Pacifica

Yamaha started the Pacifica line in 1990. The mass-market 112 family is usually dated to 1993. It’s a bolt-on guitar with a Stratocaster outline: alder body, maple neck, rosewood board, 22 frets, a vibrato bridge.

It is not a Stratocaster. Different factory, different pickups, different vibrato. It doesn’t pretend otherwise, and that’s to its credit. The Pacifica was Yamaha’s take on the Strat layout, and the 112 was the one priced for people just getting started.

Most guitars on this site were made famous by somebody. This one was made for somebody who hasn’t started yet.

The thing that makes the PAC112V work as a first guitar is the pickups. There’s a humbucker at the bridge, the thick, loud kind that sounds right with distortion. There are two single-coils in the middle and neck, the thinner, brighter kind you hear on clean funk and country and a thousand indie records. A five-way switch mixes them.

Then there’s a trick hiding in the tone knob. Pull it up and the humbucker splits into a single-coil, so the bridge gets thinner and brighter too. That means a beginner who doesn’t know yet whether they want to play punk or blues or church music can find out on the same guitar, without buying another one.

A first guitar has to be comfortable, or it goes back in the closet. The 112V gets a few quiet things right.

The neck has a satin finish instead of gloss, so your hand slides instead of sticking when it gets warm. The fingerboard is fairly flat, a 13¾-inch radius, a lot flatter than the rounded board on an old-style Strat, which makes bending a string a little less likely to choke the note. The scale is 25.5 inches, the same as a Strat, so the lessons and the videos all line up. The body is gloss alder, and the colors are the ones you’d want at fifteen: Sonic Blue, Vintage White, Old Violin Sunburst, black, natural.

None of that shows up in a photo. All of it shows up in whether somebody keeps playing.

The 112V is regular mass production, and Yamaha doesn’t say how many it has made. It isn’t a collector’s guitar, and it isn’t trying to be.

There’s a cheaper student model below it, the PAC012, with a mahogany body. There’s a maple-board version beside it. But the 112V is the one people mean.

It never got a famous player, and it never needed one. Its player is whoever opens the box next.