Ibanez PR-1550

The Ibanez PR-1550 (made in 1985) is from 20+ years back, when I picked this up in Boston in the late 90’s. It’s a superstrat made for eighties shredding glory, and it originally had a black tremolo bridge (the dreaded Pro Rock’r tremolo, with unique dimensions) which at some point broke in half. Years later I located an exact replacement in Belgium, although it was silver-colour. The neck is the Pro Line (oiled maple – 18/20mm thick), and its finish has worn down to the wood, but it’s very thin profile and looks like 16″ radius.

An earlier mod I had done was to replace the pickups with a Charvel set, this was not a good idea as the bridge pickup was overpowering and the single coils didn’t sound very well. I eventually swapped back to the original Ibanez coils. The switches also had to be replaced as the originals broke. I also relic-buffed the body a bit as there were many paint chips off over the years. It’s a piece of decades ago history, and a sort of souvenir of possibly the worst decade in music of the last century.