I’m a big Les Paul fan. I own two Gibson Les Pauls and two Epiphone Les Pauls. Probably because I grew up watching guys like Ace Frehley and Elliot Easton play them. Paul Stanley had that dumb looking Firebird (sorry, Firebird fans) while Ace had the cool smokin’ (literally) Les Paul.
My very first electric was a Kent Les Paul copy. I also had a Hondo II Les Paul copy at one point. Eventually I got an Epiphone Les Paul, and eventually a couple of low end Gibson Les Pauls (50’s and 70’s Tribute series.) My red Gibson Les Paul sounds better than any other humbucking guitar that I own. There’s just two problems with it. The G string doesn’t like to stay in tune, and it digs into my ribs.
I’ve been wanting to play the $450 ESP LTD EC-256 for a while now, and today I finally got a chance. It’s a budget guitar ($500 or less), AND it’s got a tummy cut so it doesn’t dig into your ribs. But after playing one, would I want one?
Not really. But the reason why isn’t exactly fair. Let’s talk about this guitar…
The Good
The finish on the model I played was flawless. It felt good because of the belly cut. It had nice jumbo frets and I liked the neck profile, which felt pretty fast. A good looking guitar.
The Bad
The sound was… well, I’ve yet to find a new sub $500 humbucker guitar where I loved the pickups. I wasn’t impressed with these. If I bought one of these guitars, I’d swap the pickups. I mean, a really good humbucker costs between $99 and $129, so a pair would run $200 to $250, which is half the price (or more) of the guitar. You can’t expect more, at this price range.
The Ugly
Well… the fret ends on the guitar I played were BAD. They were sticking out of the side of the neck. You can blame quality control, or the climate of the warehouse this thing sat in, or you could blame Santa Claus or Jack Frost, but I don’t care – a guitar should not have sharp fret ends. Yes, this is easy to fix, but there are other manufacturers who do a much better job on a $399 – $450 guitar. Squier comes to mind, as does Epiphone.
Here’s the unfair part – for this kind of money, you can buy a used PRS SE Tremonti guitar and in my opinion it’s a much better guitar. That’s not a fair comparison – to be fair, I’d have to go up higher to the $700 to $800 price point to find something more comparable. But I’m a realist. If I had $450, I would buy a used Tremonti over this. And I’d probably swap out the pickups in it, honestly.
Conclusion
This is a good looking and good playing guitar with crappy pickups, and you really need to play several to make sure you’re not getting shitty fret ends. With upgraded pickups and with the fret ends fixed, it’s not a bad guitar. But it’s nowhere near the guitar the EC-1000 is. That guitar could give most Les Pauls a run for their money, but the EC-1000 is, appropriately, around $1,000. So that’s not in our ball park. You can find used PRS SE Tremonti guitars for this money all day long, and they’re better guitars in my opinion. I wanted to like this guitar badly, but it felt like a $350 guitar that was marked up to $450.
If you bought this guitar, you won’t like my review. It’s much more fun to read a review that says “This guitar is amazing for the money.” But it isn’t amazing for the money. These are going for $250 used. That’s actually a pretty good deal, I think. It’s a decent guitar to build on. If you got yours used for $250, you got a good deal. Don’t feel bad – this isn’t a bad guitar. It just has crappy pickups and the model I played had bad fretwork, and both of those things can be fixed.
