Beatrix! - Ibanez RG350M-YE | 2010 | Yellow | Upgraded HSH

There are guitars which politely request your attention.

Beatrix appears to have been painted in highlighter pen and is now standing outside your house revving a motorcycle.

Built in Indonesia in 2010, Beatrix is an Ibanez RG350M-YE, one of those gloriously unapologetic RGs from an era when subtlety was apparently considered an optional extra.

And yes. She really is that yellow.

The RG350M takes the familiar superstrat recipe and turns the 1980s dial firmly back up: a lightweight basswood body with those unmistakably sharp RG contours, a 25.5-inch scale and a three-piece Wizard II maple neck, topped with a maple fingerboard and 24 jumbo frets.

The result is exactly what you’d expect from an RG. Thin, quick and alarmingly easy to get yourself into trouble with.

But Beatrix isn’t entirely factory specification.

Somebody decided the original HSH pickup arrangement wasn’t quite interesting enough.

So they went shopping.

At the neck sits an upgraded DiMarzio humbucker, giving Beatrix considerably more authority than the original Ibanez pickup she left the factory with. In the middle is a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails, squeezing humbucker behaviour into a single-coil-sized package.

And then there’s the bridge humbucker.

It’s green.

Because apparently by this point colour coordination had been formally abandoned in favour of chaos.

Yellow. White. Green.

We respect the commitment.

The three pickups are controlled through the familiar five-way selector with master volume and tone, giving Beatrix considerably more range than her appearance might suggest. There’s plenty available here, from big neck-humbucker sounds to aggressive bridge tones and all manner of interesting combinations in between.

At the other end is an Ibanez Edge III double-locking tremolo, paired with a locking nut and black hardware, because obviously the guitar equivalent of a fluorescent warning sign also needed the ability to dive-bomb.

The maple fingerboard is particularly lovely on this one. Against the yellow body and matching yellow headstock it gives Beatrix that unmistakable old-school RG appearance, with simple black dot markers rather than anything unnecessarily decorative.

Because clearly the rest of the guitar has already handled decorative.

Beatrix has been through The Stray Chord workshop for our full rehabilitation process, including inspection, deep cleaning, fret levelling, crowning and polishing, fret-end attention, hardware and electronics checks and a complete setup.

She carries some honest signs of her life, particularly around the black pickguard and hardware, but overall she has survived remarkably well for something visible from low Earth orbit.

Beatrix isn’t restrained.

She absolutely isn’t going to match your living room.

But if you’ve ever looked at a sensible black guitar and thought, “yes, but what if it could be seen from space?”

We may have found your Stray.

Rescue • Restore • Rehome