So, I'm not one for 'reviews' (and this isn't one) but I've had it for 10 days now so I'm a bit more familiar with it and I've put in ALOT of hours playing it at high volume.My neighbors have moved out and next door is empty :D
The poor thing has been going through a Goldilocks with strings and tuning to find out where I want it to live.It came with 9/42 which I thought was a bit strange for a 24.75" guitar but it played really well with no buzzes and the tension was good (even if I was bending stuff out of tune). I thought it was amusing that it could go down to C# without any buzzes. Iommi uses 8's, right? :-p
Anyway, I've tried it with 9/42 in standard, 12/5x in Cstd, 11/49 in Dstd and finally and surprisingly settled (for now) with 10/46 in Dstd.The heavier strings just didn't jive with this guitar (me).
It's bizarre because it's 24.75" and I've been using 11-49 in Dstd on my 25.5" for quite a while. I wonder if it might be because of the super small vintage frets? The tension is great, though and I really dislike floppy strings but I do like a low action. The stainless steel frets are great, very very smooth for vibrato and bending. I actually had SS frets on a guitar before and didn't think much about it either way but these feel noticeably different in a good way.
I'm no good at describing sounds but I don't need to be because it sounds like a really great LesPaul. It sounds exceptional, actually and it's the perfect match with my Morgan (Plexi with more gain) but it's not all roses dum dum duuuum. Whilst the pickups do sound great there is a bit of squeal going on now and then. I'm sure it's not feedback, it's a set pitch squeal and happens at any volume. It gets worse when I turn the Tubescreamer on, though. I'm guessing that probably means they aren't very well potted? Which is a shame especially as they sell the pickups for £130 each. I'd probably moan about it more if everything else about the guitar wasn't so good. And I imagine that at some point down the road I'll be buying a set of Mules or something similar for it, anyway but it's still early days. Maybe it's something else, though?
The pots are interesting too. The tone knobs are really stiff to turn and the volume knobs are really easy to turn. It makes sense on the proper Wolfies that EVH uses with the volume being in reach for your little finger but on this LesPaul layout I reckon low friction pots for the lot would have been good. It's not like you're going to knock anything mid playing with them being so far back. Oh, and the 3-way is backwards - up is bridge and down is neck!
I saw some pics and I'm not sure if it's a slightly different version or just an update to this one but the neck joint was contoured where as this one is square. There might have been a few revisions to the model as this one has a low serial making it the 359th one made.
