Gabriel Sykes

This instrument plays well above what you'd expect for the price, it looks good, stays in tune, and the stock pickups sound quite good. I've modified mine with a killswitch, a new output jack (nothing wrong with the old one, I just prefer pure tone output jacks because they hold the cable more securely), I plan to add a coil split, locking tuners, and new pickups. The stock pickup rout is HSH, for those of you who wanna know that before you get one (more shops and reviews should talk about pickup routs). The position of the pickup selector switch is kind of annoying, because if I am strumming chords clean in the neck or neck and middle position, I will sometimes accidentally hit the switch and end up playing on the bridge pickup.

Pros: The pickups sound nice, though they are single coils, which might not be what you want from a Les Paul. It's nice and light, (I don't have a scale capable of measuring guitars yet). Bolt on neck, which I personally (IN MY COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE OPINION) prefer over set necks. Cons: It plays terribly. The fret job is a joke, notes just instantly die when you try to bend a string. The tuners are really poor quality, and the bridge can't be intonated. The guitar does not stay in tune for more than about 10 minutes. The pickup switch started developing faults after about a year, and now it will occasionally just completely kill the signal. I plan to mod pretty much everything on this guitar, when I have money and time to throw at it, it really needs a lot of work.

It stays in tune really well and sounds decent, it plays okay but not amazingly.

It sounds good regardless of what pickup you use, it plays well and is easy to set up, it stays in tune. The wiring is a bit of a mess, by that I mean that all the wires are longer than neccessary, so it's hard to tell what's going on with it, but that isn't too much of an issue.

The presets are fun to mess around with and some of them are quite interesting, though I'm not really a fan of modelling amps. It's too powerful for a small bedroom, I can't even get the master volume knob to a quarter turn before the amp is too loud. The knobs are not stiff at all, accidentally brushing your finger against one is enough to turn it quite a lot, and imo it feels cheap. I just stick to the "Clean" preset for practicing, and all my effects are done through pedals, kinda defeating the purpose of owning one of these. I would not use this live, because the knobs are too easy to turn and I don't need all the modelling capabilities.

It sounds quite good, it has many effects including more common ones such as distortion, reverb, delay, and chorus. And it also has more "fun" effects (that you could still do something unique and creative with) such as reverse delay, trigger hold delay, etc. The firmware and controls are really well designed, it is easy to use and making changes to settings, or switching between multiple presets with the footswitch is really easy. It eats (AA, not 9V) batteries quite quickly though, so I heavily reccommend plugging it into an outlet, or a pedal power supply.