I recently sat down and spent some quality time with the Epiphone Les Paul Standard Florentine PRO blah blah blah.  I say blah because there’s more crap after all of that in the title.  This is an Epiphone Les Paul and it sells for around $599, putting it in the top third of the Epiphone line.  Epiphone makes some great budget guitars, but this ain’t one of them.  It’s not a “budget” guitar because on this site budget means $500 or less.  It is, however, a great guitar.  With an asterisk.

This guitar gets high marks for looks – it really looks fantastic.  I believe it comes in five or six different bursts, but I played the one in the picture.  Some might get turned off by the f holes – they do look weird on a Les Paul.  They bother you or they don’t.  I think they’ll bother a lot of people, but I don’t mind them.

I was very surprised at how playable this guitar is.  I say very because I’ve played a billion Epi Les Pauls.  I own one.  But this guitar seemed to have a quality to it, in terms of playability.  It’s hard to quantify what that certain thing is, but it’s like porn – you know it when you see it.  Ever notice how no one ever says “porn music?”  They ALWAYS say “Cheesy Porn Music.”  This guitar is not porn music, but you could play such music on it if you so desired.

Now I’ve got a mental image of Ron Jeremy in my head.  There are some things you can never un-see.  Dammit!  On with the review.  I fell in love with this guitar and didn’t want to stop playing it.  If you’ve ever played jazz on a Les Paul, you should check this guitar out.  You might really love it.  It’s got a warm quality to it.  Well, except for the fact that the pickups are utter dog poop.

That’s the asterisk.  To my ears the pickups were muddy and lacked detail.  The guitar succeeds in spite of them.  They’re not really dog poo.  But there’s no way in hell I’d buy this guitar and not swap out the pickups.  A set of GFS pickups would improve this guitar a lot for not a lot of money, and a set of Seymour Duncan pickups would make this thing killer.    Epiphone gives these pickups an epic name – the ProBucker.  They make them very carefully in a factory.  I guess they read them poetry while they’re in a hot wax bath.  I guess some people like these pickups.  I am not some people.  These suck.

Great guitar.  BUT I will not recommend this guitar as a budget guitar because it’s not.  However, this is on my used watch list.  Sadly there won’t be too many of these on the used market locally, because they’re not made and sold in massive quantities.