Yes. I got my first Kaizen 6 and it was so good, I got my second. I'm selling a few guitars that I will no longer need, and I plan to get another. it. is. that. good. - at least for me. sounds great, playability is great, looks great, comfortable, well built / quality, versatile... it's quickly becoming my favorite guitar when I don't need a FR and when I need more than a hard tail. Cheers!
I'm right there with you! It has surprised me. In the comments under my Kaizen 7 video, one troll made a blanket "It's cheap crap" type of comment, which immediately told me he'd never held one nor even bothered to read up. EBMM did their homework on this one. Combined with Tobin's input, they've produced a unique, comfortable, lightweight, extremely versatile instrument. Yeah, I've been surprised by the Kaizen, and I'm not surprised very easily when it comes to guitars.
Would love to see you review a Music Man Majesty 6/7 in comparison. This is such a great and informative review, thank you! Just subbed to your channel. You're an excellent player as well!
Very kind of you, thanks so much. Yeah, a lot of reviews are interesting but not very "complete", in my opinion. I'd like to hear a patient walk through the pickups, especially clean tones. I feel like hearing a guitar's clean tones sets the stage for all other tones the guitar could potentially make. I can do metal any day of the week, but I want to hear whether that guitar can sound pretty. If it can't do that, I don't really care about the guitar (sorta uppity, I realize, but that's just my perspective). Thanks again for your kind comments, much appreciated.
I suspect the variety of tone is coming from the 3 way Toggle it's not a standard toggle it's the same that John Petrucci has been using in his JP and Majesty guitars. It's called a 4 Pole Double Throw and allows you a ton of different varieties than just bridge, Both, Neck. The middle position is using the bridge north coil (top coil) and the necks south coil (bottom coil) it gets a very nice tele sound that is great for clean tones. I really dig the Kaizen guitar because I want to see more modern style guitars show up and get some love. Thanks for the excellent video.
@@Darkslide2AR-FE Thank you! And your technical description makes a lot of sense to me. I suspect that PRS uses a similar method to achieve their tones via 5-way switch on two-pickup guitars. Agreed about the Kaizen. What a lovely, lovely axe! Just a work of art and engineering. So lightweight, so resonant, very stable tuning-wise (w/o using the vibrato bridge), just a gorgeous instrument.
Really nice detailed review and excellent playing. I'm verging on buying one of these. Really expensive here in Oz, but still cheaper than an LP Custom . I was cooling on it, but now you have the urge building. There is a nice St Vincent HH in Charcoal as my alternative option and I've been so keen to get one of those too.
Thanks so much! All the guitars you mentioned are drool-worthy axes! I want one of everything (if I had a bottomless budget). I'm late to your comment here because I'm not a full-time RU-vidr, and there was also a "covid first-timer" thing starting in Dec '23 (extremely mild case of covid) that had a long-term effect on my voice! I couldn't make vids because I couldn't talk for more than about 10 seconds without coughing my guts out. That lasted for months. Recently, I was better enough to start making vids again (meaning, I could talk without spontaneously dry-coughing). Yammer, yammer. Anyway, thank so much! Appreciate your comment.
@@onceuponashredder So, funny thing. I turned 60 in Feb, and my lovely wife ended up buying me a Gretsch Black Paisley Penguin as I had sent her some pics of it admiring it and she loved the bling. And just last week I found a 2010 LP Custom on FB marketplace for a really good price, a little scruffy and scratched up, but no real issues and I snagged that, had a few extra bucks I earned . It was meant to be stock but has SD pups JB/Jazz which I'm not in love with, so I'm doing the pick-up comparison thing, which is driving me a bit nuts. BKP Cold Sweats and Nailbombsare great, but so expensive, so I found a set of SD Black Winters for a good price that I ordered. They may go into the LP, or maybe a Viper 301 that needs a better set. I love the Duncan Invader as well, but not sure if those big nuts will fit under the LP covers. So much gear, so little time :)
@@MrScrofulous Awesome! Cool find. I don't have any vintage Les Pauls. :( However, I have a Modern, a Classic, a Modern Studio, and a Supreme. Gorgeous axes. All stock (they're all pretty new; within the past year). The pickups differ a little between them, but the wiring is identical on all of them. Push-pull knobs to split the pickups, push-pull knob for out-of-phase, and the push-pull treble tone knob for "treble pickups straight to the output jack". I love all of that, except the "split" tone is so fat that it hardly sounds split at all. I wish it was more like a PRS, and I have several McCarty 594 singlecut guitars. The wiring for splitting on those is pretty sweet. Lovely tones. But the Les Paul's are their own thing, and I appreciate them for their own unique quirkiness, so I have no plans to mod the ones I have.
Good question! I like the neck pickup. If I had to guess, I think they'd keep it this way. It doesn't really sound "mini" to me, and I have other guitars with mini-humbuckers. Part of the problem with any guitar that has 24 (or more!) frets is that it moves the neck pickup more toward the bridge of the guitar, which changes the sonic character of what we traditionally expect from a neck pickup. That may be part of what you hear, if it's a tone thing for you with this guitar. This is such a weird-cool guitar. Like, my brain says I should find it repulsive to look at, but I think it's beautiful. Very strange and cool at the same time.
Sorry so late replying; you probably already found them. If not, I bought them on Sweetwater. It's a (pretty sure) D'Adarrio strap and the plastic self-locking ends are Steinberger designed (yes, same Ned Steinberger who designed the tuners on the guitar... coincidence... well, except that Ned is a genius :))
Oh, and the Steinberger-designed locking things come on the straps. I didn't buy them separately. Because of the location of the strap button on the horn of this guitar, I carefully cut the strep on this one, reversed the strap lock piece, then super-glued the strap back together. I've done that with several guitars that have "backward"-facing strap buttons. For those types of guitars, the lightly rubberized side of the strap (intended to protect the finish from damage, and it does a great job) needs to be reversed. Guitars with the strap button on the the "back" of the guitar need that. I love these straps so much, that when necessary (a new guitar with a backside strap button), I'll take the 10 minutes or so to perform this operation on one of these straps, because they're the only straps I use. Love them! TMI? :-P Well, I'm a chatty guy, so hope you appreciate the over-sharing.
@@DrowningTimeOfficially They are spend-y! Maybe they'll someday release a lower-priced version. Off the top of my head, I forget what their "Squire"-/"Epiphone"-level sub-brand is called. But it would be interesting if they released on in that line.
Infinity radius, not infinite. It comes from "infinity edge" pools, where there is a flow over edge, which usually overlooks a view, so there is no apparent edge to the pool.
@@MrScrofulous Indeed! I "corrected" that in the closed-captioning when I published the video, but you're right: I kept saying it incorrectly. That's interesting about the infinity edge pools! A precedent for that terminology.
Ha! 😂 Then you still have the general tuning stability issue, because they just didn't make this thing to be floating. It seems like it "should work"... like simple physics. But I'm starting to think that floating vibrato bridges with non-locking nuts are just fundamentally different than ones that are not made to be floating (and this one is definitely NOT not made to be floating). Like, different block size/shape/density/something, or the angle the block attaches to the bridge, and something about the balance of the whole mechanism, etc. I have a VegaTrem on one of my guitars, and man that thing is crazy nice. They must have put serious engineering and trial and error hours into figuring out how to make something like that work so nicely.
I just got my first kaizen 6 in the radium color, and something ive noticed with the tremolo is that it doesn't change the pitch evenly, when you dive down, the pitch is different on the e strings, which other trem multiscale guitars fix by giving the trem points of contact equal with the multiscale. That is my only complaint. Also you mentioned that if you could buy the steinberger gearless locking tuners you would put them on other guitars, and you can from both stewmac, and gibson (they made firebirds with them).
@@JTaylo Whoa! I can get the Steinberger tuners separately! I'm a StewMac fanboi. But didn't think to look there. You got a radium Kaizen 6. Jelly (jealous). Those are beautiful.
Sorry, super-late reply. You've probably already tried it! You mean this one? www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/StratSnHSSTC--squier-sonic-stratocaster-electric-guitar-tahitian-coral I've never played it. I bet it's sweet, though. The reviews seem to be good.
The new colors are amazing! Got a Kaizen 6 in Kryptonite. It's my fourth Kaizen 6, I'm hooked. They now come with a custom mono gig bag, it's thick and offers great protection, but takes up way too much room compared to the original HSC. Cheers!
@@zoomzoom3950 They're such gorgeous, well-engineered guitars. They really are. It's nice to see a company trying to push the envelope on guitar design.
Great review! I recently got my kaizen, couple of questions , does yours stay in tunes when using the bar? Also what are your pickups dc resistance? My bridge seems low I msg ebmm but no reply
@@Danny.B82Apologies for late reply. (Not a full-time RU-vidr, plus I had a covid thing - my first - that kept me away from making videos for months; a long-term aftereffect of my brief and very mild covid case... I couldn't talk without dry-coughing uncontrollably... for months). With vibrato bridges that are not floating, I tend not to use them at all. (I'm a floating vibrato guy.) And when I do use them, I use them so mildly that it doesn't really affect the tuning. BUT, if I did some dive-bombing with this, I'd expect it to not always come back to perfect tuning afterward. That's my experience with any guitar that isn't a Floyd+locking nut type of guitar. I actually did attempt to make this a "floating" vibrato bridge, and recorded an entire video about the experiment. But I couldn't get the tuning to stabilize after three days, no matter what I tried, so I scrapped the video idea and returned the bridge to its original position. Basically, I very slightly lifted it off the body by carefully backing this screws out a little bit, just to give the bridge a little backward motion. (Now I can't remember whether I tried it on this guitar or the Kaizen 7, but they're the same except for the number of strings.) I'm not sure what the DC resistance is. I think they list it on the product EBMM product page, though. I think. Fact-check me! :) I could be wrong.
Nice video. How about the intonation on this guitar? That first position D chord sounds wonderfully in-tune. That would be 50% of the Kaizen 6's value for me.
@JamesLongPDX I intentionally detune the G string a little on all my guitars, because I’m a lefty on “right-handed” guitar and I have an unintentional iron grip… always making the G string notes go sharp. Otherwise, I think the intonation is solid. I made no adjustments to intonation, and never thought about it. So, it’s solid out of the gate.
