ESP LTD EC-401 Black

I purchased this guitar two weeks ago at Thomann. This is the first guitar in this price range that I ever bought. I have some old guitars and I also purchased a Harley Benton beginners guitar at Thomann six weeks ago.
To make a long story short: the guitar sounds flawless. Together with the new amplifier, it is just beautiful. But unfortunately I felt like something was wrong when I received the package. The Harely Benton Guitar that I received six weeks ago was simply beautifully wrapped and unboxing it was very cool. My son was more than happy. Unboxing this guitar felt like unboxing something that was already returned to the seller and now was re-sold. This was not the original packaging and there were fingerprints all over the guitar body. It almost looked like B-Stock. Although this is kind of ok and won't effect the sound of the guitar (there are not scratches), it messed the "unboxing feeling" totally up. Having to clean a product first before you can use it is difficult. However, after cleaning it I deceided not to send it back because it is still a great guitar and it works fine. It doesn't have any scratches so it looks good now. Other than the poor packaging, I can only highly recommend this instrument.
// let me give you a quick update here: after about three weeks, I experienced technical problems with the guitar. There was no sound anymore although cable and amp were ok. I contacted the Thomann support and their help was concerning friendliness, competency, speed and, at the end, customer happiness absolutely flawless. To be honest I never experienced a customer service at the hight quality level. This is why I changed my rating of the overall quality from two stars to five. Thank you Thomann-Team for this exceptional service. You guys rock! :-)

I use this guitar for D Standard and drop C tunings with 11's on it, and it's great for what I need it to do. The pickups sound good with metal tones and can produce some decent clean tones as well, however I find the sound to be quite one-dimensional, in the sense that you can't use this guitar for much else. That depends on whether or not you like EMG's though. The guitar feels great to play, is comfortable and has good weight. The set-up was excellent and the guitar was great out of the box, and I only needed to change the strings, as it came with 10's on it. There were some issues with build quality that arose a few months later. Both volume knobs came loose, and I had to tighten them, and also the pickup switch started malfunctioning. I was able to fix it with no problems though (unscrewed the back, messed around with the selector and it started working properly). Overall, a great buy for anyone looking to upgrade from cheaper guitars!

I wanted a single cut guitar, but a model more oriented for metal, I choose this model for the EMG pickups the lightweight and overall design of the guitar (pure black goodness with easy access to the higher frets, a very ergonomic design).

The feel of the guitar is great, great neck although having a gloss finish is not sticky in any way and the high fret access is great, frets are shinny and rounded on the edges, beautiful rosewood finger board with the inlays perfectly executed. About the finish and looks of the guitar I only found two small golden flakes beneath the black paint that look like some kind of dust from the factory flying around during the painting (but that?s not a problem for me)

All the hardware is good quality and the EMG?s are great for high gain, not so good for clean sounds or bluesy tunes, truly a metal guitar.

For the price the only downside of this instrument is the lack of a case or gig bag included, it?s a made in Korea, and other brands from the same factory on this price range all come with a gig bag included.

For metal music i totally recommend this guitar.