re: #179 subterraneanhomesickalien

Have Epiphone guitars gone up in quality lately?

I remember I bought a Epi Les Paul Custom model 10 years ago and it was awful.

Just felt cheap. It seemed to me that Fender and Gibson didn’t really care about making good affordable mid quality instruments back then with their Epi and Squire models.

It led to them getting lapped by brands like ESP and Ibanez in that market.

Well, I’ve got a Squier and a Epiphone now. Both feel good to me but I am a real beginner. Down the road I may not think as highly of them as I do now but OTOH, they’re so much better than the guitars I could have afforded in high school (class of 82) that it’s a different world. The Epi needs a bit more set up - fair bit of fret buzz from something being too low. The Squier was near perfect out of the box. In both cases, these are mid to higher end guitars from these companies - their cheapest can still be pretty rough from what I understand.