The Epi Les Paul Standard I bought from GC used came in yesterday. It's in remarkable condition with a beautiful black finish and only some very shallow belt rash on the back that doesn't go far into the clearcoat which I may see about buffing out. I let it settle in to the temp difference between a Chicago warehouse and a Tennessee living room before I tried to set it up to play, but for $279, my cursory checkout said this puppy is a winner. It looks just like Deathshead’s, but in slightly rougher shape.
I had some time to kill waiting for it to be delivered, so I went around town to a couple of music stores I normally avoid, one for its incredibly unrealistic pricing, and the other because its owner is an asshole guitar-show "vintage" dealer. The 'overpriced' store was true to form, asking outrageous amounts of money for anything remotely playable and electric, though they did have a very good condition Ric 4004 on consignment for $1100. They are more of an upscale acoustic snob place, anyway. Other items of note were a Traynor Bassmaster stack for $895, (only about double its value) and a really shitty 60's hollowbody Italian Teisco Del Ray for $350 that rattled like a snare. Oh, and you could buy a mint condition, NOS hot pink Yamaha Attitude signed Billy Sheehan from 1992 for only $1200. Gee… I wonder why it has never sold…
I hadn't been into the other store in about five years and figured I'd at least check it out, because even though the jerk factor from the owner is huge, he runs across lots of oddball stuff and prices reasonably for local sales, and I was trying to find out if there were any takers for some signed guitars for fundraiser for a charity set up by a friend in memory of his young daughter who died of a rare brain tumor. I figured if there was anyone in town who would want a signed guitar, he’d know them, because he and most of his clientele are poser douches. (He was VERY unhelpful in this regard, BTW.) He has expanded his bass selection considerably since I was there last and now has a bass section with some pretty nice stuff, but you can tell he set it all up, guitar player-style. There were two Epi's and a few Gibsons: a Ripper III, an RD, and a Grabber.
I don't like Rippers or Grabbers and am thinking about a T-Bird, so I tried the RD. It was one of the heaviest basses I have ever picked up, black finished with a baseball bat of a neck, clover tuners and the big chrome-covered pickups. However, it had a Badass installed, and in the rear bridge post holes for the old three point, someone had installed switches and routed out the back for two 9 volts and put an 18 volt Carvin electronics systems in. It was set up terribly, and I didn’t even bother plugging it into anything.
One of the Epi’s was a “TV white” flying V that someone had put a fake Gibson logo on the headstock. It played OK, but was far too light and neck dived. It was also pretty reasonably priced at $350. The other was a redburst Les Paul Standard, same model as mine, but in mint condition, but something about it was not quite right. The first thing that I noticed was that the neck profile towards the headstock was much too wide; it had the whole “slope to the stock” look of a Rickenbacker, but with a much larger diameter neck than one would expect, and the neck joint at the headstock was clearly visible. It played exactly as you would expect with such an oversized neck, terribly. Even before I set mine up and it was adjusting to my house, it played miles better. I think it’s a second. I know Epi sells refurbed B and C-stock, and I’m guessing that it is one. He wants $445 for it
…now on to my new bass. I have never had to set up the three-point bridge before, so I expected a steep learning curve in regards to intonation. Surprisingly, that was the easiest part. Over the course of a couple of hours, I adjusted the neck and bridge height, and it became pretty apparent that the bass had been marked down because of an extremely poor setup by someone who didn’t know what he was doing. The bass side of the bridge was initially lower than the treble and the neck had a fair amount of backbow. The pitch angle on the front of the bridge was also set much too shallow. As a result, the E and A strings fretted out at the third fret and made tons of string noise. Once I corrected the bridge and the neck, the whole bass felt way more “alive” when I played, and the strings resonated with harmonics instead of the bad-shortscale-esq thud it had when I first started on it.
Once I got its playability issues out of the way, I proceeded on to the pickups. Lots of people here have remarked about the Epi TB+’s being tonally bland, and I can totally see that. However, the one thing I was NOT prepared for was their sheer output. These things could eat a G&L MFD without even trying! I noticed that it is nearly impossible to get an undistorted tone out of them, so I lowered them as far as they would go, and worked them back up to even out the sound. I’m not crazy about whatever strings are on it; they’re pretty bright and thin, but I can already tell that I’m not crazy about the top end of the pickups. They definitely have that ‘cheap import’ upper-midrange and high end and are much more subdued in the very bottom than I would like. Balancing their output helped that tremendously, but I still have to back down the volume knobs to get clear tone, and on the note of tone, sadly, my tone pots are going bad. The bridge tone control is worse, but both are persistently noisy, even after a good dose of De-oxit. I’ve got a couple of spare 500K pots, but I think I’ll wait until I decide whatever I’m going to do with the pickups before I go changing them.
