IYV IJZ-500 NA Jazz Solid- Hollow Body Electric Guitar, Natural

I bought the IYV IJZ-500 because it looked incredible and cost less brand-new on Amazon than used on eBay. That’s usually a sign of cult status or pending scarcity—or maybe just a really good deal.This is my seventh IYV guitar. Yes, seventh. I’ve been playing guitar for over 30 years, which is just enough time to get very good at buying them and stay reliably mediocre at playing them. I’m the kind of guy who owns a wall of guitars and plays the same songs on all of them with deep conviction.The IJZ-500 is a big, beautiful jazz box. Glossy, elegant, and absolutely fun to hold. If you like guitars that look like they cost more than your first car, this one fits the bill. It’s built for jazz tones, and it delivers—smooth, warm, and mellow. Played through a Spark 2 and flat studio headphones, it sounded great. The pickups are a little soft, which might annoy pros, but I consider it a feature: they mask my sloppy playing like Instagram filters for bad tone.Mine arrived with no sharp frets, no issues with the finish, and a real bone nut (nice touch). The tuners are budget-grade, sure—but they work. I’ll upgrade them eventually, mostly to pretend I know what I’m doing.Compared to my “real” guitars (the expensive, pro-tier ones I bring out to impress absolutely no one), this holds its own just fine for home use. Honestly, I sound about the same on a $1,500 guitar as I do on this—like a guy who long ago hit his talent ceiling but loves to be discerning about different guitar tones and feels.The best part? IYV guitars are fun. They make me want to pick them up and play, which is pretty much the whole point when you’re not paying the bills with your playing. Also, my wife doesn’t really raise a serious eyebrow when one shows up on the doorstep. That matters.Would I take it on stage at a jazz club? I’d have to suddenly became good to give you that piece of advice. But for living-room sessions, headphone jams, or pretending to be a guitar hero in my study, it’s perfect.

I wanted to give this five stars. What I received plays well enough, sounds great, and I’m satisfied with the quality for the price I paid. Though it does have a lot of small imperfections.I’ll start with the pros, which are mostly aesthetic:- The guitar pictured in the listing has a silver tailpiece and pickups, which looks fine, though not as pleasing against the body color as gold-tone hardware would be. So I had a really good first impression when I opened the box and saw that both the tailpiece and pickups were gold.- The inlays are absolutely gorgeous. Especially the abalone inside mother of pearl inlays on the neck.- It looks like someone did a basic setup before shipping it. The strings were so low, in fact, that the 6th string buzzed from the 5th fret up. The frets themselves were fine, the bridge had just been taken down too low. But the truss rod didn’t need adjusting, and I count that as a pro because it amounted to less time and work than I normally have to put into setting up a new guitar.- The sound is actually quite nice, despite the cheap pickups.But I’m giving it four stars instead of five because:- There were some blemishes in the finish. They aren’t visible from a distance, you really have to look closely to find them. And they’re hard to photograph with a cellphone camera. But there are several, ranging from small bumps that weren’t sanded out or indentations that weren’t filled to some scratches around the bridge pickup.- The pickups aren’t terrible, but most amateurs could have done a better job installing them. I took out the bridge pickup to get a better look inside, and as I was unscrewing it, one of the screws wouldn’t lift. It turned, but I had to lever it out because the wood was stripped around it, so it was more like a loose nail than a screw. This was sold as a new instrument and not a warehouse return, so my best guess is that the pickup didn’t pass the QC process at the factory and someone did a rush job replacing it. Whatever the cause, it’s going to take about half a day and some wood filler on my end to correct.I put a set of flatwounds on it, which took about a day to settle. I’ve played it for a few days now, and it stays in tune. The tuners, by the way, aren’t great, but they work well enough, I don’t see a need to replace them any time soon.The bottom line is, if the instrument needed more than a day’s worth of work to setup or repair, or if it didn’t stay in tune, I’d send it back. But it does the job I bought it for, and it’s quite fetching, so I’m keeping this one.I bought this because I’ve purchased two IYV guitars before that were easily five-star instruments for the price I paid. I’ve found the brand in general to produce really good platforms for modding; the bodies and necks are high quality, while the electronics are easily replaceable with a bit of patience and some soldering skills.