Epiphone Les Paul Custom
Still quite a few QC issues.
£648 at thomann.de | £569 at amazon.co.uk
The Epiphone Les Paul Custom is a very classy-looking guitar. It is part of Epiphone’s “Inspired by Gibson” range, recreating highly coveted Gibson models, while keeping the prices way down. But is it really possible to bring prices down to as low as £520 on a carve top guitar with so many bells and whistles, without sacrificing build quality? Not really…
A “Made in Mexico” Fender Player Stratocaster at £600 is quite a bit more expensive than the Epiphone Les Paul Custom. The Fender has a much simpler body carve, no binding, and a bolt-on neck. All while being £100 more expensive. Why? Because making a guitar play and feel good is very labour intensive.
The Les Paul Custom has very similar issues to the Epiphone SG Custom, we reviewed earlier. The binding has mismatched colours across the neck, body, and headstock. Unlike with the SG, there is no lacquer missing along the neck and the fretwork is noticeably better. However, you still get progressively sharper fret ends, with the last 3 being very unpleasantly sharp.
The gold Grover tuners look very classy and hold tune very well, in addition to being very smooth to operate. Combining that with a self-lubricating Graph Tech nut leads to excellent tuning stability. The action was very high initially, but simply lowering the bridge a few millimetres solved the issue – frets were properly level. Unlike with the SG, there are no tooling marks around the fret ends. However, there is some black hue in the binding around the fretboard. It looks a bit like overspray or die bleeding out of the fretboard. The fingerboard is made of ebony, but it looks like Epiphone are staining it to look darker. It is a bit odd, but the fretboard looks very good. The nut on this one is also too big for the neck and is sticking out a bit on the upper side of the neck.
This particular guitar weighs 8lbs (3.5kg), but it seems these can be anywhere from 8 to 9.5lbs (up to 4.3kg), similar to the Gibson Les Paul Customs.
The pickups are a ProBucker 2 in the neck and a ProBucker 3 in the bridge. Both are voiced really well and sound every bit as good as the Burstbuckers in my Gibson Les Paul Standard. The bridge pickup is loud and aggressive, while the neck is warm and full. You definitely get the sound you’d expect from a vintage-inspired Les Paul. There isn’t much clarity and it can be a bit tricky to get the high frequencies back in with pedals, but that is the PAF sound!
The guitar comes with the Epiphone Quick Connect wiring, which lets you quickly swap out the pickups without having to solder. The caveat is that they have to be Gibson/Epiphone pickups that also have these connectors, so your options are very limited. Chances are, you will have to completely rewire the guitar with traditional solder connections if you ever want to swap out the pickups. Good thing the stock pickups actually sound great!
Bottom Line
The Epiphone Les Paul Custom is a flashy guitar. The low price and great feature set mean that compromises had to be made somewhere. In this case, they compromised on fretwork and finishing – neither of which is obvious from a distance! Overall, the guitar sounds very good and authentic, and with the right setup it can be a great player’s guitar too!