“What’s Japanese for shameless?” Tosin Abasi's Animals As Leaders bandmate lambasts Ibanez's new Alpha guitar design

Ibanez’s all-new electric guitar model, the Alpha, is gunning for the currently bustling progressive and metal guitar markets.

Yet one of the scene’s biggest players, Javier Reyes of Animals as Leaders, has taken issue with the design, as comparisons to two other guitars – both designed in collaboration with his bandmate, Tosin Abasi – intensify.

Available exclusively in seven-string and eight-string formats, the Alpha seemingly continues where their signature guitar collaboration that never was with Abasi left off. Abasi spent many years as an Ibanez artist before launching his own brand, Abasi Concepts, in 2017.

Some on social media are claiming they assumed the Alpha was a new Abasi Concepts design and there appear to be some notable similarities between the lower horn and cutaway bottom of the Alpha’s silhouette and those of Abasi’s Larada model.

Then there’s the Kaizen, which Abasi built in partnership with Ernie Ball, and appears to have offered some influence on the top horn side of the Alpha body shape.

Indeed, if you simply splice together the top of the Kaizen and the bottom of the Larada in Photoshop, you get a result remarkably similar to the Alpha’s outline...

That’s all seemingly prompted Abasi’s co-guitarist Reyes to comment a thumbs down emoji in response to Ibanez’s Instagram post launching the guitar, before asking, “What’s Japanese for shameless?”

When pressed for more from other Instagram users, Reyes responded: “I’m just another Yelp reviewer like you. I respect and appreciate your opinion, like my band members' contributions to my life. But be smarter. If you can’t discern that [the designs are very similar]. That’s not on me. You should be smarter, or don’t be a Yelp reviewer.”

Yelp ratings aside, the fact that the Alpha was also launched on Tosin Abasi’s birthday was also not lost on some of his fans.

However, other commenters on Ibanez’s post have rightly pointed out how shape copying is no new fad in guitar design. Strat and Tele shapes are incredibly commonplace because, legally speaking, those guitar designs have been deemed generic.

It’s a slightly different story for V- and Z-shaped guitars, with Gibson winning its trademark dispute with Dean, as it successfully argued that those shapes were its intellectual property.

The Alpha, meanwhile, creates a new outline, albeit by splicing familiar shapes together and tweaking them slightly, which is fairly common practice when it comes to the more generic outlines.

Time (and, we imagine, some IP lawyers) will tell if that’s enough for Ibanez to avoid breaching patents or trademarks held by either Abasi Concepts or Ernie Ball, but it seems unlikely the firm would not have investigated such a possibility prior to the launch.

At the time of writing, Abasi has not issued a response to Ibanez’s first big launch of 2026. His last Instagram post was from the day of the drop, celebrating his 43rd birthday.

In a recent interview, however, he teased the future of Abasi Concepts, with the guitarist set to expand his roster of electric guitars and pedals in new ways.

Meanwhile, we suspect the debate about whether the guitar's design cuts too close to the bone of Abasi's standout designs will continue to divide opinion.

• Guitar World reached out to Ibanez, Ernie Ball, and representatives for Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes for their response, but had not received comment at the time of publication.