"This guitar is a solid choice for those seeking vintage style and sound without the vintage price tag": Epiphone Les Paul Special review

Time to reevaluate an entry-level classic?

Epiphone Les Paul Special review
(Image: © Future/Chris Corfield)

Guitar World Verdict

The 2024 Epiphone Les Paul Special is a dream to play. It sounds great, looks a million dollars in TV Yellow, and gives you a different sonic edge to a regular Standard. Don’t write these off as budget guitars - there’s plenty of character here and lots to love.

Pros

  • +

    Fit and finish is impeccable

  • +

    Neck pickup, in particular, is a joy

  • +

    Superb value

Cons

  • -

    Some more color options would be welcome

  • -

    Players of heavier genres should look elsewhere

You can trust Guitar World Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing guitar products so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

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.

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Chris Corfield

Chris Corfield is a journalist with over 12 years of experience writing for some of the music world's biggest brands including Orange Amplification, MusicRadar, Guitar World, Total Guitar and Dawsons Music. Chris loves getting nerdy about everything from guitar gear and synths, to microphones and music production hardware.