Ibanez KRYS10 Scott LePage Signature: The Other Half of Polyphia’s Sound

His bandmate’s signature guitar carries a fingerboard inlay named as a direct tribute to Steve Vai. Scott LePage’s doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean Vai is absent from the story — he’s just present in a different way. Ask LePage about his guitar heroes and Vai and Joe Satriani both show up, alongside Stevie Ray Vaughan, as formative influences on his own playing. Where Tim Henson built his signature line around a visible homage, LePage’s Ibanez KRYS10 carries those same influences somewhere quieter: in the bluesy pentatonic phrasing and hybrid picking that make his half of Polyphia’s guitar interplay sound different from his bandmate’s.

Polyphia’s breakthrough moment — the guitar play-through video for “Impassion” going viral off their 2013 “Inspire” EP — put both guitarists’ technical ability on display simultaneously, but it was the contrast between their two approaches that gave the band its lasting identity rather than either player’s individual chops alone. More than a decade later, that contrast is now built directly into hardware: two Ibanez signature lines, engineered around two different sets of instincts, that happen to share a body platform and not much else.

From SLM10 to KRYS10: LePage’s Own Two-Guitar History

LePage’s signature line is shorter and simpler than Henson’s three-guitar arc, but it follows a similar pattern of Ibanez refining an initial design based on real-world feedback. His first signature, the SLM10, launched in 2019 alongside Henson’s THBB10. It was a visually distinct instrument — a flame maple top finished in transparent red over gold hardware, gold pole pieces, and a black pickguard, built on an American basswood body with a roasted maple neck. Electronically, it ran DiMarzio True Velvet single coils alongside a custom-designed DiMarzio humbucker dubbed the INGO, built specifically to give LePage the range he needed across Polyphia’s stylistic swings.

The KRYS10 replaced the SLM10 in late 2022, launching the same day as Henson’s TOD10 and following the same broader shift across Ibanez’s Polyphia-adjacent signature line: swapping passive DiMarzio pickups for active Fishman Fluence units built to LePage’s own specification. The two guitars share their basic AZ-derived platform and launch date, but the KRYS10 charts its own path in wood choice, hardware color, and — most importantly — pickup voicing.

The Guitarist Behind the Guitar

LePage picked up guitar around age ten, taught first by his father and later by a neighbor he’s credited by name in interviews as a formative influence. Where Henson’s early training was classical (violin from age three), LePage’s foundation was more conventionally rock-focused from the start, gradually incorporating modes and arpeggios that would become a structural signature of Polyphia’s sound. His own influences shifted over time from a metal-heavy diet toward a bluesier sensibility — Stevie Ray Vaughan sits alongside Satriani and Vai on his list of guitar heroes, a lineage that shows up in his playing as a preference for slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs, and pentatonic-based phrasing layered with tapping and hybrid picking.

That approach sits in deliberate contrast to Henson’s. LePage has described the difference himself: Henson tends to chord out his melodies and compress ideas into a single guitar part, while LePage prefers to spread his own parts out to create more dimension against Henson’s. It’s a division of labor that’s defined Polyphia’s guitar interplay since the band’s earliest instrumental work went viral, and it’s a useful lens for understanding why the KRYS10’s pickup voicing — built around vintage PAF and hot-rodded tones rather than Henson’s nylon-string-adjacent clean voice — reflects a genuinely different musical personality rather than just a cosmetic variant of the same guitar.

A Working Guitarist’s Toolkit

Before and alongside his signature guitars, LePage’s studio and stage gear has ranged far wider than most fans might expect from a two-guitarist band. He’s used a black Ibanez AZ seven-string, various AZ six-strings, an Ibanez RG8 eight-string, an Ibanez S-series model, and — for the deliberately heavier material on “Bloodbath” — an Ibanez Iron Label Xiphos, a guitar he’s credited with directly shaping how aggressive that particular track ended up sounding. For 2018’s “Inspire,” he reached for a Jackson Pro Dinky DK2M rather than an Ibanez at all, a reminder that even an artist with his own signature line doesn’t limit himself to endorsed gear when a specific track calls for something else. That range reflects Polyphia’s own restless genre-hopping across albums — from the metalcore-adjacent “Inspire” EP through the pop and EDM excursions of “Muse” and “Renaissance,” into the trap and hip-hop-inflected “New Levels New Devils” and “Remember That You Will Die,” the album that includes “Ego Death” and features Henson’s Vai collaboration.

LePage has also been vocal about how much Polyphia’s sound depends on outside collaborators, name-checking guitarists like Jason Richardson, Ichika Nito, Mateus Asato, and Yvette Young as writing partners who’ve pushed the band’s sound in different directions over the years — a collaborative streak that runs parallel to, but distinct from, Henson’s own high-profile guest slot with Vai.

It’s worth noting that LePage keeps a noticeably lower public profile than his bandmate — gear trackers researching his rig have specifically remarked on how rarely he appears on camera compared to Henson’s prolific YouTube presence, which makes signature-guitar releases like the KRYS10 one of the more reliable windows into his actual playing preferences. Premier Guitar’s Rig Rundown series has covered his setup directly, walking through his Ibanez and DiMarzio-era signature gear in detail — a rarer piece of press for LePage than the steady stream of features built around Henson.

Inside the KRYS10

Where the TOD10 uses basswood, the KRYS10 is built on an ash body — a deliberate choice for a brighter, more resonant tone with what Ibanez’s own materials describe as pleasant midrange “pop,” a fitting match for LePage’s more pentatonic, blues-rock-inflected lead style. The neck is a roasted maple item in the same AZ Oval “C” profile shared across the Henson/LePage signature family, topped with an ebony fingerboard carrying offset white block inlays and a dedicated “KRYS” inlay at the 12th fret — a visual identity distinct from the Tree of Death pattern on Henson’s guitars, gold hardware and an ivoroid pickguard and binding giving the whole instrument a warmer, more vintage-leaning look than the TOD10’s cooler-toned finishes.

The pickups are a pair of active Fishman Fluence Scott LePage Custom Series humbuckers, and their switching logic works differently from Henson’s setup. Rather than a five-way blade switch paired with a push/pull tone knob, the KRYS10 uses a three-way pickup selector alongside a separate three-way voicing lever mounted near the lower cutaway. Voice 1 puts both pickups into a calibrated Vintage PAF mode. Voice 2 splits the two pickups into complementary roles — a clear, airy chime voice at the neck paired with a hot-rodded, more aggressive tone at the bridge. Voice 3 shifts both pickups into single-coil territory, with a clear vintage-voiced single coil at the neck and a slightly overwound single coil at the bridge. Combined with the three-way pickup selector, that gives players a genuinely wide tonal range from what looks, at a glance, like a simple two-switch control layout — fewer total combinations than Henson’s eight-way system, but arguably a more intuitive set of choices for a player who described his own approach as instinctive rather than clinical.

Family Tree

The Scott LePage series consists of just two guitars to date: the discontinued SLM10 (2019-2022) and the current KRYS10 (2022-present), both built in Indonesia as part of Ibanez’s Premium tier. That’s a notably smaller family than Henson’s four-guitar THBB10/TOD10N/TOD10/TOD70 lineup, reflecting either a more conservative approach to signature expansion on LePage’s part or simply less commercial pressure to diversify — either way, it means secondhand SLM10 units represent the only real alternative voicing within LePage’s own signature line, rather than a wider tiered range to choose from.

Full Specifications

Dialing In LePage’s Tone

LePage’s rig philosophy tracks closely with Henson’s — both run digital modelers rather than traditional pedalboards — but the specific gear differs. LePage has favored the Fractal Audio AX8 as his live processor, running it into an Orange Dark Terror head used purely as a power amp rather than for its own tone-shaping character, the same broad approach Henson takes with his own Orange Dark Terror. For players trying to approximate his tone without a Fractal unit, here are three starting points:

Recipe 1: Vintage PAF Rhythm

Voice 1 (both pickups in Vintage PAF mode), middle pickup selector position, moderate gain, generous midrange. This is the calibrated, balanced tone closest to a traditional humbucker-loaded guitar — a good starting point for Polyphia’s more classic-rock-influenced passages.

Recipe 2: Bluesy Lead

Voice 2, bridge pickup selected for its hot-rodded voice. Moderate-to-high gain, slight midrange boost, light compression to smooth out pentatonic bends and slides — the setting that leans hardest into LePage’s Stevie Ray Vaughan-influenced side.

Recipe 3: Clean Single-Coil Texture

Voice 3, neck pickup for its vintage single-coil voice. Low gain, bright EQ, useful for the more delicate fingerstyle and tapping-based sections that sit alongside Polyphia’s heavier material.

KRYS10 vs. TOD10: Same Platform, Different Voice

Beyond the pickup voicing already covered, the two guitars diverge in wood choice (ash vs. basswood), hardware color (gold vs. chrome), and trim (ivoroid binding and pickguard vs. a cleaner, binding-free look on the TOD10). Both launched the same day, share the same AZ Oval “C” neck profile and Gotoh T1502 tremolo, and are built at the same Indonesian facility as part of Ibanez’s Premium tier. If you’ve read our look at the TOD10, the KRYS10 is best understood as its structural twin with a different pickup voicing philosophy and a warmer, more vintage-leaning aesthetic — a fitting physical expression of the two guitarists’ differing musical instincts within the same band.

The visual contrast matters as much as the tonal one. Henson’s TOD10 leans into a cooler, more contemporary look — Classic Silver and Metallic Mauve finishes with no binding and a Tree of Death inlay pattern that reads as deliberately modern. The KRYS10’s gold hardware, ivoroid binding, and block inlays pull in the opposite direction, toward a more traditional, almost vintage-humbucker-guitar aesthetic despite running the same cutting-edge active pickup technology under the hood. It’s a small but telling detail: even the guitars’ appearances encode the same “chord-it-out versus spread-it-out” contrast LePage describes in his and Henson’s playing styles.

Buying Guide

The KRYS10 makes sense for players chasing a brighter, more classic-humbucker-adjacent tone within Polyphia’s genre-blending style, rather than Henson’s cooler, more nylon-adjacent clean voice. If you’re deciding between the two purely based on tonal character rather than loyalty to one guitarist, ash-body brightness and Vintage PAF voicing point toward the KRYS10, while basswood’s flatter, more midrange-forward voice and the nylon-surrogate clean tone point toward the TOD10. Players specifically drawn to LePage’s earlier SLM10 sound should note that guitar’s DiMarzio-loaded, more single-coil-forward voicing is genuinely different from the KRYS10’s Fishman Fluence set — the SLM10 occasionally surfaces on the used market for those chasing that specific earlier tone.

Budget-conscious buyers should also factor in that both KRYS10 and TOD10 sit at the same price point, so the decision genuinely comes down to tonal and aesthetic preference rather than cost. Players who gig frequently and want simpler onstage switching may also lean toward the KRYS10’s more straightforward three-way-plus-three-way control layout over the TOD10’s push/pull tone knob, which can be less intuitive to reach for quickly mid-song, particularly for players accustomed to a standard three-way or five-way switch without a secondary function layered on top.

Ownership Notes

Owner feedback on the KRYS10 is broadly positive, with the Fishman Fluence pickup set drawing particular praise for its versatility from players trying active pickups for the first time. One recurring practical complaint involves the included gig bag, which multiple owners across different retailers describe as too thin to offer meaningful protection for a guitar in this price range — budgeting for a proper case separately is a reasonable expectation rather than an optional upgrade. A more technical issue flagged by at least one experienced owner concerns the Gotoh T1502 bridge’s 10.5mm string spacing, which is proprietary to the Ibanez AZ platform; replacement saddles aren’t widely available through normal channels, meaning any bridge damage may require a service center visit rather than a simple DIY part swap. On the positive side, the Gotoh MG-T locking tuners consistently draw praise from owners making the switch from traditional tuning machines, cutting string-change time significantly compared to non-locking setups. Several reviewers coming from Floyd Rose or other double-locking tremolo backgrounds specifically noted the KRYS10’s simpler two-point synchronized tremolo and locking tuner combination as a welcome change of pace, reducing the fiddly setup process typically associated with double-locking systems while still delivering reliable tuning stability. Overall satisfaction across retailer reviews is high, with multiple owners describing the guitar’s handling, pickup versatility, and finish as decisive factors that won them over compared to other Ibanez models they’d considered instead.

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