustic-electric guitar models, keeping track can be difficult. Their inscrutable alphanumeric naming system doesn't help matters. Still, each Ibanez has its own characteristic sound and features, and the AEF30E is no exception.
Trying to find refuge from the oppressive H-VAC system at Gearwire, Owen O'Malley retreats R. Kelly style into the supply closet to check out the AEF30E.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I’m Owen O'Malley, and we are taking a look at the Ibanez AEF30EVV 1201. It’s the AEF30E acoustic-electric, single cutaway in VV, which is the vintage violin finish, this pretty cool looking translucent finish. Ibanez sure does know how to put the appointments on their low-price and mid-price acoustic guitars.
This guitar retails for about $450 without a case. It comes with the new for 2008 Ibanez SRT-N preamp which has both 1/4” and balanced XLR outputs and has three-band EQ (bass, middle, treble they call that in America). There is a tuner built into it. It has a phase switcher, there’s a simple volume control and there’s a simple notch frequency control for combating feedback pretty quickly on the fly without having too much of an effect over the overall tone of the guitar.
Like most Ibanezes, acoustic or electric, a lot of attention was paid to the neck, and the neck profile itself is really, really comfortable. The action is really, really low on this guitar which causes a few problems. It’s not the most perfect fretwork, and so as you’ll hear, we’re going to play a little fingerstyle, on these lower three strings, the bass three strings in the lower frets here you get a lot of buzzing...,
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
...which is shame because otherwise it’s a really comfortable to play guitar. And because the body sort of emphasizes the mids and the highs a lot more than the bass frequencies, it would make a really excellent fingerstyle guitar if not for the kind of bad buzzing in the bass side in the lower frets. Otherwise, in the upper frets in general is pretty good. There’s a little bit of buzzing sort of around the 12th fret.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
The action feels really great on the higher three strings, the trebler strings. It’s just a little cut -- a little bit low on the bass strings, probably the nut is cut a little bit too low. Well, that was the acoustic sound. Let’s plug-in this preamp through the balanced XLR out and hear what that sounds like.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
So, a pretty decent sounding transducer. You can hear it’s a little bit uneven. It sort of heightens the two middle strings here. Let’s just do a quick sort of scale neck, scale run up the neck.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
That’s the worst scale ever.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
You can hear that even just as I rake across the sort of middle strings here...
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
...they really sort of heighten the most. Let’s play a little with the EQs here. Let’s just take the middle out.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
Bring that back in. If we pump the treble...
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
...it’s pretty harsh. It’s all the way up. Let’s pump the bass here.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
I kind of want to keep the controls right in the middle there. The nice thing about these controls is that they’re really big knob so that they’re easy to access live. The only problem is that if you kind of bring your arm over the guitar like this, they’re also sort of easy to turn off, especially the treble control here. Let’s play with the notch frequency.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
You get an idea of how that can be used pretty easily to find where that feedback notch is and kill it...
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ AEF30EVV ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
...without having too much of an effect on the basic tone of the preamp. So there you go. For $450, that’s the Ibanez AEF30 in the vintage violin translucent finish. Pretty decent guitar with a few structural problems but a pretty decent sounding preamp. You’ve been watching Gearwire.Com. I’m Owen O'Malley. Thanks for checking us out.
thanks
Thanks for the review. I apologize if I am mistaken, however, could you mention in future demos which mic and amp your are using?
Thanks
P.S. Has anybody ever told you that you bare a resemblance to Seth Rogen?
As to your Qs
The mic was an AKG C414 XLSII.
When you were listening to the preamp, that was just direct into a Radial JDI Direct Box.
And no, you are the first to make that comparison. I blame the beard and the flannel.
Action
I recently bought the AEF30E in the transparent black finish. I found your review interesting although I had quite the opposite complaint about the action height on mine. I had to lower the saddle to get it right. But I don't have any fret buzz at all. Makes me wonder how much quality control goes into these (yeah I know it's not a 2K guitar)
You mentioned in the video that this model had "a few structural problems" what exactly were you referring to as structural?
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