Ibanez Exotic Wood - African Zebra Wood

Today's blog is on the Ibanez EW20ZW. This guitar is (once again) a personal favorite of mine. It is the first acoustic electric I purcahsed, and for the budget, this guitar is the tops. Ibanez offers a great price for an affordable budget and I would reccomend their product to anyone. The Exotic Wood (EW in the model code) is Ibanez's series of acoustic electrics that are constructed, as the name implies, of vairous exotic woods. The ZW on this particular guitar stands for Zebra Wood, as the guitar's top, back, and sides are constructed of African Zebra Wood.

The woods used in this series of guitars are not all necessarily tone woods. This means that the sound does not resonate quite as well as it would with some other woods. To compensate for that, Ibanez build this series as a custome jumbo size. The body is not quite as drastic as a jumbo style body, but it is larger than a standard dreadnaught body. This gives these guitars a 'big' sound that really does great when playing full, open chords. The lows are very prominent, the highs stand out, but the mids get a little bit lost in the whole big sound. That being said, this guitar has a very good blended sound.

Along with a great acoustic sound, this guitar has built-in pick-ups with a preamp. The SRT-C preamp with a built-in tuner, paired with the B-Band UST pickup used in this guitar blend together like to make the guitar sound even better plugged in than acoustic. The preamp give you full control of highs, mids, lows, and has a feedback cut-out in the case of difficult acoustics in a room. The electronics also feauture a 1/4" input, as well as an XLR input, so that there is not need for a direct box.

While there is much, much more I could say about this guitar, I will keep this blog fairly short. One last thing about the Exotic Wood series, and the zebra wood guitars in particular, is that they are one of a kind. Because the grain patterns of these exotic woods are so distinct, you will never find two EW guitars that look the same, and each one with have its own unsurpassed beauty.