Despite it's youthful age the MC500 continues to be a sought after guitar.
The Ibanez MC500 Musician is a superb piece of guitar art and engineering from Fuji Gen Gakki. Meeting the taste for exotic woods with natural finishes, the MC500 was made using a sandwich of either carved walnut or dark-stained ash with a maple center and walnut or ash back, around a laminated maple and mahogany neck. Only the MC500 had a carved top. Hardware that wasn't gold-plated was solid brass for enhancing sustain, including the extra-large scalloped tailpiece. As with all instrument series, electronics were more sophisticated as you moved up the line. The MC500 sported active Tri-Sound Super 88 humbuckers with a dizzying array of controls. Two three-way mini-toggles offered regular humbucking mode plus a coil tap and phase reversal for each pickup. A third mini-toggle activated an EQ circuit with volume and tone plus boost and cut controls for a three-band EQ (low, mid, high frequencies). All were controlled by a master volume.
The beauty of the wood, the excellent construction, and the electronic horsepower would be enough to recommend the MC500 to anyone who likes a fine-playing, versatile-sounding guitar, but the original owner wanted this to be something extra special, so he custom ordered the gorgeous mother-of-pearl tree-of-life fingerboard inlay, which Fuji put on some of its showcase models. To make sure his prize was protected, he also got an aluminum flight case!
All Ibanez Musicians, and especially this MC500 are really nice guitars. They're fun to play, and if there's a downside to them, it's that the search for sustain almost inevitably makes for added weight. Plus, as wonderful as it is to be able to fine-tune your sound with onboard EQ, there's a powerful streak in many guitar players that likes to keep it simple. That's the other extreme represented by a young Edward Van Halen, who wanted one pickup and one knob - a volume control! In any case, the rage for brass nuts, sustain blocks, and active electronics eventually passed, as all things do. The original Ibanez Musician line was gone after the 1980 season, replaced briefly by a bolt-neck with passive electronics, as the guitar business began its inevitable drift toward the Stratocaster-style guitars that would come, after a brief flirtation with exotic shapes, to define the decade of the 1980s.
The success of Ibanez Musicians during their brief three-year run means they're not especially rare birds. The carved-top MC500s were, understandably, less common and prime examples can easily sell today for $1,500. Only 164 were built in 1978, when this custom-ordered guitar was finished, and by the end of 1980, some 1,180 MC500s had left the Fuji factory - enough to make it possible to find one of these beautiful tributes to the search for sustain at the end of the 1970s.
The beauty of the wood, the excellent construction, and the electronic horsepower would be enough to recommend the MC500 to anyone who likes a fine-playing, versatile-sounding guitar, but the original owner wanted this to be something extra special, so he custom ordered the gorgeous mother-of-pearl tree-of-life fingerboard inlay, which Fuji put on some of its showcase models. To make sure his prize was protected, he also got an aluminum flight case!
All Ibanez Musicians, and especially this MC500 are really nice guitars. They're fun to play, and if there's a downside to them, it's that the search for sustain almost inevitably makes for added weight. Plus, as wonderful as it is to be able to fine-tune your sound with onboard EQ, there's a powerful streak in many guitar players that likes to keep it simple. That's the other extreme represented by a young Edward Van Halen, who wanted one pickup and one knob - a volume control! In any case, the rage for brass nuts, sustain blocks, and active electronics eventually passed, as all things do. The original Ibanez Musician line was gone after the 1980 season, replaced briefly by a bolt-neck with passive electronics, as the guitar business began its inevitable drift toward the Stratocaster-style guitars that would come, after a brief flirtation with exotic shapes, to define the decade of the 1980s.
The success of Ibanez Musicians during their brief three-year run means they're not especially rare birds. The carved-top MC500s were, understandably, less common and prime examples can easily sell today for $1,500. Only 164 were built in 1978, when this custom-ordered guitar was finished, and by the end of 1980, some 1,180 MC500s had left the Fuji factory - enough to make it possible to find one of these beautiful tributes to the search for sustain at the end of the 1970s.