We reviewed the Yamaha Pacifica 112V, an affordable electric guitar with a lot of history.

 Check it out in our store here, available in Black, Natural Finish, Old Violin Sunburst, Sonic Blue, United Blue, and Vintage White.

Here’s the transcript of the review: 

Today, I’m going to be showing you the Yamaha Pacifica 112V by Yamaha and it’s the tried and true all-around guitar in my opinion. So I’ll be walking you through what this instrument has to offer for you.

Yamaha released this model of guitar the Pacifica in 1990, and the name sort of is reminiscent of the West Coast makers of Strat style guitars where this style sort of originated in California and on the west coast. So the Pacifica name sort of speaks to that legend of guitar we’re talking about – Strat styles with the bolt on neck and the double horn body and of course the whammy bar with the blocks tremolo and this guitar really captures all of that essence in a super diverse sort of all-arounder style guitar.

The Pacifica 112v features a bolt-on neck construction with 22 frets. The neck is made out of maple on the neck and then the fingerboard is rosewood, so really nice woods being used in this guitar. The body is also alder which is a great body material, so we’ve got a really nice selection of three different woods that are the main composition of the guitar. The joint on the neck is really typical for a Strat-style guitar. Provides you nice access all the way up to that 22nd fret and then we’ve got on the bridge a block style tremolo which is very nice. You can use the whammy bar in a few different ways with this guitar and then above the the nut we’ve got six our typical closed back tuners on the Yamaha.

Fret dressings are nice and I want to draw your attention to the electronics. This guitar has a really versatile pickup configuration. It can give you a lot of great variety for heavier music like rock with the humbucker or cleaned up tones for that sound funky and clean or bright with these two single coil pickups. So this is an HSS where the H is a humbucker and then the next two S’s are for the single coils. So that’s a really nice pickup configuration to have, it gives you a ton of tonal variety to choose from and you control those pickups using this five-way selector switch. There are five positions to choose from the first one all the way up is the neck position and then the next one position number two. It’s one of my favorites, it’s both of the single coils together which gives it a bit more of this “quacky” sound that sounds kind of unique to Strat- style guitars and it also cancels out a little bit of the hum that you get from single coil so this is a very popular position to use.

Position three is the middle pickup alone a nice warm single coil sound. Position number four is the middle pickup along with the humbucker together and then position five is just going to be the humbucker. Now there’s a secret feature of this guitar that is unique to the 112 and up in terms of the different Yamaha Pacificas, and that is the coil top which is controlled by pushing and pulling the toe knob in and out. And what that does is it actually splits up the coil in this humbucker to give you um the full humbucker sound or a single coil style sound so this gives you two options as to how to configure this humbucker and that is toggled by changing pushing and pulling this tone knob. Speaking of the knobs, you’ve got really nice knurled Chrome Dome knobs. I like the style of these knobs a lot and there’s the volume knob right here and then the tone knob here, which is your master volume, master tone and then the pickup um coil tap in the tone position and actually you can hear the change, right?

It sparkles a little bit, like it’s a little bit more um bright and some of the high-end tones come through a little bit more in my opinion, but the with the when you tap that coil like this compared to having it pushed in the down position you get a thicker more humbucker sound.

So right away, you can start to hear a little bit of the variety of sounds you can get out of this guitar, and that’s just using this pickup by itself. You know I like to come up here to the neck pickup too, it’s got a little bit more of a rounder sound very bright as well and then again the one of my favorites that I talked about is these two together the neck plus the middle position.

Smooth as can be, I mean the guitar sounds great. These pickups are actually El Nico 5 magnet pickups, they are the Yamaha El Nico 5 pickups the humbucker and the two single coils. It’s a slight upgrade from what you get with the 012, which is the ceramic pickups. I think these provide a little bit more output, a little bit more clarity in my opinion. El Nico 5 has been the standard for modern pickups for for a while now and it’s nice to see some some good sounding pickups in this guitar.

They really did a great job of making a guitar that is tried and true to the to the bolt-on style, the Strat style, it gives you all that versatility and familiarity that you want from a Strat style guitar and it really feels great this guitar does a great job of performing at its price point. It doesn’t set you back, you don’t need to take out the second mortgage to to get this guitar. it’s a really affordable but reliable instrument and I think it offers you a lot. I think Yamaha did a really good job again like they always do in my opinion of packing the right features into this guitar and giving the right attention to the quality in the right places – like the wood, the feel of the neck is really smooth and comfortable to play. It’s a c-shaped neck kind of similar to a Strat. It’s um kind of Speedy feeling it’s not overly chunky I think the neck is really really quite nice and sort of easy to to grasp. I think this would be a great guitar to learn on, it’s super comfortable but it also gives you that confidence to play comfortably and when you’re feeling comfortable like that it’s just easier to play like more difficult riffs and kind of push yourself to new places when you’re learning. So I’m finding this guitar super nice as an all-arounder and one that can hit a bunch of different tonal options and give you that comfortable playing experience definitely a strong advocate for the Pacifica you can check it out on FretZealot.com where it’s bundled with the Fret Zealot LED system. So one thing that Yamaha did a great job of as well would be providing this guitar in a variety of unique colors there’s six different colors that this guitar comes in comes in Black, Natural Finish, Old Violin Sunburst, Sonic Blue, United Blue, and Vintage White.”

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