This is my Second Esp guitar and I bough it in order to benefit from the specs which in turn stand for shredding at first but rythm playing as well.
This is a very beautiful instrument, well balanced considering the "difficult" shape, and can be placed in ideal positioning between legs for long recording sessions.
The sound is the clasic combination of Esp +Emg 81 , ideal for all kind of Heavy music.
The best feature in this instrument is the freatboard which highly stands for full time shredding but also rythm parts as it is very "fast" and easy to scale along .This instrument has an extremelly good sustain as well.
Overall is a very nice instrument, well built , quality materials and very good metrics .
My cons now stand for the specific instrument i happen to have .
Firstly the specific instrument has painting flows which imo are not acceptable for the range of 2k instruments.In the one side of the longest "Leg" it seems that the paint has not dryed well since you can see the wood color underneath.At first glimpse I though it was a"hit" mark though it is not..apparently the black paint has not dryed properly and in 2 slight spots it seems as transparent paint and underneath you can see the wood color.this appears as a wooden thin "line".
secondly, the factory assembly regarding the tremolo part was a total fail.
The instrument wouldnt stay in tune even after seting it up..and after dissasembling the whole tremolo part i have found out that the factory technician had inserted some kind of metal slices underneath the tremolo saddles!These metalic parts do not provide any use in the tremolo part and generally the specific person that took the responsibility for mounting the instrument apparently was watching television that day and did not pay attention to his purpose.
This has nothing to do with Thomann company since they always provide new instruments though it is not possible to check the condition since they are well stored inside the carrying case.
In general this is a very nice guitar, would be a workhorse for live, rehearshalls and studio use and the top feature as previously said is the perfectly made freatboard.Though considering the price paid it is not a nice experience to obtain an instrument with even minor paint flows and the requirement to dissasemble and re-assemble the whole floyd rose part.
Please note that this cons happened to my specific instrument and i do not know if there are other cases like mine.
The only reason that i did not returned the guitar to obtain the same one is that i paid my technician to do all the necessary adjustments and make it a proper shred machine.The paint flow is of minor importance as well though it does not justify the price range.