palmmutedopene's Reviews

Good metal strings

This gauge of strings to me is best for playing heavy metal from E standard to D standard, especially E because the heavy gauge gives your tone a little more oomph.

Nice practice amp

Good for playing around the house without lugging your main amp around.

Best Metal picks on the market

Whether or not you're a fan of James Hetfield or Metallica, you have to give the man some credit when it comes to his unrelenting down picking technique, and these picks were designed around that very technique. They have a perfect balance between being thick enough to keep a grip on and being light enough to not sacrifice any of your picking speed, while also having one of the sharpest and attack heavy tips on a pick that I've ever seen, giving you supreme chug power no matter what you're playing.

It's an acoustic, that's for sure

Technically my "first" guitar, even though the one I have now is the second one I've had in my possession, as the first one was sold when I lost interest in it years ago. The one I have now had been sitting in my basement in it's gig bag for a good three years before I finally decided to pick it up and learned to play the opening riff to "One" by Metallica, and I was hooked. I decided that I wanted to pursue this whole guitar playing thing seriously, and I played it almost everyday up until Christmas of 2017 when my dad gave me my ESP, which I've played exclusively on ever since.

I think I'll try taking it out of the bag today and tune it up, should probably get the strings changed too. I'll give it a rating once I've played it a bit.

RE: Even though I didn't replace the strings, the guitar still sounded fine. Quality.

Awesome strings

There are so many amazing artists throughout music history that have used these, so what's your excuse?

Perfect entry level guitar for the aspiring metal musician. Heavy riffs and an even heavier body.

Not to take away from my use of the word perfect in the review summary, but the EX-50 (or any other guitar in ESP's XX-50 line of guitars) is anything but a perfect guitar. Far from it in fact, because it doesn't have to be. If anything, the flaws in this guitar are motivation enough to practice and get better at playing the instrument to reach a level in which buying a more expensive and higher quality guitar would have more of a reason behind it other than "just because." That being said, the list of flaws is a rather short but severe one. The first problem for me would have to be the sheer amount of neck dive that this thing has when trying to play it standing up, so much so that I find myself having to rest the region of my picking arm that is just below my elbow on the main "wing" of the guitar just to keep it level while playing, which is fine for parts of a song that mostly consist of chugging on a single string or chord and picking out arpeggios or single notes, all done with 100% downpicking. But as soon as you have to let go of the neck to change chords and start strumming without palm muting, say for example, the chorus of One by Metallica, playing at the correct tempo becomes impossible, at least for a newbie like me. The only other major issue I have with the guitar is the pickups. As expected, a cheap entry level guitar isn't going to come with higher quality third party pickups, and the ones that came with the EX-50 were in house (generic brand if you will) ESP LH-150 humbuckers that sound great when playing both high gain and clean channels, but can come off as a bit too harsh when playing genres that use less amounts of distortion than heavy metal does, like punk and grunge for example. This is largely due to the loud nature of the humbucker itself, but it is also abundantly clear that they were designed with high gain heavy metal in mind.

But at the end of the day, the EX-50 is at its core a beginner's metal guitar, and the perfect instrument for the James Hetfield wannabes of the world, like yours truly.

Amazing starter/practice amp. Emphasis on starter.

I wouldn't really call this line of amps traditional guitar amps as much as i would them amp simulating computer programs (Fender Fuse) with a speaker on them. As many different tones and styles that you can get out of this amp, it still doesn't compare to the practicality of using physical effects and pedals to get a certain sound rather then just using downloadable presets. At the end of the day though, being a new player myself, this amp is perfect for practicing all of my favorite songs in their original tones that I otherwise wouldn't be able to get without spending a bunch of money on different pedals and effects. It gets the job done.