The ESP Guitar Company

Jus wen I ran out of bucks....

Just picked one of these up. Was really by accident to be honest. Never would have expected the build quality from a lower tier LTD like the EC-256 to be THIS good. I couldn't help myself from buying it. I was literally blown away by the quality especially in the little detail areas. Neck is perfect. Good fretwork. I don't think the shop would have done any setup on it before hanging it on the wall, so if that's truly the case, it was setup perfectly right out of the box. Pickups also to my surprise sound really good. No desire to swap them. Top looks killer too. Love the color!

Question for ESP:
Sweetwater has this model listed with Rosewood fretboard, this site says roasted jatoba.  Which is correct?

Hello,
I'm from Bangladesh. I wanted to buy a new ESP LTD EC256FM in Cobalt Blue color. The official distributor of ESP LTD in Bangladesh is 'WORLD MUSIC'. All the EC256FM models are the same price and when I told them that I want the Cobalt blue color, they increased the Cobalt Blue colored one. Is this right to increase the price in this way after knowing what color I want? I request you to change the distributor from them. They don't even want us to play in the shop. This is a total disgrace about a musical store where we can't play guitar before buying. 

I just purchased this guitar as a new little upgrade project.  A few review notes:

1. The color of it is very different from what is shown on this page, so I highly recommend googling additional pictures of this specific guitar to verify it's what you want.  I did exactly that, and purchased this model based on those pictures alone, as I'm not at all a fan of the shade of blue shown on the ESP website.  That being said, in person the guitar is much more of a pale blue/green, somewhat like a tropical ocean color.  It's absolutely beautiful, but again, I would look up additional images to verify it's a color you would like.   

2. I bought mine from a 3rd party retailer, and while it overall arrived in excellent condition, the fretboard itself was in not-so-great condition, as if the guitar had been sitting in a warehouse for some time before being shipped.  The strings were clearly very old, the fretboard was extremely dirty/grimy, and the frets were tarnished - causing any bends to feel like they were grinding against cheap plastic.  Of course, this is all easily fixable with some standard cleaning and treatment, so if you're reading this and yours arrived in similar condition, it just needs some routine cleaning and new strings.  But I advise against judging the quality of the guitar before getting it properly cleaned up.

3.  The stock pickups aren't actually too bad, they're quite balanced and versatile.  They're a bit muddy of course, but the neck pickup actually has some decent clarity and bite to it that I've enjoyed noodling around with.  That being said, I will be upgrading to some Seymour Duncans to beef it up a bit.

Overall, I was actually surprised at how high quality this model is.  Outside of some fretboard dirtiness (I blame the retailer), I couldn't find any damage or signs of lazy construction whatsoever.  I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a new guitar in this price range, you won't be disappointed.