ESP E-II Eclipse Full Thickness

13
JANUARY 2022 GUITARIST
ESP E-II ECLIPSE FULL THICKNESS
may not be ideal for two-hour marathons.
The upshot of all that mass is that it seems
to contribute to the lively natural resonance.
Your ears will thank you – even if your spine
won’t be quite so happy.
It feels great to play, though, with that
neck delivering comfort and speed from
the ‘Thin U’ profile (that’s not actually
that thin), offering a decent palmful that’s
more palm-filler than modern shredder.
Likewise, the extra jumbo frets are less
noticeable in practice than on paper. Their
highly polished finish makes string bends
feel like you’re skating, and they’re nicely
rounded, avoiding the speed bump effect
you can sometimes get with frets of this size.
Despite the traditional scale length and
0.010 to 0.046-gauge strings that the guitar
ships with, there’s a tension to this Eclipse
(whether implied or real) that we found
reacted nicely, even if you’re heavy on the
picking hand. Open strings stay in their lane,
pitch-wise, and it also appears to help with
lower tunings, too. We took it down to drop
C comfortably with the factory fitted Elixir
Nanowebs and the tuning remained stable.
So, what of those pickups, then? Well,
first we should note that the volume
controls are mounted in reverse order to
what you might expect, a nod to the fact
that ESP is expecting you to stay parked
in the bridge position for a lot of the
time. Each pickup gives you three voices,
selectable via the push-pull neck volume
and master tone controls. Voice 1 is based
on a vintage PAF, Voice 2 for the neck
position is described by Fishman as “clear,
airy chime”, while the bridge humbucker
turns into a Classic Hot Rod, and Voice 3
on both provides a coil-split, aiming for
clarity in the neck and a hotter, overwound
single coil in the bridge. Confusingly, ESP
appears to have taken a similar approach
with the voice selection as it has done with
the control layout, opting to give you the
full-bore bridge and extra punchy neck
tones of both second voices as your starting
4
The styling and
additional voices
make this an even
more versatile Eclipse
GIT480.rev_esp.indd 13GIT480.rev_esp.indd 13 25/11/2021 09:2825/11/2021 09:28