Epiphone Les Paul Ultra III (Vintage Sunburst)

Epiphone Les Paul Ultra III (Vintage Sunburst) Overview

The Epiphone Les Paul Ultra-III is designed for us guitarists that love the classic designs and shapes, but want something with a bit more to offer. With the same look and features of a traditional Les Paul, it also adds some new tech to give us a guitar that seriously delivers.

Epiphone's ProBucker pick-ups are the core of the Ultra-III. These acclaimed pick-ups are tonally styled after Gibson's even more highly acclaimed BurstBuckers. The ProBuckers have authentic 18% nickel silver bases and covers, Elektrisola wire, accurate bobbins, slugs and screws and sand casted Alnico-II magnets. They are Epiphone's way replication of that Classic PAF tone that still sits right at the heart rock. 

But the complement of pick-ups doesn't stop there. The Ultra-III also features Shadow's patented NanoMag pickup embedded into the fingerboard. With its three samarium cobalt magnets, an air coil, and active electronics. This is a low-impedance pickup that gives you subtle body acoustics and string harmonics, ready for great acoustic tone. With these two different set of pick-ups working together you can get everything from powerful rock, to lush acoustic, and everything in-between.

And if that's not enough for you in terms of modern features, there's even a full-function, chromatic tuner mounted in the bridge pick-up mounting ring. Push its on-off button and sound is immediately muted when the tuner activated. To allow lightning fast changes from ProBucker to Shadow pick-up each pickup system, the Ultra-III's NanoMag Volume knob is an A/B switch between the two. Just push it in and toggle between Magnetic, NanoMag or both pickup systems with no delay, and no pop. So you always know where things are there are also more LED's on the pickup mounting ring to give you a visual key as to which pickup system is active (Red=NanoMag; Blue-Magnetic or Red/Blue=Both). 

To increase the flexibility of hook-up, given the flexibity of the pick-up systems the Les Paul Ultra-III has three different outputs. But don't worry, it looks more complicated than it really is. By using the standard 1/4" Mono output, both the Humbuckers and NanoMag are mixed into one signal and sent to the same amp, just like a regular LP. But when you plug another 1/4" cable into the stereo output, the humbuckers signal is sent down the regular cable and the Nanomag goes to the other output. This lets you send the two signal to different amps, or DI the acoustic side straight into your desk/PA. We'd recommend this set-up best for getting the most out of the acoustic pick-up, tonally speaking. In this set-up the A/B switch also still works too, so you switch between the two outputs right from the guitar itself. 

The third output is the USB. Using a USB cable you can plug directly into your computer and use guitar applications such as Native Instruments GuitarRig 4LE (included, via download). The Ultra-III is so versatile it even includes a load of amp models!

While the Ultra-III is packed with technology, it still maintains the same basic specifications of the Epiphone Les Paul. Just check out this spec list:

- Solid Mahogany body with glued-in Mahogany neck and comfortable SlimTaper neck profile
- Flame Maple veneer top and Rosewood fingerboard.
- Classic Les Paul tone and sustain. 
- LockTone locking tune-o-matic bridge and stopbar for ultimate string changing ease
- Grover 16:1 machine heads

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