If you try and buy a guitar and you have anything approaching long hair you will more than likely be proffered a 'eavy metal guitar wiv a great new whammy bar'. And I have long hair, so it came as little surprise when I was given this to review.

Fairly invariably 'eavy metal guitars come in three basic types: The Strat copy, The flying-V, and The Explorer and the Washburn RR-12V is no exception. There's nothing really that radical about the design, known as 'Shark Fin', as Grover Jackson has been making them for years and they're not that far removed from the original Gibson Flying-V shape. Once you get over the problem of not being able to balance the thing on your knee and have adjusted the strap so it hangs around below your crotch and you begin to play it, the first thing you come across is the width of the neck. It feels HUGE. Everyone's favourite joke about a neck like a tree trunk is in this case very true though it's very comfortable and quite playable despite it's size and has a very nice finish in satin black that disguises whatever wood the neck is made of. The fretboard is rosewood which is also very nice and gives you a good grip on the neck. Good for 'burning the frets' so I'm told by a friend with a Black Sabbath addiction and hands like a gorilla.

Right onto the next bit... the body. This is... er... a bit spikey... er... and very white. As I've said it doesn't look a lot different from your average flying-V except one horn is slightly shorter and more angular than the other. This makes playing up at the top of the neck really easy, especially for those 'screaming licks' so I'm told. Apart from easy access to the top frets the shape doesn't do a lot for me but that's down to personal taste (or lack of it), but it is very well balanced and sits really nicely wherever you decide to wear it though I can't see many buyers hanging it any higher than their ankles.

The pickup selector however is not as run of the mill as the body shape. Instead of the usual five way switch it has three on/off switches that give you a couple more sounds that you wouldn't normally have. Being able to turn the guitar off between numbers is a good feature and there is almost no hum from the guitar when it's turned off. The positioning could have been a bit better because being positioned directly below the 'whammy bar' (more of that later) which makes quick pick-up changes very difficult and Pete Townsend type flourishes/windmill poses really dodgy, or so I'm told by a friend with a Black Sabbath addiction and one and a half bloodied hands like a gorilla. Even so it's a good idea but a little cumbersome. Like all the hardware it is finished in shiny black and is really hard to scratch.

The pick-up configuration is the two single coil one humbucker pattern which seems to be the most popular set up on this type of guitar and incorporates a coil splitter in the form of a push/pull volume control. The pick-ups are all fairly powerful and have a warm tone but couldn't deliver the big American HM sound that it was obviously designed for. The coil splitter was a bit of a disappointment with the sound on the bridge pickup not noticeably changing that much at low volume but when 'cranked-up' is a lot more trebly and has a much more cutting edge. Overall the pickups are pretty good with a wide range of sounds available at the flick of the switch(es).

The tremelo arm/wang bar/whammy bar etc. is brilliant. No matter how much racing car gear changes or diving stukka noises I could not get the damn thing out of tune to any discernible degree and this was long after I had killed the strings off. The workings of it are a mystery to me as no handbook was provided and as I'm not the world's premier DIY man I didn't take it apart. Apparently it works with a torsion bar rather than the spring/pivot system which goes over a series of rollers rather than being held in place with clamps which is the reason that strings are difficult to break. The nut lock on the guitar is pretty standard with one lock for each pair of strings which basically means it's a bitch to change strings quickly but that's not really a problem considering how hard it is to break them in the first place.

All in all it's a good guitar with a couple of minor faults which would probably be overcome once you'd got used to it but at £560 I don't really think that it's exceptionally good value. It does have a very rock sound though there are other guitars in this end of the market that do the same job a lot more cheaply especially when you could pick up a Les Paul or a Strat for a lot less than £560. If you are determined to have one then you probably know what you're after and this does deliver the goods in most areas that it was designed to cover. The sustain's good, it's nice and light, easy to play and it costs a lot less than the Grover Jackson equivalent. Looks great too or so I'm told by a friend with a Black Sabbath addiction, hands like a gorilla and a white stick.

WASHBURN RR-12V: £560