The $250 "China Girl" (Three year report)
In 2014, I was working on sweep/tap arpeggios that required a 24-fret guitar. I got one of these from MF for $250 with a coupon. Its a Dean branded Chinese import guitar, and it's one of the cheapest guitars you can buy. (They have since raised the base price to $349, so its probably $275-300 street.) I've been a long-time Ibanez fan. I started playing in the late 80s, so I remember the value and innovation they brought in that era. You could get a new $600 RG with an Edge trem that stayed in tune with the best, and the RG shape and color options were innovative and eye catching. A big fan of the Lo-Pro edge trems, I developed a disdain for the "lesser" Floyd Rose guitars. I bought and rehabbed alot of Fujigen Ibbys over the past 15 years and there was no reason to play anything else. More recently, the calculus has changed. For one, most of the good used 80/90s guitars are buried in other people's collections. When they show up on the used mark
