About a year ago, I reviewed the Yamaha Revstar RSS02T, which is basically the same as this guitar with Yamaha’s P90 pickups. It was a great guitar to play but the sound just never really bit me. Lots of folks love P90s and while I own some instruments with P90s, they don’t call to me as much as others do.

So when I was chatting about the Revstar with my buddy Will, who plays a Revstar with P90s and who is jonesing for one with humbuckers and then had a conversation with my friend Cody, I concluded that if possible it was time to review the humbucker version. With the help of the fine people at The Arts Music Store, here it is. Please support this shop either live or online. They are great people and are really committed to your musical joy.

Overview

The RSS20 is functionally the same body as the RSS02T with some differences that I will go over in more detail. It is a double cutaway solid (kinda) body with two humbuckers, a five way switch, one volume and one tone pot with a Yamaha unique circuit on the push pull tone pot. It comes in a variety of colours and the one that I have as pictured is called Swift Blue. There are three solid colours, black, white and merlot (a really nice purple-red), one orangey sun burst and the Swift Blue and Flash Green that have these late sixties white racing stripes. They sometimes look goofy in pictures but in real life they look pretty cool.

There was a substantial tone difference between the P90 and the humbucker version to my ears. Which is bad for me. And you can figure out why.

Specifications

There are three family variants of the Revstar. The Professional series is the top end and is manufactured at the Yamaha Hamamatsu factory in Japan. The Standard series is made in Indonesia and as I found with the Pacifica that I recently reviewed, I struggle to find any significant downside to the Indonesia build. The Element series is made in China and is still a very good guitar, built to a price point.

The attached image is from Yamaha and shows the specification differences between the Standard with Humbuckers and the Standard with P90s.

The Revstar has the Gibson standard 24 ¾ inch scale length, so it is immediately comfortable to anyone having been playing that scale length. Moving to it from a Fender style scale length took minimal adjustment as a player. It is also a set neck, not a bolt on design. It’s a mahogany body that uses Yamaha’s proprietary acoustic design engineering to maximize resonance. It works, The body rings wonderfully. There is a solid maple top on the three piece mahogany body and the neck is mahogany with two carbon reinforcement rods under a rosewood fingerboard. Overall the guitar is very lightweight and perfectly balanced. The body finish is gloss polyurethane and the back of the neck is satin polyurethane. Both finishes are excellent and the poly coat is thin not like other guitars where it looks like it was gooped on. The rosewood board is really nice and there are twenty two stainless steel frets. Given how easy it is to do stainless steel frets these days, why every maker doesn’t go there confuses me. Yes I have heard the myth about them sounding different. Show me a frequency response chart for both done in the lab that has been peer verified and I will believe you. The pickups are Alnico V and have a good punch but can still clean up really nicely. I personally prefer a lower wind pickup, but these suited me fine in all my different tests. I personally prefer the humbucker version over the P90 version. I don’t know if there is a treble bleed installed but I can say that when you roll off the volume, all the treble does not vanish as on some guitars. The tone control is fine, and at zero is not a complete puddle of mud. I will touch on the Focus switch later, because I really hated it on the P90 guitar and my feelings on it with the humbucker is that its usefulness is really amp dependent.

While the P90 version has this cool looking tailpiece, the Humbucker version has the tried and true stop tail and tune-o-matic bridge. They work great. There is no vibrato option and tuning stability is excellent. The tuners are precise and smooth with no lash. I would always prefer locking tuners but there is nothing wrong with these.

The guitar comes with a padded gig bag which is of good quality. It comes strung with Elixir 10 - 46 strings. I am not a fan of Elixir strings generally. They are jobber grade strings with a Gore-Tex skin. I would personally restring it with D’Addario XS Coated 9-42s or my own custom balanced tension set of Curt Mangan 8.5-42 coated strings. Strings are very personal things and I credit Yamaha for not shipping this fine guitar with the cheap crap that Fender and Gibson use regardless of the instrument price tag.

Switching

The pickup switching is pretty unique in that instead of just coil splitting or tapping in positions 2 and 4, Yamaha throws the pickups out of phase which in a clean setup gives you some nice tonal versatility although once you start into an overdriven amp, that subtly slips away.

Focus Switch

The Focus Switch as Yamaha calls it, is a passive boost, no battery required and as consequence by simulating an overwound pickup tends to darken the overall highs with a push to the mids and highs. I did not care for it into a clean amp, but found it increasingly useful as the overdriven character of the amp increased. It’s interesting in my opinion, but if it wasn’t there I probably wouldn’t care and if it did a real coil tap, I would probably prefer that. But this is my opinion, your need/want could be very different.

I will give Yamaha credit on the push pull. It was easy to engage and I didn’t need to slide a fingernail under the rim to get it to pop up, unlike a certain PRS Myles Kennedy that I recently reviewed. Part of that is knob design but the other part is the ergonomics of where the knob sits on the shaft. Push pulls that make your life difficult are a curse.

Playability

Like the Pacifica Standard+, this Revstar was perfect from the word go. No fiddling required and I didn’t even want to do a minor relief tweak to the neck. The neck is a gentle C and after hours of playing there was no tension, no cramping and best of all no arthritis pain. The fretwork is superb, although I have yet to encounter any Yamaha with bad fretwork. The knobs are smooth, the frets have a good polish on them, there is no crackle from the switching and the jack connection is positive. I ran the guitar into a variety of tube amps and it worked well with all. It is very pedal friendly and while I did my example sounds using my Kemper Stage because it just works so well, I am comfortable saying that the Revstar is going to be ideal however you use it.

I mentioned that the guitar is well balanced and quite lightweight so if you are gigging musician and playing standing, you aren’t going to go hunchbacked. And if you have smaller hands, you’re also going to be well served by the neck carve and flatter radius. I have average hands with shorter fingers and there was no issue playing traditionally or handling the bottom strings with my thumb. I like a guitar that works with you and that isn’t a fight every time you pick it up. I have heard some players say that they want to fight the guitar a bit. I cannot fathom why, but if you want a fight, go play something different because the Revstar works WITH you, not against you.

Example Sounds

For all the examples, I plugged the Revstar into my Kemper Stage and used a number of different profiles. I stuck to Kemper’s latest Liquid Profile architecture wherever possible because the company has done a really nice job on this upgrade which reduces the need for a bunch of profiles for each different amp setting. The Kemper is connected in stereo to a UA Apollo Twin which is connected in this location to an older MacBook Pro hacked to run the current macOS. The DAW that I used for the samples is Logic Pro or UA LUNA. I did not use any plugins for the recordings at all. That’s not what I would do in the real world, but a couple of folks have asked me to load up samples without any post production work. The first clip is just a simple chord in each of the switch positions and then again with the Focus switch engaged. The second clip is a variety of amp tones demonstrating the superb versatility of this instrument.

Wrapping Up

Simply put, this is a fantastic guitar. In this price point, Yamaha kills. It comes in less expensive than the Fender Player II Series that I consider excellent and outplays any Player I or any Epiphone, Gretsch, Jackson, Charvel that I have tried in the $1,000 CAD MAP range. Would I buy one? Like the Pacifica Standard+ the answer is 100% yes, except for that annoying requirement for the funds to make the buy. And while I liked the Merlot on the RSS20T, I would choose the blue on the RSS20. I will never understand why so many guitar shops that actually carry Yamaha, forget them completely when the buyer is looking for a killer electric guitar, and in my opinion, this Revstar is a clear winner. Another player asked me if I would take it over a PRS SE DGT and I said yes, which surprised him because I raved about that guitar. But I have a PRS Core DGT already, and don’t have a Revstar.

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