Epiphone Les Paul Limited Edition Flametop Reviews 4

$350 from the local pawn shop, dead mint.

First of all it's a les paul. Has a nice vintage sunburst flametop that is plum spiffy. It is also well balanced and assembled nicely, the action is great and it has unreal sustain, It is a hard to beat guitar for the money and it is very comparable to my gibson!

Here's where the big price difference comes in:pickups,tuners,and electronics. The pickups just really suck compared to gibsons,emgs,or duncans. They get horribly muddy if you detune which makes alot of notes undefined. A friend of mine has the EMG Zakk Wylde setup in the same guitar as what I have, sounds like a $2000 axe. You'll probably think the stock pickups sound ok, but wait till you hear what this guitar sounds like with other pickups in it! It is worth the investment! Ok other than that you should change the vol.and tone pots, the ones in the guitar are not really 500K and the dimarzio or CTS ones will sound much better. If you get emg's they come with the pots. Over time if you run big strings like I do the tuners often tend to break like match sticks. So put some gibson les paul tuners on it or go with grover all the way, the best tuners you can buy period! You may gripe about how heavy it is if you stand up playing for a while but no biggie....

These seem to be constructed as well and some play as good or better than the higher gibson models, A good guitar for the $$$. With the right mods this guitar will handle any gig...

I got this guitar after I played a friends and was impressed with it. Also I didnt want to gig out with my gibson explorer or my gibson les paul. If this epi gets stolen I can replace it, so keep this in mind. The gibsons are great but very pricey, So my advice to you working class musicians is to grab one of these change the electronics and tuners and you will have a reliable gig worthy les paul for 1/10 the price of a gibson model. Dont forget to change the 3 way toggle either, these are bad for messing up. Either way you cant beat this for the $$, a 3.5 to 4 average but modified Id give this guitar a 5 and a little over, the thing to do is to buy one of these cheap and modify the crap out of it so you'll have a great sounding one of a kind axe with little cash outlay!!

Gothgibsonguy rated this unit 4 on 2003-11-06.

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