This is the fifth and final ESP article in this run, and it closes out the brand’s section of this catalog with the cleanest artist connection of the bunch. Three ESP models into this phase, we’ve now watched James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Alexi Laiho, and George Lynch all get attached — correctly or not — to shapes that belong to other guitarists in this same five-name spreadsheet cluster. This time, the connection isn’t buried in old tour photos or a decades-retired stage guitar. It’s Stephen Carpenter of Deftones, and it’s not just his most famous early guitar — it’s the literal foundation of the signature series he still plays today.
What Is the ESP Horizon Shape
The Horizon occupies a distinctive middle ground in ESP’s catalog, deliberately built to bridge two very different guitar traditions. Brought to life in the 1980s during the peak of “Super-S” style guitars, the Horizon bridges the gap between S-type and Les-Paul-style instruments with a utilitarian body shape, a 25.5-inch scale length, a carved top, and a powerful dual-humbucker configuration. Most Horizon guitars pair a mahogany body with a maple neck — mahogany supplying rich tonal resonance, maple contributing top-end snap ideal for tight riffing — and the majority use set or neck-through-body construction, favoring sustain and generous upper-fret access. It’s one of ESP’s oldest and most enduring body designs, predating the E-II name by decades and remaining in active production continuously since the company’s early days.
Stephen Carpenter’s ESP Horizon: The Guitar Behind Two Landmark Albums
Long before Deftones guitarist Stephen “Stef” Carpenter had his own dedicated SC signature series, he was already closely associated with a specific, one-of-a-kind ESP Horizon Custom. This turquoise HHS-configured Horizon was the guitar Carpenter used to record 1997’s “Around the Fur” — it’s the exact instrument photographed in that album’s liner notes — and it also appears on several tracks from 2000’s “White Pony”, the two albums widely credited with establishing Deftones’ signature blend of alternative metal atmosphere and crushing riffing. The same guitar featured prominently in the “Back to School (Mini Maggit)” music video and served as a touring instrument for several years, appearing in multiple live television performances during that era.
The $55,000 Guitar
That original Horizon Custom has taken on a life of its own among collectors. The guitar eventually passed into the hands of a fan, and was appraised by Christie’s at $55,000 — a valuation shared publicly by Carpenter’s side project Sol Invicto, with an accompanying note about how strange it felt that “White Pony” had turned 25 years old and one of the actual recording instruments now belonged to a fan rather than the band. Carpenter’s specific pickup preference on that guitar — dual humbuckers positioned at the bridge and middle, an unusual choice — was reportedly inspired by Vivian Campbell’s signature Kramer Nightswan model, a lineage that also likely influenced other iconic 1990s metal pickup layouts of the era. The guitar’s provenance has been personally confirmed by Carpenter himself, making this one of the more thoroughly verified artist-guitar connections in this entire catalog.
The Horizon Shape Lives On in His Own Signature Series
Here’s the detail that seals this connection for good: Carpenter’s own long-running ESP/LTD signature guitars — the SC series that has carried his name for over two decades — are still explicitly built on a “Horizon-style” alder body construction, even as the electronics, scale length, and string count have evolved dramatically across his career from six-string to seven-, eight-, and nine-string extended-range instruments. In other words, this isn’t a case of an artist briefly touching a shape early in their career before moving elsewhere — the Horizon body is the literal foundation Carpenter’s entire signature guitar lineage has been built on for more than 25 years, right through to his most recent baritone and extended-range models.
Deftones and Carpenter’s Broader Story
For readers less familiar with the band behind this connection, Deftones formed in Sacramento, California in 1988, and built their identity around a genuinely unusual blend of crushing, down-tuned riffing and dreamy, atmospheric melody — a combination that set them apart from most of their nu-metal contemporaries in the late 1990s and helped the band remain critically and commercially relevant decades after acts from the same era faded. Carpenter’s guitar work is central to that identity: heavily palm-muted, dissonant low-string riffing contrasted against clean, reverb-drenched passages, all built around drop tunings (drop C, drop C#, and drop A# have all featured across the band’s catalog) that pushed him toward increasingly extended-range instruments as his career progressed — from the six-string Horizon-based guitars of the “Around the Fur” era to the seven-, eight-, and even nine-string ESP signature models he plays today.
Carpenter’s amplification history traces an interesting arc that mirrors many metal guitarists’ journeys from all-analog to hybrid digital rigs. In the “Around the Fur” era, he ran a Marshall JCM800 into an ADA MP-1 preamp and a Marshall 9200 dual monoblock power amp — his first time using a dedicated power amp setup. Over the following decades he moved through Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifiers, an assortment of Orange amplifiers (including the Dual Dark and Jim Root signature Tiny Terror), and eventually into Fractal Axe-Fx modeling for the bulk of his touring rig, though he’s mentioned needing considerable time to dial in digital patches to his satisfaction compared to the more immediate feel of his earlier tube-amp setups. His pedalboard across different eras has included the Rocktron Intellifex multi-effects unit, a Boss Hyper Fuzz, ZVEX Fuzz Factory, and Strymon’s BigSky reverb and Mobius modulation units for the ambient, textural side of Deftones’ sound. Through all of that gear evolution, the guitars themselves stayed remarkably consistent in one respect: the underlying Horizon-derived body shape carried through from that original 1997 Custom all the way to his current extended-range signature models.
Two Bonus Horizon Players Worth Knowing
Two other guitarists have Horizon connections worth mentioning for anyone researching this shape. Helmet’s Page Hamilton has one of the longest documented relationships with the model: he found his way to a magenta ESP Horizon Custom at the brand’s small New York shop in 1989, and that guitar’s tone still shapes Helmet’s sound decades later, with his own later ESP LTD PH-600 signature carrying forward the same Horizon-derived body. Anthrax and former Volbeat guitarist Rob Caggiano also has an ESP signature model built directly on his own customized Horizon, released as both the ESP Rob Caggiano and the more affordable LTD RC-600. Both underline just how many working metal and hard rock guitarists have gravitated toward this specific shape over the decades.
ESP’s Origins and the Horizon’s Place in Company History
ESP’s founder, Hisatake Shibuya, opened a shop called Electric Sound Products in Tokyo in 1975, initially selling custom replacement parts for guitars before the company began building complete instruments under the ESP and Navigator brands. By the mid-1980s, ESP had expanded into New York, building custom instruments for local artists, and it was during this era — alongside George Lynch’s Kamikaze becoming the company’s first signature model in 1985 — that ESP introduced the M1 Standard, M1 Custom, and Horizon Custom as core standard-line body shapes. That makes the Horizon one of ESP’s oldest continuously produced designs, predating even most of the company’s signature artist relationships.
ESP’s product hierarchy has stayed consistent in structure even as names have changed: the ESP Standard line (renamed E-II in 2014, with no other differences according to the company itself) sits below the handcrafted Custom Shop and above the budget-focused LTD line, with ESP Original Series and USA-built models occupying premium tiers above E-II depending on the specific era and market. Understanding this hierarchy explains why Carpenter’s earliest Horizon Custom, his later SC signature models, and the modern E-II Horizon NT-II covered in this article can all trace back to the same fundamental body design despite sitting at different price points and production eras.
The Names That Don’t Fit This Shape
The remaining names belong to other corners of ESP’s lineup entirely. James Hetfield’s ESP history centers on Explorer-derived shapes (the Snakebyte, Iron Cross, and Vulture signature lines); Kirk Hammett’s most famous instruments are split between the Eclipse-derived KH-3 Spider and the M-II-derived KH-2 series covered in the previous two articles in this thread; Alexi Laiho’s signatures were built on an asymmetric arrow-and-V-shaped body distinct from the Horizon’s more traditional double-cutaway outline; and George Lynch’s entire ESP legacy runs through his own Kamikaze design, ESP’s first-ever signature model, dating back to 1985. All are legitimate, well-documented ESP artists — none of them are the reason this particular shape exists in the catalog.
Construction and Specs
The current E-II Horizon NT-II carries the shape’s neck-through tradition forward with modern hardware. It’s built with a mahogany body, three-piece maple neck, ebony fingerboard with 24 extra-jumbo stainless steel frets, a bone nut, ESP strap locks, Gotoh locking tuners, and a Gotoh tune-o-matic bridge with tailpiece in a string-through-body design, typically finished with a quilted maple top in eye-catching gradient colorways. Electronics come from a pair of EMG active humbuckers — the 66TW in the neck position and 57TW in the bridge — wired for coil-splitting via push-pull controls on later production years, giving players access to thinner, single-coil-adjacent tones without leaving the guitar’s core humbucker voice behind.
A Note on Coil-Splitting Across Production Years
Worth flagging for buyers: owner reports suggest the push-pull coil-splitting feature wasn’t present on all production years of this model. Some 2018-era examples reportedly shipped with standard (non-push-pull) potentiometers despite being visually identical to later versions with the split-coil feature, so it’s worth confirming this detail directly with a seller if coil-splitting matters to your buying decision.
Tone Recipes
Alternative metal atmosphere: Neck humbucker, moderate gain, generous reverb or modulation. This voice — thick, dark, and slightly scooped — sits at the foundation of the atmospheric side of Deftones-adjacent tone, well suited to cleaner verses and ambient textures.
Crushing rhythm attack: Bridge humbucker, high gain, tight palm-muting. The classic setting for down-tuned, riff-driven rhythm work that this body shape and pickup configuration were built around from the start.
Coil-split clean/quack: Engage the push-pull split on either pickup for a thinner, more single-coil-like voice — useful for genre-crossing players who want Stratocaster-adjacent tonal options without switching guitars.
Comparisons and Family Tree
Within ESP’s broader Horizon lineup, the NT-II sits alongside the Horizon-I (a more vintage-spec Original Series model with a Floyd Rose and Seymour Duncan pickups) and the Horizon-III (featuring a longer, more angular upper horn and active or passive pickup options depending on configuration). Reviewers note the Horizon-III’s longer horn design reads as flashier compared to the NT-II’s more classic profile, while the NT-II is generally seen as having stronger resale value and more timeless shape appeal. Budget-tier LTD models and premium ESP Original and Custom Shop Horizons bookend the E-II tier at either end of the price spectrum, and Carpenter’s own SC signature series represents the most historically significant artist-driven branch of this same body lineage.
It’s also worth understanding how Carpenter’s own guitar choices have evolved beyond the core Horizon body over the decades. His earliest recording rig relied on passive Seymour Duncan pickups with an unusual HHS bridge-and-middle configuration; later signature models shifted to active EMG humbuckers (81/85 pairings, and eventually EMG-707 and EMG-808X pickups as he moved into 7- and 8-string territory), before a more recent shift to Fishman Fluence active/passive-switchable pickups. In 2023, Carpenter also began playing Kiesel guitars alongside his ESP instruments — including a headless Kiesel Vader model built to his specifications — broadening his gear rotation beyond ESP for the first time in decades, though the Horizon-derived ESP and LTD signature models remain central to his recorded catalog.
Buying Guide
The E-II Horizon NT-II suits players who want Les-Paul-adjacent sustain and tone with more contemporary features — active EMG pickups, a slimmer neck profile, and 24-fret upper access that a genuine vintage-spec single-cutaway typically can’t match. It’s a strong pick for players working in down-tuned, atmospheric metal territory in the Deftones mold, particularly if coil-splitting versatility matters to your sound. Buyers specifically chasing Carpenter’s own recorded tone should note that his historically significant guitar used passive Seymour Duncan pickups in an HHS configuration rather than the active EMG HH setup on the current production NT-II — a detail worth knowing if exact tonal replication is the goal rather than just the underlying body shape.
Players drawn to this shape purely for its metal-genre pedigree should also weigh scale length and string range against their own playing style: while the standard six-string E-II Horizon NT-II covered here uses a conventional 25.5-inch scale, Carpenter’s own signature lineage has increasingly moved toward baritone-scale, extended-range instruments built for extreme drop tunings — a direction worth exploring separately if down-tuned riffing is the primary draw, rather than the standard-tuning versatility the six-string NT-II is built around.
Ownership Notes
Owner reports on the E-II Horizon NT-II are largely positive, with players praising the neck-through construction’s sustain and the guitar’s overall build quality relative to price. As with several other E-II models in this catalog, buyers should confirm specific electronics details (particularly the coil-split push-pull feature) against the exact production year before purchasing, since specs have shifted subtly across the model’s run. The Horizon-III variant is frequently cited by owners as feeling slightly lighter than the NT-II despite sharing near-identical neck specifications on paper — worth factoring in if weight and shape aesthetics are a deciding factor between the two.
FAQ
Does Stephen Carpenter actually play the Horizon shape?
Yes, and unusually thoroughly. His famous 1990s Horizon Custom was used to record “Around the Fur” and parts of “White Pony,” and his own long-running SC signature series — still in production today — remains built on a Horizon-style body.
Do James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Alexi Laiho, or George Lynch play the Horizon?
No. Hetfield’s ESP history runs through Explorer-derived shapes, Hammett’s through the Eclipse and M-II lines, Laiho’s through his own arrow/V-shaped signatures, and Lynch’s through his Kamikaze design — none connected to the Horizon.
What’s the difference between the Horizon NT-II and Horizon-III?
The Horizon-III features a longer, more angular upper horn compared to the NT-II’s more classic profile, along with some differences in pickup and hardware options depending on the specific configuration.
What pickups did Stephen Carpenter’s original Horizon use, versus the current E-II model?
Carpenter’s 1990s Horizon Custom used passive Seymour Duncan humbuckers in an unusual HHS (bridge and middle) configuration. The current production E-II Horizon NT-II instead uses active EMG 57TW/66TW pickups with coil-splitting.