What’s up Gear Mortals, Trey Xavier here. On today’s edition of Gear Gods quality control, we’re gonna be taking a look at the 2019 Legator Ninja R Performance series multiscale 6 string guitar.
Legator Guitars is a brand that is in need of some serious PR damage control. They’ve come under a lot of fire in the past few years for their quality control and they are working to turn their public image around with this new crop of guitars. It’s my job to take a closer look at these guitars and let you know if they’ve succeeded or not.
This guitar has a burl top, ebony fretboard with staggered offset inlays, a painted maple 5 bolt neck, Grover tuners, Legator branded humbucker pickups and individual monorail bridges. The scale length is 27” on the low side to 25.5”.
The body on this guitar is impossibly thin. I love a nice light guitar so I’m very happy about that, I find thinner guitar bodies to be much more comfortable to play, and more ergonomic for a number of reasons. It’s super light and very comfortable to hold, and it came set up very well and plays great. The fan on this guitar is pretty large. 27”-25.5” is a spread of an inch and a half over 6 strings, a typical 7 string fan has that same spread so just know that if you’re looking at buying this guitar and you’re not really familiar with fanned frets, it will probably take a bit of getting used to. It does keep the string tension pretty much perfect across the fretboard which is very clutch.
I think the weakest part of this guitar is the pickups, I found them to be kinda thin and shrill sounding. If you’re a Patreon subscriber you have access to the DI tracks from the demo so you can run them through your rig at home if you like to test that out. This is a bit of a disappointment because comparably priced import guitars from Ibanez and LTD generally come stock with name-brand pickups AND locking tuners.
I’m also kinda confused by the weird decision to have the headstock be a slightly different shade of green from the body, it kind of looks like a mistake to me, but the website pictures of at least one other of these guitars leads me to believe it was intentional. The finish is of course an outrageous shade of neon green which you’re either gonna love or hate, but aside from the quasi-matching headstock, the finish looks real good – it’s a nice combination of having a bright color but also plenty of wood grain coming through, which is pretty impressive to me. I really don’t like the feel of this painted black neck, it gives the whole guitar a cheaper feel than just a natural finish would have, but they tell me that’s actually going to be changed on this model.
Legator has for sure come a long way since I last reviewed their offerings. The issue I had with their in-line headstock not having straight string pull has been remedied with this new, sleeker shape, and this axe is a big improvement quality-wise over some of the previous guitars I’ve played. However, I think they’ve still managed to overestimate their market value a bit. The pricing on this guitar is around $800 direct from Legator, which in my opinion is a bit too much to pay for an import guitar with very mediocre Legator-branded pickups that you’re pretty likely going to want to upgrade, and no locking tuners.
This video was made possible by our Patreon subscribers this week, who get their name in the credits as well as access to download the raw mix tracks for the demo song and the final version of the song, behind the scenes blooper reels and more at patreon.com/geargods. If you haven’t already, mash that subscribe button and smack the bell for more reviews and original content and I’ll see you real soon!
