Sometimes, in your playing career, you may come to reevaluate certain guitars you overlooked the first time around. For me, the Epiphone Les Paul Special is one such guitar. I often thought of the LP Special as just the cheaper, less desirable version of the Les Paul Standard or, better still, the Custom. However, having had one on loan for a little while, I now feel a bit foolish for sleeping on it for so long.
First things first though, what are we looking at here? The Epiphone Les Paul Special is, at its heart, a budget-friendly rocker that’ll deliver all the vintage-flavored sounds you could hope for without pushing north of the $500 mark. It differs from a Standard in many ways, some of them coming down to aesthetics, but the primary difference is in the form of the two P90 pickups it has in place of the Standard’s humbuckers. P90s are, essentially, fattened single coils. In their more common shape, single coils would look frankly wrong on a Les Paul, but as the heftier P90 style it works, giving a tonal depth and warmth that a regular single coil can’t. For clean and mildly overdriven sounds, P90s offer a level of clarity and chime which is hard to beat.
