Yamaha Pacifica 112V

82 SUMMER 2007
YAMAHA PACIFICA 112V
£199
ELECTRICS GUITARIST INTERACTIVE
W
e usually apply the word ‘classic’
to a handful of electric guitars,
most of which were designed
before 1965 and now cost thousands of
pounds. We’d be a laughing stock, then,
if we used the same word in reference to
a £199 electric guitar from Yamaha. Well,
laugh away because the Yamaha Pacifi ca
112 is indeed a modern classic.
The 112 is the most successful Yamaha
ever by quite a margin and the company
guesstimated that, by its 10th birthday,
some 60,000 had been sold in the UK
alone. Ken Dapron from YGD (Yamaha’s
USA design and custom shop centre)
reckoned annual sales worldwide
numbered around 25-30,000. It’s
undoubtedly one of the best-selling
electrics in the history of the instrument –
certainly outside of Fender/Squier and
Gibson/Epiphone – and even has the
dubious honour of being copied, originally
by the UK’s Vintage brand and now by
numerous far eastern factories.
The obvious question is, if the 112 is
such a brilliant guitar, why did Yamaha
feel the need to upgrade it this year?
“Basically, we just wanted to raise the
specifi cation,” boasts Yamaha’s Julian
Ward. “You see, the market has changed
a lot in the past 14 years and when
companies market a product today, the
number of features is really important –
whether you need them or not. We
thought we could up the stakes with the
112. It was always about being the best
guitar at £199 but what we can do now is
slightly different from what we could do
14 years ago. In essence the guitar didn’t
need to change but we felt there was
room for a little improvement.”
The major market change, of course,
has been the virtual tsunami of low-end
guitars from China – you can easily buy
one of many Strat copies for about the
same as a Chinese takeaway for four.
“The popularity of the 112 defi nitely
dipped a little when the price of an entry
level electric seemed to drop to £100, as
opposed to around £200, when we
started to see Chinese guitars fl ooding our
market. But to be honest, the 112 is very
established and didn’t take a massive hit.
“We didn’t want to drop the price of the
112 because we believe after the
romance people had initially with those
entry level guitars they’re now realising
that the unbranded low-quality
instruments aren’t a good place to start
and are coming back to a branded
instrument that offers better consistency.
I think people are realising the difference
and don’t have a problem spending more
to get a more serious instrument.”
In fact Yamaha has shot itself in the
foot a little. By upgrading the 112 as
we’ve described it’s made the existing
412V seem rather expensive at £299 and
it’s now technically discontinued.
But, consistency remains a byword at
Yamaha. “Across all the products we have
the drive to produce things of consistent
quality and value – but not in sense of
being cheap,” continues Ward. “We have
incredibly tight quality control. In fact
when we’ve used OEM factories to make
instruments for us, it hasn’t always
worked – very few OEM factories want to
deal with us because of our strict QC.
With our own factories, if there’s an issue
with a product, in two steps we can get to
the manager in the factory and we can fi x
it. We also have local quality control here
in the UK – not for every guitar, that’s not
necessary, but certainly when there’s a
new model we will double-check the
initial samples until we’re happy that the
production has been really sorted out.”
The Pacifi ca 112 remains a good
example. It was fi rst made in Yamaha’s
Taiwanese factory. Production slowly
moved to Indonesia, around the year
2000, and today that’s where the model is
exclusively made. “Nobody has ever
noticed a difference – to the really trained
eye you might notice a little difference but
it’d be very, very minor,” says Ward.
To celebrate the success of the 112 –
and a big part of that is down to Guitarist’s
readers – look out for a very special
competition in issue 295 of Guitarist.
Later in the year we’ll be travelling to
Indonesia to check out where, and exactly
how, the 112 and numerous other
Yamaha instruments are made.
Pacifi ca heights
Guitarist looks at the impact of the Pacifi ca 112 – past and present…
by Dave Burrluck
Left: The Original Pacifi ca 112
Below: the 2007 version
The natural fi nish
showed off the
Pacifi ca’s solid wood
construction
GIT293.rev_pacifica 82 16/7/07 12:08:27