ESP Kiso Custom Shop Horizon

Serial No.:
K0215104

Bridge:
Floyd Rose Tremelo

Neck pickup:
Seymour Duncan APH-1 Alnico II Pro

Bridge pickup:
Seymour Duncan TB-4 JB Trembucker

Tuners:
Gotoh SG360-07

Construction:
Set Through

Material specs:

  • Magohany body
  • Quilted Maple top
  • Mahogany neck
  • Ebony fretboard

During an email exchange with Bruce Kulick, his black ESP with the radioactive stickers on it came up. That’s the one he plays in the video for Turn On The Night. The non-make-up period of KISS is my favourite era, and I think the Crazy Nights years in particular are fantastic.

Bruce said he might be willing to sell it to me, but it would cost me around $22,000. At that moment, that was outside my budget.

So I decided to go looking for an identical black Horizon and put the white radioactive stickers on it myself. But of course, the number of controls, their type and their positioning all had to be exactly the same as on Bruce’s guitar.

I found one on Reverb. Once I’d modified the ESP into Bruce’s ESP, I posted it on Facebook. Bruce responded, and for a moment I was afraid he wasn’t going to like it. But his reaction was positive. He wanted to know how I’d pulled it off, and he felt honoured that I’d gone to the trouble.

What made it even better was that he’d had his own eye on that very ESP Kiso Horizon I’d bought from Reverb. But… I beat him to it.