[amyjared]

Hey all,
I've been loving my Fender Strat for many a long year, but need a beater electric to bring some places and such. I was checking out the Epiphone Les Paul Standards. They're pretty cheap and look nice and I played a few at the music store, but does anyone have one of these? Any first hand accounts of whether you like or not? Thanks!

[erock]

if your looking for a good LP copy (not gibson) check out Agile guitars. Better quality at lower prices. the al-2000 series are comparable to epiphones, and the al-3000 series blow them away.

much cheaper as well.

only at rondo music online. If you get a dud, you can return it no questions asked for 30 days

[dleonard]

I'll give Epi's the benefit of the doubt by saying they might be hit or miss. However, I did use one for a year, and had a bunch of problems with it. The first time I put .10 gauge strings on, the nut broke. The G string was still never in tune after 2 set ups, and the input jack squeaked and came loose. A friend of mine also had similar problems with his. They might be good if you were to just replace alot of the hardware, etc., but other then that I've learned my lesson. IMO, Mexican Strats and even some Squires perform better with more reliability

[hotasaPistol]

My good partner who I play with a lot has one for a beater guitar like you are talking about.

He likes it a lot....the only thing I notice is that it needs tuning a lot.....

fwiw

[FretWilkes]

I have an EPI Les Paul Custom in Alpine White. Mine happens to be an excellent guitar, though I'm not much of a Gibson kinda guy. If you get an Epi the weakest link on the guitar is the pickup selector switch. It is a real cheesy one and fails quickly. I changed that out and the guitar has been very nice, so I'd suggest being proactive and changing the switch asap.

My buddy has an early 60s Gibson Les Paul Custom and he likes my Epi very much, and was quite astounded by it in fact. He actually bought an Epi version himself after trying mine to use live as he doesn't want to take his Gibson out to gigs any longer. He IS a Gibson kinda guy, so that's a pretty good testimonial. Our Epi's are now about 7 - 8 years old though, so I can't speak for current production.

The pickups aren't bad, perhaps a little darker than I'd like, but I'm a Tele guy so...

[tcsned]

I used to run a music store that sold Gibson/Epiphones - I sold a bunch of the various LPs. My take on the Epi's was that the pickups could be problematic. They were prone to microphonic feedback (not to cool kinda feedback) and the other hardware wasn't great (cheap plastic nuts, loose tuner gears, etc.) some were useable, some weren't. They were kind of hit and miss. Swapping pickups and tuners helped. Also sometimes frets were rough and poked out from the side of the fretboard and a few other annoyances that you don't usually get from the Gibson LP's.