What follows was copied/pasted from an email I sent a friend last week. He won't mind, I'm sure...
It arrived Friday afternoon via FedEx. The packed box itself was featherweight. The gigbag will be replaced soon enuf with a "proper" case. The guitar itself might actually be THE lightest guitar that I own (and I do have a bunch!). Certainly close to being the lightest, and nothing else is coming to mind. Yikes.
Opening the bag... IMO, it’s
gorgeous, probably one of my favorites amongst all those being posted over at the PRS forum. I’m
loving the swirls, how nicely distributed they are, but still how different they are everywhere, along with the waves of thin cracks in the top, plus the three outright nail holes, too. Plus the satin finish. And the 150 yr old fingerboard wood, very dark, looking like ebony. (Yay!) Add in the offset body shape and two new and different PUs and I’m a very, VERY happy camper right there with quite an entirely new guitar for me! Really, there's no appreciable sonic overlap with my other PRSes—or really anything at all that I own. It's that unique. IMO.
Tuning it, I could already feel the body resonating against my chest, and that by quite a bit. Promising. VERY loud acoustic response, too. Like maybe you could actually use this recorded, unplugged for an interesting rhythm guitar track, at least in a double-tracked approach.
The neck is nicely ample, one of my favorite shapes (although, I do easily adapt). The satin finish on the neck (and the back) reveals
possibly a
bit too much "grain feel” in the wood, but I’m also thinking that they left out the “filling the pores” stage in building these guitars. Cost cutting? Maybe, but in keeping with the overall build feel of it? No matter, once I start playing, I could care less.
Cranked, it sounds fantastic. That said, I
definitely enjoyed its response and tone even whilst only down in the below-5 area on the Volume knob. Wow. (I actually play "down there" a lot.) Tonally, it was VERY clear, present (not at all too much so or trebly), and I also found it to be sweetly expressive, too. (Hee hee. Hopefully,
I helped out there a bit!). Like any PRS, there’s a GREAT, useful sweep on both control knobs—which I'm constantly using—and the pull-up Tone knob yields a great
95% the same volume but in a single-coil sound. (How’d they do that???) The SC setting is really quiet, too, IMO, but both SC and HB tones are excellent! Bonus: I don't usually
ever like the middle toggle settings on any guitar, but with this Vela, both versions actually sound not only useable but even
very good. So there I have
all five PU tones sounding great, varied, and very sensitive (in a good way) to both Volume and Tone knobs. Happy happy happy!
I started out that first night playing the more soaring stuff. Fun!!! Played a good couple of hours at least. TBH, I wasn’t
quite sure of the tone with the new Starla-imported pickup; hmm... it's kind of "wooly" on 10, almost with a Gretsch-like feel. At first. (I use my Gretsches for genre-specific stuff, not usually my “standard” rock things, so I was
maybe a little bit disappointed here—at first. But that said, it’s also definitely not a Gretsch-alike either, maybe more like a distant cousin.) IMO, the new neck pickup design (new for PRS) is wonderful… very, very different, in my experience, and it will certainly be quite useful along the way. (I almost wish that it had two of these new pickups, actually. Hmm.) The
second night, though, I played even longer, and I began learning what the guitar was capable of, melding, adapting my playing to the capabilities of the guitar. Eventually, those met right in the middle and I was thrilled.
Zero disappointments.
Overall, though, I’d probably want to be using this in a rootsy-sorta band, folk-rock, country-rock, Americana stuff. IMO, it would be especially perfect for those styles. Shoot me, I'm probably way too genre-specific for my own good. This guitar could probably play anything except maybe metal.
Oh, yeah. My (entirely supportive, even enabling) wife
really likes it, a lot. Even my son, the Art Director (and a great drummer) liked it a lot, esp the 150 yr old reclaimed aspect and the offset shape.
