New member... and RR!

[Fetus]

Hey guys, thought I should say hi as I'm a new addition to the board here...and coincidently I have a new addition to my Jackson family(small as it is)

I play mostly metal & have been in a few different bands, including black metal...and now a band called Battalion...as well as a Manowar esque band called METAL and another more classic/power metal band. And I wonder where all my time goes! I'll still have a jam with anyone playing blues and rock stuff as well. I play a Jackson performer kelly with a Seymour Duncan TB-5 Custom in the bridge & a '59 in the neck through a Boss GT-8.

Anyway I just bought an import Randy Rhoads V. I read through all the serial number threads etc while I was awaiting activation on the forum, and I think it's made in Japan.

Here's the specs:
Dark metallic grey finish, 22 frets, bolt on neck, sharkfin inlays, rosewood board, jackson double locking floyd bridge (with trem bar screw collar design), front pickguard mounted electronics (2 vol 1 tone) and stock jackson pups. sn 9605454

I thought it might be a RR3 but the stock Jackson pups are throwing me off identifying this guitar as I thought they all came with duncan designed pickups... was there a time when the X series maybe had front mounted electronics?

Any help would be appreciated!

Danny

[Sunbane]

Hello and welcome to the JCF!

What you have there, is an RR-X. I had an identical one, except mine was darker (almost black). The "Euro X-series" were guitars made in Japan for the European market, and were also sold in NZ and Australia. I don't know exactly what years they were made, but I believe it was a rather brief period. My RR-X had serial 9611104, and was dated to 1998 inside the neck pocket. By the look of the serial, yours seems to be an earlier one.

The body wood is poplar. The guitars that came in transparent finishes also had a flame maple veneer on the front. Scale length is 25.5 inches (650 mm). The neck is a maple neck with a rosewood fretboard (obviously) and plastic inlays. The neck profile was a little too thin for me, and would make my hand cramp up after a bit of playing. I also noticed that the neck tended to shift a lot with temperature and humidity changes, so I had to get a truss rod wrench and learn to adjust the neck. A thin-walled 7 mm socket wrench will fit.

The trem is the Jackson JT-580LP. While it does a decent enough job, it is known to wear out after a few years of constant playing. I ruined the knife edges on mine just by adjusting the bridge height while the guitar was strung up and tuned to pitch. I replaced it with a Schaller Floyd, and that was a significant improvement.

The pickups are Jackson's own. I have no idea what model they may be, as mine didn't have any kind of numbers on them. I believe that they are the same that came in the Performer series. Anyway, the pickups are pretty much just junk. While they have a decent output level, they are just way too muddy to use for palm muted riffing on the heavy strings (they will just produce a droning noise instead of crisp riffs). I put EMG pickups in my guitar (EMG-85 at the bridge and EMG-58 at the neck), and that made it into a killer sounding metal axe!

[Fetus]

Cool, thanks for the info!
So I have a RR-X from the Euro-X series...
I'm glad I know this because I thought the wood might be alder, now I can pick some pups for it.
It really is almost black it's just the flash that makes it look like that
You are right about the neck being thin! But I find it really comfortable to play live.

What's the difference between my guitar & a RR-3? Or the current X series? Better or worse?

[Sunbane]

I would guess that it's about equivalent to an RR-3 of the same time period - the only major differences being the pickups, hardware color and the jack location (the RR-3 has a strat-style jack plate in the upper wing). Apart from that, they were made of the same sort of wood (the RR-3 used to be made of poplar back then as well), with the same type of hardware, at the same factory.

It doesn't quite compete with a new RR-3, since those have been upgraded with hardened steel trem plates and real Duncans for 2006. The RR-3 has also come with an alder body for the last few years, but the poplar wood in your RR-X should sound very similar.

The Euro-X series is a bit of an oddity, and it's very hard to find info about it. I have investigated it as well as I can, and found that there were also a DK-X, an AT-X (I believe both with a H-S-H pickup config), and a KE-X with dual humbuckers. I'm unsure if there ever was a KV-X. Finishes included (but may not have been limited to) Metallic Black, Transparent Red, Transparent Green and Transparent Purple.

How does it play by the way? In the end, that's what really counts!

[guitarsjb]

Nice guitar!! Welcome aboard

[zebutcher]

Welcome.

[Fetus]

The guy I got it off had it set up SO poorly, the floyd was pulling right down against the cavity and the strings are even wound onto the keys in alternate directions! I got the bridge floating properly and the neck is straight with minimal fret wear. I just need to swap out the pickups and change the strings from 9's to 10's and it'll be rocking!