I’m a huge fan of guitars with nice wood grain and beautiful designs and paint jobs. I realize this doesn’t add to the technical aspect of the guitar but I’ll admit, I like nice looking things 
. One of my most favorite quilted maple guitars is the Ibanez S470 DXQM.
I first came across one of these in the early 2000s when I was jamming at a studio with another band. One of their members had one and it caught my eye immediately. I had bought an Ibanez S470 a few years earlier and really loved it, but the styles of music we were playing shortly after I bought it pushed me toward another guitar and it started to collect dust. It was an all black model with a beautiful contoured body that was really comfortable to play.
After the Ibanez S470 dx qm that was in the studio caught my eye I asked its owner if I good pick away for a while. Because I had only played my own S470 a few times I quickly remembered how much I loved it at the time. The Ibanez wizard neck took my fret hand and turned it into a shred monster in minutes. This was why I had originally bought the damn guitar and now I was kicking myself for neglecting it for so long.
Well, back to why this particular guitar caught my eye. The finish was simply amazing; a red guitar with the grain of maple that has been cut with a technique they call quilted maple. The grain of the maple cap has a swirled look to it and gives the paint job some serious depth.
We were starting to play some more rounded music at the time, not as much high gain metal as we used to and now the versatility of the Ibanez S 470 dxqm was the perfect guitar and I had remembered why I originally bought it. I was playing this model for about an hour when its owner asked me how I liked it because he was selling it because he had many other Ibanez guitars. Obviously I liked it and we ended up making a deal . Now I own two.
The S470 dxqm is just like its plain finished brothers. It has the wizard neck, all mahogany body (but with a maple cap), 2 medium output humbuckers and 1 single coil in the middle position and Ibanez’ classic coil tap wiring. The thin edges really cut down on the weight and thick area from the bridge through the pickups to neck gives the extra oomph in the sustain and tone dept. The Ibanez S470 dxqm is by far my favorite of all my guitar instruments now and I’m glad I was reintroduced to the model.