The neck, sad to say, was twisted badly upon arrival and caused me a lot of grief and wasted money. Swapped strings for heavier gauge ones and had the guitar shop adjust the bridge and truss rod to stop the massive amounts of fret buzz. The shop thought I had floating frets - or "Epiphone-itis" as they called it - but it turned out that the entire neck was warped. ESP USA support is just awesome. zZounds told me to call them because it went past the 30-days for returning it, so I did. They are completely replacing the neck and are getting the guitar in perfect working order as I write this, and have been in communication with me throughout the whole process. All free, of course, because it's so early that nothing I did would have caused this amount of problems. I just got a bad guitar, sad to report, but they are fixing it and making it right. Unfortunately, per the above, though the support rating will go up, the quality rating is going down. Bolt-on neck for an anniversary edition of a famous guitar player? Made in Vietnam? I'm so glad ESP is standing behind their product, but if the quality were better for $600, this wouldn't have been an issue. I'm hoping I don't have more issues with the guitar at this point, but I'm not holding my breath and am already saving my pennies to buy a Gibson Les Paul. Not that Gibson can't make a bad guitar, but I think a guitar made in the USA is a much better prospect for higher quality. I have an old Ibanez that I bought 13 years ago for… read more $200 and it still plays well and functions as my backup. How can a new $600 guitar 13 years later end up much worse? And it's a special model. Bums me out, but oh well, lessons learned. So I'm adjusting my star ratings after two months of barely being able to play the guitar due to the immense quality issues. The Features, Ease of Use, Sound (the pick-ups just rock hard on my Randall RT100H tube head with Dime cabinet), Manufacturer Support, and Wow Factor all get 5-star because it deserves that score in each of those categories. But value, quality, and overall suffer a bit as a result of experience.

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