Review: 2025 IYV- ILJR-200 Solid Basswood Electric Guitar (TV Yellow)

Review: 2025 IYV- ILJR-200 Solid Basswood Electric Guitar (TV Yellow)

The IYV-ILJR-200 is a nice, inexpensive way to get a copy of a double cut Les Paul Jr with a p90 pickup in TV yellow. This style of electric guitar has its origins as a student guitar that happened to have a pickup that many famous rock guitarists found good enough to use for a lot of classic recordings. So, it's a simple design that can produce a classic sound that doesn't cost much to manufacture.

The P90 pickup does involve accepting some trade-offs, mainly because it's a noisier pickup than other single coils like you would find on a Fender but it's probably more of a cost issue because other versions, like the Epiphones, for example, have p90s that are noticeably quieter. That being said, the P90 has a classic growl that you're really not going to find in another pickup. It has the fullness of a humbucker with the clarity of a single coil.

The guitar is a lot quieter at lower volume and if you back off to around 50% it cleans up well. At that point you can adjust volume from the amp. That's more than you might have to do on a higher quality version but it's a trade-off that might appeal to many because the build quality is very good. It's a nicely made guitar.

If you're a beginning guitar player who wants this type of guitar, be prepared to pay a little bit more for a setup if your guitar came as unfinished as mine. Judging from comments I've seen on various sites, it's possible that the one I have went out of adjustment to a larger extent than others who reported getting guitars that arrived set up or only needing slight adjustments. 

The tuners are adequate, fit and finish good for this price. The wrap around bridge is pretty good, it’s compensated with additional screws to adjust the alignment in addition to the height. I have this company's version of an SG, and so overall I like the level of quality you get with this brand at the price they charge. The company doesn’t give out very many specs on this guitar so one can assume that they use materials that they get a good deal on at any given time during manufacture.

The sound is pretty close to an Epiphone/Gibson guitar of this type, and it's a nice size and weight for beginners. If someone wants to go to the trouble of having it set up and maybe get a noise gate, then it's cheap enough to do that. However, this is a single P90 guitar so it’ll be noisy at some settings and comments from guitarists who are familiar with this type of pickup appear to have a good opinion of this Les Paul Junior copy.

This particular guitar sounds good with the stock pickup yet the quality and price are good enough that if you wanted to make it an upgrade project, it could even take a stock Gibson humbucker and still be below the price of quite a few other versions of this guitar. 

A lot of inexpensive guitars are just expensive enough to make it impractical to do too many upgrades but the cost and build quality of this guitar make for a good upgrade project. It's a good package that delivers a classic sound due to its history as an inexpensive guitar that ended up punching above its weight.

Al Handa

July 22, 2026

Aftermarket Review: 2024 Epiphone Power Player SG

Aftermarket Review: 2024 Epiphone Power Player SG

The Epiphone Power Players SG is a 3/4 size electric with a 22 fret, 22.73” scale and a slim profile D bolt-on neck. The SG has a 650R neck humbucker and a 700T bridge. The Power Player SG was introduced in 2022 and is still being manufactured. So, obviously this is a guitar that has already been extensively reviewed on YouTube and the web. I’m reviewing it here since I’ve had a recent experience with it having purchased one back in December 2025. 

I’ll stress what I bought it for and you can consider this an aftermarket review about how the guitar has performed since the initial introduction and hype.

I bought it because I was intrigued by the idea of getting an SG that had a shorter scale and no neck dive; I figured the shorter scale one would do the trick. That turned out to be true. It’s a nicely balanced, quality guitar that has the solid feel of a full size. I’m not sure about it being a good travel guitar; the  ¾ length is, in my opinion, more suited for a car trip, etc.

After six months, the positives are that the ergonomics are very good, a very comfortable guitar to play. The pickups are good enough to keep on the guitar as opposed to needing to be upgraded.

As far as it being an SG, or more specifically, sounding like one, that is a little difficult to quantify. The earliest SGs had P90 pickups and the next generation with humbuckers sounded different than ones I personally heard later. In other words, you can’t really say that this SG has “the classic sound.”  Any model that's been around for over 50 years is likely to have quite a few variations. Telecasters and other Fenders are in a similar situation; there is no one classic sound anymore.

As I’ve said in other blog entries, there are certain types of superlatives and descriptions that don’t really tell the reader what the guitar sounds like. It’s best to simply refer everybody to YouTube or elsewhere on music sites to actually hear the sound of a particular model. 

One thing I can do is give you an immediate comparison, or at least the one I noticed, and that's that this particular Epiphone is similar in sound to the Les Paul version. The pick ups are quite good, clear and very articulate, both in clean and high gain. 

As we all know the louder the guitar gets the more similar it becomes to other guitars at the same volume level. In this case, my impression is that the sound is more along the lines of what they get in this price range with the Les Paul copies. If you want a sound that's closer to a Gibson SG, I would recommend getting one of the excellent G series models. Also, If you have a particular sound in your head, then definitely try both the P90 and humbucker versions.

In the case of the Power SG, there’s a lot to like about it as a beginner guitar, travel guitar or a second or third in one’s collection. The guitar has excellent pick ups, and sounds versatile enough to cover quite a few different genres. It’s not quite a time machine in the sense that it can reproduce some of the classic 60s sounds, but that’s an esoteric application in 2026. For a lot of players, the type of music they want to play developed a lot later in the 70s onwards.

In terms of the SG sound I was looking for, I went ahead and just stuck with the IYV (reviewed in this blog) because after sitting with it for a few months, I realized that the neck length and any tendency to dive doesn’t really matter that much when you’re sitting down. 

The type of sound you get with a full size SG due to the neck length, etc, isn’t going to be present in a short scale version. In fact, the P90 version of the Epi Les Paul Special 1 has more of the sound I was looking for along with the IYV.

As far as any recommendation, it may not have been what I was looking for, but it has plenty of virtues for those who want to use it as an entry level guitar and beyond.

Al Handa

July 22, 2026

Specs

Binding. Single-ply, Fretboard

Body Finish  Gloss

Body Material  Mahogany

Body Shape  SG

Body Styles. SG

Fingerboard Material  Laurel

Fingerboard Radius  304.8mm / 12.0in

Fret Count  22

Frets  Medium Jumbo

Inlays  Pearloid Trapezoid

Joint  Bolt-on with Sculpted Heel and Ferrule Inserts

Neck Material  Mahogany

Nut Material

White Plastic  Nut Width

41.0mm / 1.61in

Profile  SlimTaper D

Scale Length  22.73in

Bridge Pickup  Epiphone 700T Humbucker

Controls  2 Volume, 2 Tone

Neck Pickup  Epiphone 650R Humbucker

Lightning Bar Compensated Wrap Around

Nickel Tuning Machines

Die Cast with Kidney Buttons

Article: True Godfathers Of Punk: Part 9 - Of Course We Had His Music In The Ear Before…Iggy

The True Godfathers Of Punk: Part 9 - Of Course We Had His Music In The Ear Before…Iggy

There have been quite a few artists, or at least their publicists, claiming to have had some sort of influence on the punk movement of the 70s, hence the phrase that’s become a cliché and keyword, Godfather Of Punk.

However, there was (and is) a 60s-70s artist who didn’t need a publicist or a rock critic to proclaim him as a Punk forefather. In fact, if you were walking around the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco early before the show and between acts, the music they played over the PA system rarely included rock acts from the 60s and 70s. San Francisco was a city that had rock legends like the Jefferson Airplane/Starship, Grateful Dead and others, none of whom were played over the PA along with all the rising stars of the first wave of Punk.

I remember the stage manager who was, I guess you could call him a wiseass tough rock and roller type. But when this 60s legend’s music came over the PA system, he immediately became respectful as if hearing the word of God and would shout “I f——-g Love Iggy Pop.”

Iggy Pop was already influential from his work with the Stooges, whose music often came over the house music system. In 1977, he came out with his second solo album in collaboration with David Bowie, and not only produced one of the greatest singles of any genre of that decade but an album that was the perfect link between the Stooges’ “Fun House,” punk and what became “Post Punk” (the more melodic branch aside from Public Image).

The album wasn’t necessarily seen that way at the time, among those I talked with about the music in 1977, it was also seen as an album with two fantastic singles with a lot of stuff that was hard to categorize, though those who liked XTC, Wire and later period David Bowie would’ve found it familiar territory.

When one talks about the album, it has a title cut, “Lust For Life,” that opens with the loudest pounding drum beat since “Wipe Out” and was so powerful that Iggy didn’t come with the vocal in right away; like the rest of us, he just rode that drum for a while, enjoying the groove that he knew was powering a punk masterpiece.

I remember at the time there were some people who really would’ve preferred that he come out with another Stooges type album but he had been collaborating with David Bowie for a while, and it was inevitable that Bowie was going to, perhaps not guide him so much as impress upon him that as a solo artist, he had the room to explore a different things, and he certainly did. 

The voice that growled “ No Fun,” turned out to also be one that could sing the Bowie’ish-Kinks “Dead End Street” influenced “The Passenger,” and on the rest of the cuts, a punk, art rock and post punk tour de force that even 50 years down the line still amazes.

I’m not sure how Iggy stood in the general rock scene in 1977. He was certainly respected, but I’m not sure how big a force he may have been to the then established 60s icons and the 70s wave of metal artists. However, in 1977 in that punk club in San Francisco and in similar clubs elsewhere around the world, Iggy stood pretty tall and we all were playing music under that man’s very big shadow and listening to yet another of his albums that was way ahead of us.

Al Handa

July 22, 2026

Retrospective: The Real Good Old Days - No Names, Danelectro Coral Bellzouki 12 and Aria 6814 Acoustic 12

Retrospective: The Real Good Old Days - No Names, Danelectro Coral Bellzouki 12 and Aria 6814 Acoustic 12 

One of the most common stories born from the success of some guitar player or musician is the stock horror story of an earlier cheap guitar. There's no doubt that for many players that's probably the case but quite a few of those old war stories are just modern attitudes being projected on to a different time and place. 

For example, my father bought a guitar for everybody when I was in 4th grade. It was an extremely cheap guitar and it didn't last very long but the action was fairly low and it was quite playable. It fell apart because of the cheapness of the construction but during its short life, it could be played and produced some music.

Later on when I was in 6th grade, my father bought another guitar, this time a no name classical and again, perhaps by sheer luck, it had decent action and it stayed in the front room well into the 90s until it was taken by an in-law (and it's still being played today). 

That’s one good thing about nylon string guitars; they tend to last. My point though is that nobody ever developed an attitude that it was a piece of crap and that we were lucky to do better later on. That no name classical did what a good guitar should; it stuck around and gave people a lot of fun and pleasure. I remember more than a few evenings watching a boring TV show and just playing it while watching. 

Later on in the early seventies came a pair of, shall we say, name guitars? Those were an Aria 12 string and an odd Bell shaped Danelectro 12, both strung like sixes, the latter  of which turned out to be quite the collectors item. Both were what one could fondly call a “dual purpose” 12 string guitar. 

I remember open chords on the Danelectro having an absolutely beautiful chime and later on, after getting my first “real guitar,” I would think back about that Danelectro and realize that it probably was my first real guitar, not the Gibson. 

Later on I went back and identified some of those guitars like the Aria; I got the model number through a lot of research, by checking eBay ads, that sort of thing and eventually finding the Aria that I used.

The same with the Danelectro, which was a lot harder because the original model was a sunburst and with the one I had, somebody had painted it brown with what looked like fence paint or something and had begun using it as a 6-string. I only knew it was a Danelectro from the headstock and had to go by the body shape. I was eventually able to find the model which was a mid-60s Coral Bellzouki Sunburst Solid Body Electric 12 String.

There's no denying that Fenders and Gibsons had better construction and workmanship but frankly my first tele took a lot of work to make it playable. There was no automatic superiority with that particular telecaster compared to the earlier Bellzouki which was playable right from the start. 

In fact, that first Tele was where I first learned the concept of a “guitar that had to be set up first,” as opposed to many used guitars like the Danelectro which had survived careless treatment, were well played and considered good enough. The guitars that were crummy were quickly pushed out of sight, languishing in pawn shops, thrift stores and elsewhere. A lot of the guitars that circulated tended to be good, perhaps a survival of the fittest type thing.

The idea that you had to take this or that guitar to a shop to make it playable was a novel idea in the early 70s. Many of those budget guitars did play well enough at first when new and if you could get one, the attitude wasn't that it was something lousy. Particularly when you were a young person like me at the time, a teenager who was happy to get a playable electric guitar.

Whether such instruments were good or bad, pieces of junk, or whatever are labels reflecting modern attitudes projected back into the past, often influenced by their later worth or lack of, in the vintage market.

My memories of the Danelectro and Aria have always been good, which I looked on as first steps and in the case of the former, I've never heard a Danelectro reissue since that sounded as good as that Bellzouki.

These days a person might take a look at that now classic Dano and think, wow, I wish I had it now because I could sell it for a lot of money, or it would be a great collectors item. That thought ran through my mind later on but I always recognized that it was an attitude from a later era when many of those guitars became expensive collectors items.

A good example are mid-70s Fender Telecasters; at the time those were often called “icepick guitars” for the type of sound produced at a higher gain setting and one of many  complaints about the CBS era Fenders.

In 2026? Those Fenders are now highly sought after as vintage treasures worth thousands of dollars. That doesn't tell me that the guitars may have been misunderstood or unappreciated, but that perception is often more important than reality when it comes to guitars. Just like what happens when a celebrity endorses an instrument.

Also, my point isn't that many of those beginner guitars were superior to guitars made today. But, perhaps many of them, in their prime, were cherished instruments that made playing music possible for a young musician and deserved better fate than becoming sad and neglected hulks and twisted pieces of neglected wood. 

Probably the best thing that could have happened to many of these old cheap and no name brands was the rise of a secondary vintage market. They may not have the aura of prestige brands like Gibson but a little nostalgia combined with capitalism often restored a sense of appreciation for what they were and the memories associated with them, which as a rule were always a lot more good than bad.

Al Handa

July 21, 2026