I was encouraged to learn that the Guitar Hero: World Tour guitar would have detachable faceplates, like the Guitar Hero III Les Paul before it. There are some very nice official Red Octane guitar faceplates for the Les Paul.

I tend towards the semi-realistic finishes myself, I’ve picked my four favorites from the store, above.

(There were also some official band centric faceplates for some of the bands in GH3, such as Kiss, Panic at the Disco, Sex Pistols, Korn, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice Cooper, Fall Out Boy, and so forth.) There’s lots more at the official store. If you’re interested, hurry, because these Les Paul faceplates are all on closeout for $6.99 or lower at the moment. I can definitely recommend the mirror and black mirror faceplates, they look fantastic and are nearly impossible finishes to achieve yourself.

• Try searching on Amazon to find guitar faceplates
• Try searching on eBay to find guitar faceplates

I also found these amazing Coop Guitar Hero Faceplates as well.

They’re one-piece aluminum, which is great for durability but it means you’ll have to mount them with double-sided foam tape — you can’t use the standard plastic clip attachment points.

I was disappointed to discover that there are no official Guitar Hero: World Tour guitar faceplates available at launch, yet. However, the Red Octane blog did sneak preview three new World Tour guitar faceplate designs, with no ETA.

As I mentioned, I prefer faceplates that mimic real guitar finishes rather than arbitrary designs, so these don’t do much for me. I’ll probably end up manually painting my own to get the finishes I want. Time to brush up on my fake plastic guitar painting skills ..

Update: See Metal Flake Les Paul Faceplates!