Saisei! - Ibanez RG350DXZ | 2015 | White | Kintsugi-Inspired Restoration

Gifted to a member of The Stray Chord community

Saisei was never put up for adoption.

We gave her away.

Her name comes from the Japanese word 再生 (saisei), associated with rebirth, regeneration and restoration.

There really couldn’t have been another name for her.

Saisei is a 2015 Indonesian-built Ibanez RG350DXZ, finished in White. Underneath is a mahogany RG body paired with Ibanez’s wonderfully skinny Wizard III maple neck and a bound rosewood fingerboard carrying those unmistakable sharktooth inlays and 24 jumbo frets.

She’s loaded with an HSH set of Ibanez Quantum pickups, with ceramic humbuckers at the neck and bridge and an Alnico single coil between them, controlled by a five-way selector, master volume and tone.

At the other end is an Edge-Zero II double-locking tremolo with Ibanez’s ZPS3Fe stabilising system.

In other words, she’s a proper RG. Pointy, fast and equipped with precisely the sort of hardware that encourages otherwise sensible adults to make terrible decisions with a whammy bar.

But Saisei came to us with something else.

She was cracked.

There was damage around her neck pocket. It was repairable, and the damage was professionally repaired and made structurally sound.

At that point, we had a choice.

We could disguise it. Fill everything, colour-match the white and try to erase every trace of what had happened.

But that didn’t feel right.

Instead, we took inspiration from the philosophy and aesthetic of the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which the repair of a broken object becomes a visible part of its continuing history rather than something that must be hidden.

So we traced Saisei’s repaired scars in gold.

They aren’t something we’re trying to hide.

They’re the point.

Saisei was damaged. Then somebody took the time to repair her.

Neither of those things makes her worth less.

Perfect isn’t the goal. Being repaired doesn’t necessarily mean returning to exactly what you were before. Sometimes it means carrying the evidence that something happened, that you came through it and that somebody thought you were worth putting back together.

We think that’s rather beautiful.

Importantly, Saisei isn’t simply a metaphor that happens to have six strings.

Her structural repair is sound, and she received exactly the same rehabilitation we would give any Stray being prepared for adoption: deep cleaning, fret levelling, crowning and polishing, fret-end attention, hardware and electronics checks and a complete professional setup.

She was ready to be played again.

But rather than sell her, we chose Saisei for something we’d promised ourselves we would do whenever The Stray Chord could afford to.

We gave her away.

She went to James, someone we’d never met and didn’t personally know, but whose name had become wonderfully familiar underneath our posts.

From the early days of The Stray Chord, James had been there. Commenting, reacting, encouraging us and celebrating the restorations, ridiculous finds, adoptions and little milestones along the way.

There was nothing in it for him.

He was simply consistently kind to three strangers trying to build something they believed in.

And we noticed.

Saisei wasn’t a consolation prize or a guitar we couldn’t sell. We specifically chose her because her story represents so much of what The Stray Chord was created to be about.

Rescue. Restoration. Second chances. And recognising that something doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth caring about.

When we started The Stray Chord, we thought it was going to be about guitars.

It is.

But increasingly, we’re discovering that some of the best bits are the people gathering around them.

Saisei found her next chapter without ever receiving an adoption fee.

No strings attached.

Well…

Six strings attached.

And a double-locking tremolo.

So quite a lot attached, actually.

Rescue • Restore • Rehome