New gear day.

[Mr. P]

So everybody probably remembers how I have said multiple times that I hate ESP / LTD guitars. Well, few days back I sold my Jackson DK2S and decided to get an Les Paul -model as I got pissed off to Floyd rose for the third time in my life. So I started searching for a new guitar and spotted this LTD model for pretty decent price. So did little searching in google and apparently this model has gotten pretty decent reviews from everywhere so I decided go and try it out.



I went to the sellers place and played this one out for about 20 minutes and decided to buy it for 340 e. It's 6 months old and played about 5 hours say(?). Not bad as these are 470 e new here. For some time I've been thinking that I should re-try LTD guitars and few months almost bought LTD Explorer. So now I decided to get this and if I don't like it I can always sell it away. What next, I go out and buy active EMG pick ups?



I just did some maintenance to it, oiled neck, cleaned the body from dust, did some adjustment to bridge and now it plays a bit better. The pick-ups are actually very good for standard pups. Very clean and sound good through my amp when played some Slayer. I was surprised by that! This guitar also has a split option for both pick ups so I can get more acoustic sounding stuff out off it. This guitar is also worn out by factory so it looks really old even the bridge is slightly worn from the side. Which is nice =)



The paint job on this one is not that perfect as on the back of the neck there is some small paint "dots" which you can feel and see. They are on the twelfth fret

so they don't really matter on my playing.



Overall rating, I would give it a 7½. It really does feel very fracture when lifting it. Kinda like the strings would be holding it together. Hard to explain. But it sounds good and plays ok. Feels good and is pretty ok balanced.



So pics;





















There is not too much space left for wires. I had to tighten up the cable plug and I could pull the plate out no more than 1 cm from the hole.











Look how the neck has been done.























Battle Axes.

[Uros]

I am a little puzzled as why did you buy guitar which is in a lower quality league than DK2s, so to speak (after all, this Ltd is from Vietnam, while DK2s is from Japan, if I am not wrong). Doesn't matter that it has floyd rose. You could do a number of things if that was your only gripe with it. My opinion is that you should have aim for the same quality level, if not more.



But, that's only my opinion of course.

[Mr. P]

^Point taken. The DK2S was old and had seen it's best days over on the hands of the previous owner. It was a nice piece to play still but would have required a new floyd. I changed the volume pot lately to it and it would have still required the change all the wires and rest of the switches.



I would like to change the tuning a lot and when I had my BC Rich which also had a floyd the blocking didn't hold very well while I changed the tunes. It always required more work on it that fixed bridge. Most likely I just did it wrong back then (had a piece of wood in the cavity).

[Uros]

But, it would cost you something like 200e with installing for Original Floyd (which doesn't come with a regular DK2) and you would have a killer guitar (the older guitar is, the better as far as wood go (it's getting drier with time (sp?), which only can add to the tone quality).



As for the tuning, I really wouldn't recommend you to change your tuning a lot, even if you have a fixed bridge guitar, it ruins the strings (you also should set up your intonation every time you change the tuning, in order to have good tone). I see you have more than one guitar, so why wouldn't you set up every one of them with different tunings?



Don't wanna be a party breaker ofc, congrats on your purchase

[Mr. P]

No problem mate. The band has not played yet. Got two guitars at the moment. I really would like to own more guitars but then again some weeks I might have time and enthusiasm to play for 1 minute, then next week for 10 hours. It really varies a lot. There might even be months when I don't really play at all. Just note here and there so can that really be called playing at all? So it really isn't that passionate anymore as what it used to be when I played few hours per day. I am a bit of a "cheap person" so I don't really like to keep my money on laying around. And by that putting 1k € to a guitar just to hang on the wall. It just isn't me.



The Dean is dropped to B and I change it from B all the way to A depending on what playing. With the Jackson I just kept it in E. As I have had 2 floyded guitars before that I changed them away for the same reason; Got pissed with messing with the floyd.



I was thinking about getting used Tokai LC-85 Les Paul but then spotted this and decided to give it a try after testing it. Let's see how time goes by this time.

[shadowalk]

Nice Eclipse you got there mate!