ESP LTD MH-327 Review

The most immediately notable thing about this guitar is the 27 frets on the top four strings and the tapered fingerboard, which runs parallel with the neck pickup. This is a superb piece of design that not only serves as a beautiful aesthetic feature but is also one of the main functional attractions of the guitar. The neck-thru design is just magnificent for a guitar of this price and adds to the sleek feel of the guitar when holding it. ESP tuners which feel very smooth and responsive. Push-pull pot for neck pickup coil tapping is a very neat touch. The Floyd Rose Special Tremolo can do with a Sustain Block upgrade. The block on the Floyd Rose Special is just a small Zinc one. Swap out for a Brass block and the tone and sustain would be improved greatly. I see the cheap Zinc parts of the Floyd Rose as the weak link in this otherwise top-featured guitar.

There are a few discrepancies in quality on this guitar which I am not happy about, mainly down to the fact this is a factory-line produced guitar. Two main things - 1. My Volume and Control knobs rotated off their axis and were very wonky when I first got the guitar, this took a lot of fiddling around with before I could get them to rotate smoothly and comfortable. This however, was fixable and the knobs are now great (though it was a frustrating exercise). 2. My second problem was the quality of the soldering - it can only be described as atrocious. Very messy and blobby in places. Even though the soldering looks bad, the guitar's signal is still solid, so it does not appear to affect it's function, it's just damn ugly in there. One day I will rewire this guitar with some high quality wire, and do a decent solder job on it.

About the build quality of the body/neck: Bloody beautiful. I can't say anything bad about it. The contours, the headstock, the pearloid binding, the through-neck all come together in a beautiful construction. All the quality issues on this guitar are fixable. Any patient and considerate owner of this guitar could quite easily put right all it's wrongs, and be left with a formidable piece of equipment.

For the money you just cannot go wrong with this. But one great thing to take into consideration before buying is that you must be prepared for the initial frustration of the setup of this guitar. You will have to be very patient. The factory setup is terrible, the Floyd Rose must be adjusted properly, a truss rod adjustment will need to be made and I'd recommend and immediate restring. You will not take this guitar straight out of its box and be amazed by it playability, you'll have to fine-tune the setup over your first few weeks with it. It's quite a balancing act. My MH-327 is almost there after about 4 months of owning it...

I love it. Problem is it looks so nice I couldn't bear to see a scratch on it. My other two guitars are both beaters but this one I just couldn't be mean to, even though it's the guitar I play my heaviest, hardest music on; which is a little ironic really.

This guitar requires patience to set up, and a few modifications may be necessary to bring it up to standards an experienced player would expect from their instrument. But with a little patience and love this guitar delivers it all.