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The headstock's black facia paint has been allowed to bleed over the edge and the line of the black finish itself doesn't follow the headstock outline particularly rigidly – viewed straight on there are areas where you can see a little more red than we'd like.

At the other end of the neck there is a similar sketchiness where the neck joins the quilted maple veneer top on the bass side. That said, standards are higher where it counts more – the fretwork is neat and tidy and the satin-finished maple neck feels smooth, with only the tiniest hint of a lip perceptible where the binding meets the wood.

It's always going to be a subjective thing, but we can't help feeling that the quilted maple veneer is a little too gaudy; gold hardware in combination with a cherry sunburst just looks wrong on a Les Paul. Gold hardware on a Custom, yes, but on something resembling a Standard it just seems like overkill to our eyes. Give us a plainer top and chrome, or better still tarnished nickel, hardware any day of the week. It's purely personal, though.

Aesthetic preferences aside, the usual cursory unplugged strum reveals an instrument with a lot more unamplified life than you might expect from something that looks, to all intents and purposes, like a Les Paul Standard. The chambers and the maple neck combine to deliver an almost semi-like loud sprang that bodes well both for the Alnico humbuckers and the active NanoMag circuit's performance.

Sounds

Check out this video of Guitarist Editor Mick Taylor putting the Les Paul Ultra-II through its paces:

Dealing first with the more traditional pair of Alnico Classic Plus pickups, we find most of the expected Les Paul boxes ticked, with an added airy quality and a pinch of ES-335 dynamism.

There's certainly more twang in the equation, making this the ideal Epiphone Les Paul for snappy soul licks and blues tones that are more Bloomfield than vintage Clapton. There's warmth and push if you need it, but it's definitely a brighter, more dynamic take on what most people will think of as the archetypal Les Paul grunt.