Epiphone Les Paul Studio Limited Edition

What's going on?

What type of car is that? Or computer game? It's certainly not a sport. Never heard of it before!

That's because it's none of those. It's a guitar.

WTF?!?

Yup. Here at MSCG, we've decided to give a special review to this beautiful guitar, which, I might add, I am the proud new owner of.

So what type of guitar is it? Ok, if you're a guitar player, in particular an electric guitar player, and you haven't heard of a Les Paul you shouldn't be playing guitar...simple as that. Les Paul electric guitars define rock music. First seen in 1950, the Gibson Les Paul has become synonymous with rock music.

"Didn't you say Gibson though?" I hear you say. Yes, I did say that. Epiphone is the cheaper version of Gibson. Cheaper, not cheap. Epiphone is licensed by Gibson and still go through the same quality control. However, they do cater for the lower end of the market but their guitars still can get up to $3000 or so.

Enough about the history and company. Retailing at $950, the Epiphone Les Paul Studio is the entry level set neck electric guitar in the Epiphone range, sitting above the LP-100 and just below the Les Paul Standard. To be honest, it's actually a lot closer to the Standard than the LP-100, the LP-100 is rubbish compared to the Studio.

Featurewise, the Studio has a set neck for truer tone and sustain, mahogany/alder body with a rosewood fingerboard. It comes with two humbuckers and four controls, two tone and two volume for each pickup. It also features a 3 way selector switch to change between pickups. Now, that's the basic Studio. The one I have is the Limited Edition. How is it different? Let me explain...

The basic Studio has two open-coil humbucker pickups. The Limited also has two humbucker pickups but they're covered to give it a classier look. I've also heard that they're the Gibson '57 Classic pickups. The basic Studio only has a dot inlay on its fretboard. The Limited has the nicer trapezoid pearl inlay like the more expensive models. The basic Studio has ordinary tuners. The Limited has Grover machine heads which work a treat. Oh, and the colour. The Limited is pewter which you can't get normally. Looks great with the chrome hardware.

So it looks great. How does it sound? Two words. Bloody brilliant.
Plugged into a Line 6 Spider 2 30 watt amp, it was amazing. Beautiful creamy clean sounds, crunchy overdrive on channel 2, crazy thrash metal on 3 and totally nuts on 4. And that's just on a 30 watt digitally emulated amp. Try it on a hybrid tube amp like an AVT100 and it blows everything away. It has a beautiful warm sound that goes so well with all rock music. I had no problem getting a Greenday or Foo Fighters sound out of it. The humbuckers are incredibly versatile. Flick the selector to treble and turn up the gain on the clean channel and you can produce a bright funk type sound. Flick it to rhythm and turn up the drive and you can get a really grunty and chunky powerful sound. I love it.

All these beautiful sounds. And what makes it even better is that it plays like a dream. The acton was set up perfectly and it was extremely easy to play. The Studio is also thinner and lighter than the Standard, which makes it easier on the shoulder when playing with a strap.

Dislikes? There was a little bit of fret-buzz further down the neck. And the paintjob, while nice to look at new, is just begging to be scratched.

Other than that? It's a dream guitar if you're on a tight budget. The basic Studio is already a great guitar, but the Limited makes it just that much better, adding small touches that make it look, feel and sound much more expensive. An absolutely perfect guitar for me.

19/20

- MTC