I was the head of the design team that made the Saber, reverse-bodied Power, Maxxas, JEMs, Universe, RG series, etc. I did most of the basic shape and neck details with Bill Reim, who was Art Director then. He turned me onto the idea of making the prototype bodies from modelling clay. We had a great deal of fun doing them this way. It made it easy to change the shape quickly. Mace Bailey built nearly all the prototypes and Leon Reddell painted them. After a while, Bill Cummiskey got involved by giving suggestions for details, etc.
The first wooden prototype for the Saber had a body that went to a very sharp knife-edge. It was given to Leon Reddell (the painter at Hoshino). I lost touch with him, so I don’t know what happened to that body. I believe it was maroon color. The factory went crazy, as they knew the sharp edge would never survive! I was trying to achieve two points with the Saber- One was to have a body with the same basic dimensions as a Strat that looked much thinner and sleeker. Second was to make a guitar with the tone of a Gibson SG crossed with a Strat. My first good guitar was a 1969 Gibson SG Standard, which had a very cool open, sustaining tone. The second prototype Saber had an edge similar to the production guitar, with three pushbuttons to select pickups. It also had a pickguard sprayed black from the back. We hadn’t perfected the “tunnel” jack like the production Saber, so we flipped a standard Strat jack cup upside down, and sprayed it the color of the body. Fritz Katoh devised the cool jack tunnel later. The early production guitars had 3 mini switches (or 2, if it was an HH). We had trouble later getting a standard 5-way switch inside, as the guitar was very thin near the edges.
In the first attached picture from 1987, you can see part of the body of this guitar at the bottom of the picture with me (sitting, with black shirt), Bill Reim (sitting on left) and Bill Cummiskey (standing). We’re looking at one of the clay prototype bodies. The other two pictures on that page show two guys that Fuji Gen sent to Hoshino USA to assemble the 540 Project guitars- For a while in the USA, you could order either a Power, Saber or Radius body with your choice of the Wizard or two other neck shapes. The second attach photo shows Leon Reddell a the paint booth, the son of the owner of Fuji Gen buffing a Radius in Philadelphia, and Mace Bailey cutting out a body in the shop at the bottom of the page. These photos were taken in 1987 and used in the 1988 US Ibanez catalog.
Our West Coast distributors developed the Radius as part of an internal design competition between them and Hoshino in Phila. We didn’t like it when we first saw it- We thought it looked fat. Fritz Katoh liked both the Radius and the Saber, so Japan decided to produce both. Fritz did a lot of work to make the Radius look good in the production versions. Eventually, we modified the Radius design to make the Satriani models. We stopped calling the 540S the Saber, as Music Man began production again (After being out of business) and they planned to use the Sabre name again for their bass.
Rich Lasner