PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHILIP SOWELS & NEIL GODWIN YAMAHA pAcificA 611HfM, 510V & 311H £579, £479 & £399 ELECTRICS 70 Guitarist Summer 2011 GIT345.rev_yamaha.
YAMAHA pacifica 611HFM, 510V & 311H £579, £479 & £399 ELECTRICS Budget boutique Yamaha’s most successful electric guitar line of all time gets three new variants. They meld a custom shop vibe with some boutique-style appointments, not least a brand-new Seymour Duncan pickup. Best of all, not one of them will break the bank… by Simon Bradley Summer 2011 Guitarist 71 GIT345.rev_yamaha.
YAMAHA pAcificA 611HfM, 510V & 311H £579, £479 & £399 ELECTRICS Yamaha Pacifica 611HFM, 510V & 311H £579, £479 & £399 What we want to know 1 2 3 Yamaha has a Custom Shop? It sure has, and in 1989 it was this North Hollywood workshop that came up with the design for the original Pacifica. These three new models were conceived with help from the custom facilities in the Far East, notably the one at Yamaha’s Hamamatsu HQ.
YAMAHA pAcificA 611HfM, 510V & 311H £579, £479 & £399 ELECTRICS that we saw in the market,” continues Ward. “We determined a target player’s key style influences fairly easily – heavier blues-rock and crossing into some classic hard rock: Def Leppard, not Creed. It sounds like an obvious target of guitarist to go after, but there are surprisingly few choices if you’re that guy and you don’t want something ‘standard’.
YAMAHA pAcificA 611HfM, 510V & 311H £579, £479 & £399 ELECTRICS the vintage-tinted maple neck, which feels slightly shallower than the one present on the 510, isn’t too far away from that of a fatter sixties reissue Strat. The pickups are again Seymour Duncans: a Trembucker-spaced version of the full and powerful Custom V and the vintage-correct SP90-1 at the neck, selected by a three-way lever switch and augmented by a pull/push switch on the tone control to split the bridge humbucker.
YAMAHA pAcificA 611HfM, 510V & 311H £579, £479 & £399 ELECTRICS our esteemed editor). “But it had a big influence on the concept. It gave us inspiration in terms of the idea of a Pacifica kitted out with the hardware that an individual player might upgrade to.” Let’s not pull punches. Fender and Gibson have the heritage in this market, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of us out there who fancy something that’s different, cool and great value for money.
