I receive a lot of comments on my videos about my guitar. I’ve been using this guitar for over five years now and this seems like a good way to tell you more about this guitar and why I think it’s a great guitar for the money!
Looks – ‘’What does ‘Plus Top’ mean?’’
If you’re interested in buying an Epiphone Les Paul Standard, you can choose for a ‘Plain Top’ or a ‘Plus Top’ model. On the Plus Top model, they added a thin layer of vinneer. On Gibson guitars, this layer is about one centimeter and influences your tone, but on the Epiphone it’s just for the looks. And it looks great in my opinion. The Ebony version is the cheapest in this range, because it doesn’t have that extra layer of wood and isn’t have a (sun)burst. If you want a more Slash like guitar, you need to look for a ’sunburst’ paint job. I chose for the Heritage Cherry Sunburst, because I really like that color pattern on a Les Paul.
Playability
The first guitar I ever owned was a Squier Stratocaster, which was pretty crappy in my opinion. The Epiphone just plays a lot nicer in my opinion and has a really good feel to it. The neck profile is not really thin, which makes it easier to play chords and lead solos with a lot of bends in it. The set-up on the guitar was pretty good and the action wasn’t too high. If you bought a guitar with fret buzz or a bad set-up, I can really recommend to contact a guitar tech and let him give your guitar a new set-up. This will cost you about 30$, but your guitar feels and so much better after that.
Sound
I currently use this guitar in combination with a Peavey Valveking 112 all tube amp (Click here for more details and settings). The stock pickups in the Epiphone are pretty good. The neck pickup sounds really warm in the neck position and the bridge humbucker sounds great with a distortion pedal or overdrive pedal. The best sound I get out of this guitar, is the ‘woman’ tone. Select the neck humbucker, roll the tone knob of this humbucker all the way down and add a decent amount of overdrive/distortion. This will give an amazing sweet and warm sound with great sustain. If you want a Sweet Child O’Mine like sound, this is a very important factor in your overall tone.
Conclusion
I’ve had this guitar for over five years now and I still love to play it. I’ve played Gibson Les Pauls before and yes, they do play and sound better, but you get a lot more bang for your bucks with this Epiphone. So if you’re a beginning guitar player or you want to upgrade your crappy first guitar, I would really recommend this guitar. After four years, I replaced the bridge humbucker for a Seymour Duncan Slash Alnico II Pro pickup. The stock pickups are pretty decent, but after a couple of years I wanted a little more aggression in my sound.