When I got this guitar, I regarded this color as normal black.  But further observation revealed it to be translucent finish, so-called see-through black. After I found this fact, I didn’t take it into further consideration.

But recently, I found out a description in “Bokura ga tsukutta guitar no meiki(exquisite guitars we made)” written by Hidesato Shiino.

In summary, he tried various type of finish during his three years(1975〜1978) of working at ESP.  He came to recognize that the quality of paint material was inferior to German’s.  They finally invented some method to compensate the weakness of paint quality, one of them was see-through finish.  See-Through Black, Red and White, got good reputation from customers not only from domestic but also from foreign.  They were pioneers of translucent finish of guitar.

The finish procedure was performed mainly by Mr.Nishimori called "The Master of Finish".  The sunburst finish which he did was praised for its gratefulness and called NSB(Nishimori Sunburst).

Catalogue says that body material is ash but I assume it might be sen(Japanese ash). 3.34kg(includes strings). (Updated 2016.8.25)