[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Owen O'Malley, and this is the 2008 Ibanez Iceman. It's the IC700 -- ICT700. Excuse me. And this is the newest incarnation of the famous hard rock/metal machine. This guy is loaded with a pair of DiMarzio active Deactivator humbuckers, which are pretty great-sounding active pickups. They sound a little different than EMGs. They don't have the same kind of sort of like limiting like automatic compressing that you often associate with active humbuckers. There are actually pretty responsive to picking dynamics but they still have that sort of like focused punch that is reminiscent or isn't reminiscent. They actually are active humbuckers. Deactivators.

It's also got the five-piece through Wizard neck. This is a through-neck guitar, and you can really feel it when you...

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

...play into this guy, you can feel the resonance all the way up and down the neck, and that has a really big effect on the tone, which will become even more apparent when we play it clean. But definitely this guitar is it's made for hard rock. It's got a Gibraltar, a custom Gibraltar bridge. It's a string-through bridge, string-through string ends here. It's a pretty heavy mass bridge and adds quite a bit to the sustain, and again when paired with his neck through five-piece wizard neck, you can do some pretty heavy tones out of this thing.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

The way the sort of body shape is, in the way that the strap buttons are located, the guitar balances better when you are holding it higher up. But I mean most people who are going to do in like this really like shred style that this guitar is really well suited for, I mean holding it up higher anyway, so that's not really that big of a concern, let's just listen to the neck pickup real quick. That was the bridge pickup, and here's the neck pickup.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

It has these pretty big fret wires. They're pretty big fret wire which makes it honestly a little bit getting used to, playing this neck, but it does sort of make for real satisfying string bends...

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

...and also makes tapping pretty easy on it.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

Let's listen to this guy real quick so you get a real good sense of the tone that these pickups are capable of.

So now we've got our amp on the clean setting. We've got both pickups on. Let's give it a listen.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

So you get a real sense of the specifics sort of like identity of these pickups, and you can hear how sensitive the picking dynamics are. We play [STRUMS QUIETLY] very quietly or [STRUMS LOUDER] and that's a huge difference. They're very sensitive especially for active pickups.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

That's the bridge pickup by itself...

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

...and here is the neck pickup.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

So, I don't know if you can actually tell listening to the video but...

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

...these deactivator pickups match sets of them, have the bridge pickup with -- actually the bridge pickup -- with a slightly higher output. DiMarzio says about 25% higher. I don't know the actual decibel difference is but the bridge pickups are designed to have a higher output than the neck pickup, and it just makes for , you know, the typical sort of like rhythm-lead dynamics dynamic that most sort of like metal/hard rock guitarists are looking for so it kind of just a smart design feature right there. Let's just try and hear the difference between the two of them.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING ON AN IBANEZ ICEMAN ICT700 ELECTRIC GUITAR]

You can hear a little bit more of -- a higher peak in the bridge pickup a little bit but there you go. That's the Ibanez ICT7000 for 2008, a pretty sweet hard rock and heavy metal guitar, a thrasher's dream. You've been watching Gearwire.Com, and I'm Owen O'Malley. See you later.