The New ESP LTD JD-1 Looks Cool, but It’s Very Minimalist

At their NAMM booth (and near the bottom of a press release on their website), ESP finally announced a Joe Duplantier signature guitar, the JD-1.

No tone knobs. No pickup selectors. No tremolo (not that we expected one here). It's painfully obviously designed as an intentional precision metal riffing machine. This is the kind of guitar that's always going to be polarizing. One player's focused, minimalist guitar is another player's un-versatile, uninspiring, boring guitar.

I like the look of this. Gray and black work really well together IMO for modern medal guitars. Hell, I even designed the navigation menu of this website with inspiration from that aesthetic. But I'm sure you are also curious about the hardware. In ESP's own words:

LTD JD-I offers a uniquely modified take on the offset XJ shape, and features bolt-on construction at 25.5” scale, a three-piece roasted maple neck with Macassar ebony fingerboard, pearloid block inlays, and 22 extra-jumbo stainless steel frets, a Hipshot Tone-a-Matic bridge and tailpiece, a Graphtech TUSQ nut, and Joe’s signature DiMarzio JD Fortitude passive humbucking pickup.

The price at launch is $1,799.00 (which thankfully includes a case). There definitely seems to be a $1500-1800 tier of signature instruments that guitar brands design for. The build quality and fretwork on the Korean-made ESP-LTD guitars seems to be well-regarded though, and I am very happy with the tone and playability of my ESP-LTD Snakebyte. But truthfully, you can get a reliable metal-focused hardtail for less than half the cost of this, and Joe's signature bridge pickup (which is PAF-inspired) is available for $142 at the the time of writing.

I am a big fan of locking tuners for the time they save changing strings. The LTD locking tuners are solid hardware from my experience too.

If want a neck pickup on this, too bad! Joe clearly didn't feel it was necessary. I think this will be a fun guitar for some metalheads out there as long as they aren't trying to buy versatility.

The other guitar that caught my eye (in the opposite direction) in their announcement was the JH-200CTM, a "more accessible" entrypoint into Jeff Hanneman's signature line. I wouldn't want to rely on a Floyd Rose Special (vs. the higher-quality tiers) if I were a pro guitarist, but it looks like a pretty sweet guitar, actually. Even as the JD-1 looks pricey to a lot of us, it's clear that the "entry-level" signature instruments below a grand start making real hardware compromises.

It will be interesting to see what the non-LTD releases are eventually like, not that I can afford that kind of guitar!

Thanks for reading!

(Image credit: ESP Guitar company)