Yamaha Revstar Standard

The Revstar Standard in Hot Merlot

Hey neighbours! I recently noted that Yamaha had refreshed their Revstar lineup into three series, Element, Standard and Professional.

Element and Standard models are built in Indonesia and Professional models are built in Japan. The initial source reported that Standards were made in Japan, and I repeated this but it was incorrect. To my good fortune, the fine folks at The Arts Music Store were able to arrange a short term evaluation of a Standard model and I chose to go with the build that has two P90 pickups. The alternative is two humbuckers, but I had heard the brilliant Welsh guitarist Chris Buck playing a model with P90s and I really wanted to try that.

Yamaha may not be a trendy name in guitars but it is very hard to beat their quality and value for the dollar. The Revstar Standard that I was able to try out had a hang tag of $999.99 CAD. The body is chambered and is quite light. More important to me is how resonant the guitar is. I knew long before plugging it in, that it was going to be a sonorous experience and it certainly is. Yamaha as a musical instrument company understands acoustics at an incredibly deep level. Just listen to one of their acoustic pianos and you will understand.

Guitar Overview

The body has a high gloss polyurethane finish (Yay! I hate satin finishes on guitars. Always). The body finishes are “inspired by cafe racers” and given Yamaha’s long involvement in motorcycles I understand the crossover. The body has a maple cap over the chambered body of mahogany.

Carbon rods reinforce the neck

The neck is a three piece mahogany unit with two carbon reinforcing rods. It still has a regular truss rod, so the carbon rods support the truss rod and do not replace it as we are seeing with hollow D carbon rods in other guitars. The neck has a smooth satin poly finish. It was quite quick when I got the straight out of the box guitar, but a bit of wax polish and some light buffing and it’s glorious. The fingerboard is rosewood and the frets are jumbo stainless steel. Some people don’t care for stainless steel frets, I like them a lot. The frets were all nice and level and the bound neck had no sharp points. Necks from guitars costing three times this could do with this kind of build quality, not naming names. The tuning machines are very smooth, and very positive. The large unique looking tailpiece and tune-o-matic style bridge are well finished and appear to be quality parts, not cheap stamped pieces. The factory supplies Elixir Nanoweb 10s as the shipping strings. After a quick cleaning they were super smooth. There are 22 frets on the neck and the scale length is 24 3/4 inches.

The P90 pickups came with cream covers and sound like a P90 should, or at least they do now. These are Yamaha designed and built pickups using Alnico V magnets.

The pickup setup was the first disappointment in the guitar. I took one that had not been inspected in store as yet because I prefer to learn what state guitars are in out of the box. The Revstar was very clean, but really needed a setup. The action was far too high for me, and the pickups were much too close to the strings, producing those wolf tones that you read about. In fact the bridge pickup was mounted and that’s about it. I did find that the Philips screw heads were of a too soft metal. It’s possible that they are JIS heads but I doubt it. The neck set was just fine so it was a matter of lowering the pickups a lot, lowering the bridge to achieve the action I preferred, then raising the pickups to a proper height for great tone with no wolf tones. The top is curved, so it took a little while to get the output balance good between the pickups as the guitar has one volume and one tone control. Once I got this done, a quick intonation check and we were good. There is a five way selector switch and while the documentation is rather skint, positions 2 and 4 have that out of phase squonk, but without the typical volume drop. Position one is bridge, three is both, five is neck.

The unique Hanko mark on the headstock means Revstar

The guitar’s tone pot is a push pull. Pulled up it takes on what Yamaha calls Focus mode. To my ears it is a low + mid passive boost with what also sounds like a high shelf filter. Things get darker and thicker. Yamaha says it is designed to make the pickups sound like they are overwound. For me I have to work on acquiring a taste for it. The second sequence of pickup switch position chords in the samples later on feature the Focus switch on, and I have to be straight with you, I’m not at this point a fan.

The Revstar Standard comes with a gig bag but I used a generic one so as not to mark up the one in the box.

My amp for the test is my handwired VOX AC30. This is a two channel amp with no reverb and selectable output level for 15 or 30 watts. My initial play and recording work were done with the amp at 15 watts. I set the volume on the guitar at about eight and raised the channel volume to the level that a hard attack would just push the amp into breakup. Rolling the guitar volume up to ten produces that delicious VOX overdriven tone.

Playability

The Revstar was good to go after I did my initial setup. I am not sure if the one that I got was an outlier, as Yamaha guitars are usually ready to go out of the box. I did not get my hands on another one or a Professional series guitar so I hope my test unit is an exception.

Those P90s are very quiet, even into an amp that can be a bit noisy like the VOX. While I was connected to the amp through the room pedal board, I had everything off. There is a tap for the tuner on the volume pedal and all of my initial playing was the guitar dry through the amp. Later on I used the Walrus Audio Fathom for some reverb, because I like reverb and the VOX does not have it. When I recorded the chord riff, I added a Kramer Tape Delay after the fact in post to keep the actual recording as vanilla as is reasonable. More on the recording setup will follow. The neck has a 12 inch radius according to the docs. All I knew in the play test is that nothing choked out and the neck was not so flat as to annoy my arthritis. The neck is a flatter C shape and is neither too thin nor too chunky. The controls are very smooth and very quiet. There is a good range of dynamic control in the volume pot and keeping it around eight in general worked well, with a rollup to ten for some nice VOX overdrive and a short rolloff for clean tones. The tone control itself has a pretty wide sweep but below two goes right into the mud room. I did not check the wiring itself and wonder if it is modern or 50s wiring. I have changed most of my guitars to 50’s wiring because I like it better so that might be something to look at.

The passive boost of the Focus switch has not done anything for me yet, and I am ok with that because I like simple clean design, not all manner of gestures required. Try it yourself, you may think it’s a great thing. I always use a strap and the guitar is comfortable to play sitting down and standing. It’s heavy enough not to flop all over the place and light enough not to be fatiguing if you play standing for an extended period of time.

I could have gotten a humbucker model but I am glad I got the version with the P90s. A good P90 is the best of all worlds in my opinion, and the range of tones from the five way switch gives you lots of options.

This first audio sample is a G chord in all five switch positions. Starting with bridge, then position 2, then 3, then 4 and ending with neck, followed by the same sequence with the Focus switch activated.

This next sample is a simple chord riff sequence with the guitar turned up full, which pushed the VOX into a pleasant overdrive recorded into Studio One using an AKG condenser microphone run into an Apollo Solo interface. There were two plugins used on the interface itself, a standard UA 610B preamp and a LA-2A Silver set to open the sound up a bit. Once recorded an Eddie Kramer Tape Delay preset was applied. No pedals were used in the recording, this is guitar into amp.

Conclusions

So what do I conclude from this test? I expected the Revstar Standard to be really good. It’s at a suitable price point in my opinion and not racing down the road to pricing itself right out of the marketplace. Can you hear me Gibson and Fender?

The build quality is excellent, and the sound from the P90s is awesome, certainly as good as any other P90s that I have in guitars and overall better than most. The guitar is light, has incredible acoustic resonance and is readily playable. It sounds good through a variety of real tube amplifiers and also sounds really good through my Kemper and Quad Cortex. I have not played the humbucker version as yet but expect it to be a good choice and a better alternative to the increasing price tag of the Sire L7 series. I’d definitely take it over any of the entry level Gibsons that cost much more and whose build quality is sadly often questionable.