My wife and I had an absolute blast at Experience PRS 2018! We will be back for the next one, which I am led to believe will be 2020. 35th anniversary, get your wallets ready!
We met up with so many forumites, including
@Bill SAS 513 ,
@11top ,
@markie ,
@toothace ,
@vchizzle ,
@jfb ,
@Tosca ,
@Fred Baer ,
@alantig ,
@rugerpc ,
@JustRob (and son Steve),
@Texas_minor_blues , and probably a few others I don't recall!
And of course
@Shawn@PRS , sorry for bugging you so much (where is "this" happening, when is "that", blah blah blah), but you are such a great source of info!
And to PRSh and the whole "family" of PRS employees, thank you very much for opening your doors, hosting the factory tour (we spent hours in there), and putting on such a great event!
And the Bands! We really enjoyed every single one of them. My wife was astounded at the bass solo at the end of the last song by Visible@Night, and has redoubled her interest in mastering that instrument. Dave Weiner is an awesome guy too.
We saw DG in our hotel lobby when we left on Sunday morning - I waved, said "thanks!", and then bothered him no further. Oh, he said something during his Clinic that piqued my interest. Something like "This guitar [the one he was playing] is an older one, a bit different in the electronics from what is in the current model." So...what has changed in the DGT over the years?
There wasn't time to do everything we wanted, which is great - we can do stuff a little different next time! More watching the bands on Friday, more actual playing guitars or amps that are available to demo, maybe less factory tour.
Oh, the one thing that was a little underwhelming was the amp demo tent - the amps were all demoed via cab sim loadboxes into headphones. The max volume was way too low, and I couldn't find a way to raise it - I assume this was to protect eardrums, but I couldn't get a decent tone out of the amp as a result (I tried two). Maybe I just couldn't find the master volume, but I looked at and tweaked everything I could find. I like to play my amps loud, leaning into the sound blasting out. I know that isn't practical - apparently not too many Experiences ago they didn't have headphones, so it was indeed a cacophony of competing loud amps. But a louder headphone set up would be nice.