I hope your hot-rodded Ibanez serves you well.
 
	Sometime around 91 or 92, my main guitar was a Squire Strat, and it was a pretty mediocre instrument.  Partly at the urging of a young guitar-shop employee who was a brilliant guitarist (we were briefly in a garage band together*), I bought an RG550.  Within a few years, it was pretty obvious that there is really nothing about my personality or my preferred styles of music that would correlate with me playing a pointy guitar with a mirrored pickguard.  It was forgotten and packed away for a loooong time, and I may have even put it on craigslist for a few hundred dollars at one point.  
 
	But I'm glad I still own it.  I cleaned it up and set it up a year or two ago, and it just plays like butter and sounds *really* good.  And this absurdly-styled $800 guitar is one of the best-engineered guitars I've ever owned (fit, finish, tuning, intonation, rock-solid electronics with no crackle or buzz).  I don't need to own an HSS Strat, because this thing does that bridge humbucker thing about as well as it can be done.  
 
	
 
	 
 
	*I was invited to sit in with his band.  They had their own room with a PA in a rehearsal complex, which seemed really big-time to me.  First practice:  Everyone in the band consumed eyebrow-raising amounts of drugs and alcohol.  But I liked them and they were really good musicians, and I thought maybe I just caught them on a wild night.  They suggested a few songs for me to learn, and asked me to sing on some things.  So I did my best to rehearse and learn them, and then I went back the next week.  The second practice was even more of a rumshpringa than the first one.  So I said what everyone says when they're quiet-quitting a garage band:  "Guys, I have a thing next week and I'm not gonna make it."