ESP Ltd EX401SW Explorer Electric Guitar, Snow White

The ESP LTD "400 Series" of guitars have been cleverly designed and constructed to offer professional-grade features to the musician of today at a price that's affordable to most. A prime example would be the excellent LTD EX401SW, a snow-white "Explorer" style guitar with impressively powerful looks and tonal performance.

An agressive yet elegant metal monster

Now, you're hardly going to buy this guitar to play some Mumford & Sons covers (although you might... who am I to judge?), but despite the outwardly "metal" appearance this is an incredibly versatile instrument. The neck is of a set-thru design, meaning you have smooth and fast access to even the highest of frets, and the Thin U profile makes playing the guitar as comfortable as you could want. That's before we've even gotten onto the excellent pickup combination and professional-grade Grover tuners.

The Pickups

The combination of neck and bridge humbucker in this guitar gives you plenty of tonal choices to work with, especially with the pickup selector and tone/volume pots at your disposal too - with the correct settings you can produce sounds to fit pretty much all of your musical needs.

In the neck position there's an EMG-60 humbucker, a pickup that packs plenty of output with a nice balance of thick, boosted mids, big lows and singing highs. The close aperture coils produce an array of rich harmonic overtones and plenty of sustain, and due to the ceramic magnets they deliver a fully treble response with lots of output, making them perfect for distinct single-note solos.

Sitting in the bridge position is the ever popular EMG-81. This pickup utilises powerful ceramic magnets with close aperture coils, and produces a tone that's been speifically designed with detailed intensity, incredibly amounts of high end cut and fluid sustain. The nature of this pickup ensures that your leads will slice right through even the most dense of mixes.

Grover Tuners

The tuners on the ESP EX401SW are made by Grover, one of the best in the business. These machine heads provide highly accurate tuning and stability due to their design, giving you a smooth tuning experience with a high degree of backlash elimination. Combined with the Tune-O-Matic (TOM) bridge, these tuners ensure that you rarely (if ever) lose your tuning stability, regardless of how agressively you play or bend your strings.

Highlights

• Construction: Set Thru
• Scale: 24.75"
• Body: Mahogany
• Neck: 3Pc Maple
• Fingerboard: Rosewood
• Fingerboard Radius: 350mm
• Finish: Snow White
• Nut Width: 42mm
• Nut Type: Molded
• Neck Contour: Thin U
• Frets/Type: 22 Xtra Jumbo
• Hardware Colour: Black
• Strap Button: Standard
• Tuners: Grover
• Bridge: TOM & Tailpiece
• Neck PU: EMG 60
• Bridge PU: EMG 81
• Electronics: Active
• Controls: Volume, Tone, 3-way Pickup Selector