Epiphone Les Paul 100 Electric Guitar

...Mahogany body guitar, with two Epiphone open coil Humbuckers (Bridge and Neck). Mahogany neck with rosewodd fingerboard and dot inlays, teamed with jumbo frets. Chrome Hardware, tune-o-matic bridge and stop tailpiece, 4 knobs (2 Volume, 2 Tone) and a 3-way pick up selector switch (Rhythm, Rhythm + Treble, Treble). Plus a 6ft lead

I picked mine up for £180 from an online guitar shop, although I think the price could now be in the region ...
...Les Paul shape is reasonably comfortable, although after a while you may find that the top of the guitar may start to rub against your chest, depending on how you are sat. The contours fir around your knee well, and the single cut away allows you to reach all 22 frets. When you stand up with it the guitar sits in a very natural position, easily playable and all the frets are accesible.

-- Appearance --

I'm sure everyone ... more

The Gibson Les Paul is iconic in the music world, although we all cannot afford the £2000 + prices that are being charged for them, and Gibson realised this, so they created a sister company, Epiphone, who produced cheaper models of the Gibson range, available to beginners and intermediates, who didn't want to shell out thousands on a first guitar.

The model I bought was an "Epiphone Les Paul 100" Basically, this thing has your classic Les Paul looks with a thinner body and open coil humbuckers.

Out of the box what you get is a solid body Alder top and Mahogany body guitar, with two Epiphone open coil Humbuckers (Bridge and Neck). Mahogany neck with rosewodd fingerboard and dot inlays, teamed with jumbo frets. Chrome Hardware, tune-o-matic bridge and stop tailpiece, 4 knobs (2 Volume, 2 Tone) and a 3-way pick up selector switch (Rhythm, Rhythm + Treble, Treble). Plus a 6ft lead

I picked mine up for £180 from an online guitar shop, although I think the price could now be in the region of £190.

Sitting down the thinner Les Paul shape is reasonably comfortable, although after a while you may find that the top of the guitar may start to rub against your chest, depending on how you are sat. The contours fir around your knee well, and the single cut away allows you to reach all 22 frets. When you stand up with it the guitar sits in a very natural position, easily playable and all the frets are accesible.

-- Appearance --

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the Les Paul body shape, one of the most famous icons in modern music and this guitar pays homage to that. Although this is the "no frills" version. Basic body shape, in Ebony with cream pickguard and pickup surrounds. As this is the LP100, there is no binding (the trim round the edge of a guitar, that both adds to the aesthetic appearance and also protects against bumps and knocks around the egdes) and dot inlays as apposed to the trapezoid inlays. However this doesnt make this a horrible looking guitar, and it does look the business! It is hard to make a mistake with such a tried and tested look.

--Quality of Sound--

For the price bracket this is a decent sounding guitar, the bridge and neck humbuckers give a high output, trademark strong distortion and warm cleans.

The bridge pickup gives you a nice all round sound that can be used for lead or rhythm. With distortion on it gives you a classic rock tone, start fiddling about with the knobs you can change the sound, but it soon becomes muddy which is not good.

Flick over to your neck pickup and you kick out the trebles and mids, and you getter a warmer, deeper tone, which might suit some more alternative styles of music.

Sustain isnt brilliant, however this you must come to expect with a bolt-on neck, although the thinner body and pick-ups dont help. Although you can easily work around this if you want, it is only a minor flaw.

Feedback is a major problem, when you start to turn your amp up this guitar will feedback at you whenever it can, which does get very annoying especially when you're gigging with it.

-- Set Up --

Out of the box you can tell it was set up in a rush, no great care taken with it, action was very high which is a pain, neck was bowed too much, which was also casuing problems. The only thing that was alright was the intonation, though it wasn't perfect.
The neck was covered in a layer of black....something that has taken ages to wear off, but has revealed a lovely rosewood fingerboard.

-- Quality --

This really isnt a bad guitar, it is solid, made of decent materials and built to an acceptable standard, and will see any beginner through to the intermediate stages with ease. There are, however some minor cosmetic flaws that I have found with my guitar, which (I hope) shouldnt be on many others. These are things such as sloppy drilling (2 holes where there should be one) and poor strap nuts, which I have to screw back in every day. Poor quality pick up selecter, sometimes crackles and mediocre tuners.

As I said it will see you through and is a perfect beginner guitar. However i was expectin more, as this was a step up for a more intermediate guitar for me. Of course, if you spend more money you'll get better quality, thats how the world works.

Happy Buying

Steve

 

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