I play/practice on a personally customized Les Paul... and as flexible as I am, playing sitting down, I use a height adjustable gas-lift medical stool on glides(better stability than wheels/casters) and a Hercules brand foot stool. I adjust the seat, and foot stool, so that my right knee is at a slight upward angle, and I support the guitar with it between the hump and horn of the body. With the right foot, I pivot from the ball of the foot to raise or lower the body with my knee, and my left hand to control the angle of the neck in collaboration... which, adjusting the guitar's position while playing becomes rather natural with practice and aids reaching either end of the neck with far less stretching and straining to reach and finger notes that would otherwise be very difficult to fret in a fixed position. With the amount of support and flexibility I get from that seat set up, I actually find less freedom of movement in playing standing up... though, I did get the idea from the Classical guitarists I've watched play.
As far as the action, you should be able to ask for the strings to be lowered, and they'll play more easily. Though, strings are typically set a little higher on the Les Paul than others by timid techs because of it's shorter scale length than things like a Strat. With the shorter scale, the strings make more movement than a longer scale creating more sustain... as consequence, if the strings are really low, it'll just sound like a rattle trap if you don't play with mind toward controlled movement. A Guitar Center tech should be able to adjust it however you want, but if you want it extremely low, you'll have to practice controlling buzz, or ask for a higher gauge of string(The heavier the string, the tighter it has to be to reach it's tuned to note) which would defeat the purpose of trying to make the notes easier to fret by being lower.
You could also try extra light Jazz strings(flat wounds/chromes) if you don't want the grain of standard round wound strings to eat at your fingers. They're actually a unnoticeably amount heavier than the standard regular light round wound strings that most guitar nuts are filed for and strung through with for sale, but still fit without needing filing, so you could try a set just to see what they're like if you wanted. They're very smooth to the touch(easier on fingers that slide a lot, but as mentioned, they're slightly heavier so they take a little bit more effort to make bends.), but the flat wind also makes them sound much more warm and natural to the true tone of the instrument(they're more like the strings of an orchestral stringed instrument). I use them because the natural warmth of the notes produced practically bleed into a glide at high speeds, and rapid slides can be made with graceful transition... and personally, they sound better to me the more I break them in, as opposed to the typical round wound sounding too shrill and dodgy when new and dulling rapidly to nearly dead within a week. Though I honestly don't know how they'd sound through Gibson/Epiphone pickups. My pickups haven't been stock since long before I made the switch to flat wound strings, they're Lace pickups.
09 Nov 2014, 3:41 pm
