I bought a "real" Les Paul

My Ibanez guitars are gone, replaced with...

...the Epiphone Les Paul Traditional PRO-III.

And oh yeah, there's a story behind this. I have some explaining to do.

I will talk about this guitar, but before I do that, two things I'm reminded of immediately is my experience with a thin-necked guitar back in the 1990s and the article Why I never got into Les Paul guitars back in 2012.

I'll start with that 2012 article first.

Most of the opinions I said in '12 are the same I still have today, but a few things have changed.

The Les Paul body shape doesn't cut into my ribs now because I'm not fat anymore. In 2015 I lost the weight and kept it off. After that happened, guitar shapes that used to cut into me were now comfortable to play. "Plank" style guitar bodies now rest properly against my body when seated or standing.

In '12 I was still in thrashing mode with guitar and only played Strats. Now in '19 I play much differently, particularly due to my Jazzmaster phase. The Jazzmaster guitar could not be banged hard because it would knock the strings right off the saddles. This ended up being very beneficial because it required me to learn lighter playing techniques to get around that. Now I play with a much lighter style as a result, and it's not required for me to own a guitar I need to bang hard anymore.

Where my opinion still stands strong is concerning the price of the Gibson Les Paul Standard. It wasn't worth $2,500 back in 2012, and it's not worth $3,400 today. (Yes, that means the guitar has had a 36% price increase in just 7 years.)

One of the very few Les Paul style guitars that I feel is worth its selling price is the Schecter Solo-II Custom - which by the way does not cross over 4 figures. Crazy-good guitar, but still significantly more expensive than the Epiphone I bought. I'll talk about that guitar more in a bit, but let's get to that thin-neck guitar experience I had back in the '90s.

I remember my first experience with a "shredder" guitar neck, and it sucked

Many moons ago back in the '90s, I was at a guitar store in Southbridge Massachusetts and there was a Jackson guitar in stock. I don't remember what model it was, but it was probably a Soloist. I do remember the guitar was new, stark white in color, had a double cutaway Strat style body and a pointy headstock.

What I do remember is picking the guitar up and strumming a few chords on it. I hated the neck almost instantly. Even though I didn't know much about guitars back then, I knew that neck just felt wrong to my fret hand. It felt so bad that I didn't even bother plugging the guitar into an amp to hear how it sounded.

Before playing that guitar, I had never felt a neck so thin and flat. What bothered me the most was the fingerboard edge. The board felt like it was stabbing at my fingers. It just felt terrible.

Was the guitar bad? No, because it was brand new. It was that damned neck shape that really put me off...

...and this brings me to:

What happened with my Ibanez guitars and why I got rid of them

In December '18 I had discovered the 25.5" scale length didn't agree with me anymore, so I wanted to try something shorter. It had to be cheap and available. Two options presented presented themselves, the Ibanez GAX30 (24.7" scale length) and the Squier Bullet Mustang HH (24.0" scale length).

A local Guitar Center had both, so I went and tried them out. The Squier was first. It sucked. Then I tried the Ibanez. It was fantastic. I bought it.

Literally a month later, I liked the GAX30 so much that I bought a second one that was a little more upscale (but still cheap), the AX120. When I got the AX120, that was when I parted ways with my Telecasters (I had two). Now I was a full-on Ibanez guy.

But then something happened a few months later. Fret hand pain.

The pain wasn't in the wrist but rather at the pad directly under my index finger on my left hand palm. I best describe this pain as a dull soreness. It wasn't a sharp nor shooting pain.

At first, I thought this was just my fret hand getting used to the different thinner shape of the neck on these particular Ibanez guitars, and that the pain would eventually go away.

It didn't. It got worse.

After one particular marathon session where I played guitar for 4 or 5 hours straight, that's when the pain got really noticeable.

The pain didn't clear after 24 hours either. It carried into the next day and even the day after that. That's when I knew that no matter how much I liked those two guitars, they had to go. My fret hand was saying, rather loudly, "don't play this neck shape".

Enter the Epiphone Les Paul Traditional PRO-III

Deciding upon this specific guitar was a rather laborious process.

Now in all honesty, I could have taken the dirt cheap way out and bought a guitar I owned before, the Epiphone Les Paul Special I P90. That guitar mostly held all the requirements I was looking for. But going with that guitar would have been a notable step down in quality when compared to the Ibanez guitars. I wanted something at least as good as the AX120 as what I was parting with if not better.

The guitar had to have the following features:

1. Above average build quality
2. Solid body
3. Scale length between 24" and 24.75"
4. Top loader
5. Total weight of under 8 pounds
6. Satin urethane finished neck
7. Neck with thickness to it that was not U-shaped
8. Priced under $500

Only the Epiphone Les Paul Traditional PRO series meets all these requirements - if you can find one under 8 pounds, which I did. Mine is 7.8lbs.

The neck is absolute best selling point of the PRO-III

On the PRO-III is a satin finished D-shape neck with some actual chunk to it. It's not super chunky but definitely thicker than the Ibanez neck was.

The Ibanez AX has what I called a "squashed U" neck shape, which results in a neck that's thin with pronounced shoulders. It was the shoulder that was causing my fret hand pain. With less wood to grab, that pad on the palm of my fret hand under my index finger was pressing against that neck shoulder in a bad way.

My hand didn't start complaining loudly until playing those Ibanez necks for about 3 months. Then when I did that marathon guitar playing session as mentioned earlier and the pain didn't clear in a day, I knew the guitars had to go.

Since owning my Les Paul, the pain is all but gone now. Some soreness still remains, but it's nowhere near as much as when I was still playing the Ibanez guitars. My fret hand is healing up properly since I'm not damaging it any further.

There is only one real flaw with the Epiphone neck. It's ugly.

The Epiphone Les Paul Traditional PRO-III has an ugly neck, but that's okay

The PRO-III comes in 5 colors. Metallic Gold, Pacific Blue, Pelham Blue, Wine Red and Ebony.

I have the Pelham Blue model. It is the lightest color option of the lot. The tradeoff to this lighter color is that you can see every single imperfection on the back of the neck. Mahogany does not take well appearance-wise to satin finishing. Since it's a semigloss and not high-gloss, grain is very visible and easily felt by the finger...

...which is what I wanted. This neck feels fantastic. But it looks ugly because it has the appearance of looking all nicked up even though it isn't.

Satin finishing makes the neck feel like unfinished wood. Very smooth, zero sticky feel, and takes very well to long playing sessions. But again, looks like crap.

Does that mean the fretboard looks bad? No. That board is pau ferro and looks great:

Something I want to make very clear however is that the reason you can see the grain so prominently on the Pelham Blue model is literally because of its color. Every other color offered has a neck look that is significantly darker on the back and hides the grain lines much better.

Does the prominent grain on my Pelham Blue PRO-III bother me? Given my fret hand isn't in pain anymore, no. Having no pain more than makes up for any appearance gripes I could come up with.

How does the guitar sound? I'll have a video posted here of that soon.

How many guitars did I try before buying the PRO-III? Let's answer that.

I went through a ton of guitars before getting the PRO-III

Said very honestly, the PRO-III is one of the extreme few Les Paul guitars I actually like since almost none of them come with satin urethane neck finishing.

While I was at Guitar Center trying out guitars, I went through many models before deciding to get the PRO-III. Something like 10 to 12 guitars, both new and used. I was probably in that store for at least 2 hours, and thankfully the sales staff wasn't annoyed by that (especially since I spent money that day).

It's very atypical of me to spend over $300 on a guitar, but this time I had to because Epiphone was the only company to offer something that met every requirement I had.

Will I be keeping it?

Unknown at this point. She seems to be working okay at the moment, but sometimes Les Paul guitars can get "moody". If it gets too moody, then I'll have to part with it.

So far, she seems to be playing and sounding right. But time will tell whether or not it stays.

Like this? 🎁 Be nice and leave a tip!

Published 2019 Apr 22