Verified answer

The 335 and the 175 are great guitars. You can't go wrong with either. It should be noted that the Epi. Les Paul IS capable of some great clean tones. You can either back off the volume on the guitar a bit or replace the pickups altogether.

Interestingly enough, the active pickup was first devised to provide a very CLEAN sound for guitarists who played jazz and other idioms that required a high output CLEAN tone. Later on, many rock players found that the active pickups would drive their amps and distortion pedals harder creating a heavier distortion. Since then active pickups have become the rage for younger metal players. To take advantage of this emerging market, active pickup makers like EMG have developed systems to capitalize on this new market with pickup and preamp designs tailored to deliver very high output just for the aggressive over-driven sound. Some of these systems allow you to use an adjustable trimpot to set the actual gain level of the pickups internally. If your setup is so equipped you could adjust the gain structure down a bit to "clean up" the output gain.

Definitley get an ES-335, you will not regret it. B.B. King's "Lucille" is a ES-355, the main difference being it does have the sound holes that the ES-335 has and the hardware is gold. I have a ES-335 and I absolutely love it. I think the sound hole give you a fuller sound plus it is just so versatile, like you said, it's good for rock, blues, and I even play punk with it.

I believe that the ES-335s ship with classic humbucker pickups which translate the body's natural resonance into smooth jazz tones or searing distorted leads.

Second the motion.

Once had one of these (as did Roy Orbison) with that 'flip' tailpiece.

Semi-hollows (as some thin bodies) provide that mellow, jazz characteristcs too.

Only others to compare would be the Ibanez, Yamaha and Heritage brand models.