By creed and conviction, I don't approve of 24-fret guitars. I don't need the extra frets, and I've taken a doctrinal vow to believe that the neck pickup position, away from the 24th-fret sweet harmonic spot, renders the tone less fulsome than God (and Gibson) intended.
Stop me if I've told this one before (or ignore the senior rambling), but I was at the NAMM Show in '85 where PRS guitars - in the form of what we now call the Custom 24 - were introduced to the world at large, and like most mere mortals, was fairly gobsmacked at the shape, flame, color, fit-n-finish, and quality. I did get to finger one, unamplified, at the show, and loved the feel. Got the bad wants. Given my socio-economic non-status at the time, owning one was more aspiration than possibility.
But I did get to play one through an amp some months later...and lost all interest in owning one. All the great stuff was still great, but - especially clean - the guitar seemed to me a tone-free zone. With gain, an ideal tractable and consistent control surface for a high-gain amp, with just enough variation across the pickups and settings to provide a great hard-rock palette which couldn't possibly mud up the low end in a busy spectrum.
But clean character? I thought it the height of bland anonymity, and blamed that perceived deficiency on a toxic combination of 24 frets and the 25" scale length, with neither the warmth and bloom of Gibson nor the snap and punch of Fender.
Thus for several intervening decades, my jerking knee has responded to the PRS as an ideal guitar for "modern" rock - defined, I suppose, as the higher-gain, brighter and bitier sonorities and textures in the hard rock of the 80s onward and its derivatives. None of which was or is my thang, as they say. (Not that I have anything against it, or that I don't appreciate those tones in those contexts, or that I'm agin' change or want y'all to git off my lawn. I deploy suchlike tones from time to time, and think I'm competent in that zone...but they aren't my home base.)
But one thing and another yadda yadda, and some months ago I began to explore PRS in more detail, and lo and behold I find myself with a silly stack of the damn things - mostly SEs. Among them has been a pile of Custom 24s (as well as PRSeses at different scale lengths, so I can better parse the contributions [or subtractions] of scale vs fret count/neckpup position).
And hey hey wouldn't you know it, I'm now perfectly accepting of the CU24 spec. What I once heard as neither here nor there (on a conceptual Gibson-Fender continuum) I now hear as a pretty durn good midway point between them - proving that that midpoint is actually a distinct place of its own (as others have observed). I appreciate the versatility and the spectrum. The somewhat attenuated low end is, I admit, an antidote to mud (which can be fattened at the amp if necessary). The closer proximity of neck and bridge pickups makes for a smoother and more consistent range of voicings, so that the guitar doesn't sound schizophrenic when switching between, splitting coils, and blending the pickups.
(I also appreciate the -08 switching "innovation," but I refuse to gush about it since I've had numerous guitars since the 80s with that functionality, and don't think of it as such a big deal. The trick of not killing an entire coil when splitting isn't even entirely new - and while I readily admit that incorporating it makes for much better single-coil tones, I won't bow down in gratitude for the separate toggle switches when each pickup should have its own split under its own push-pull pot).
ANYWAY - I'm now happy to acknowledge that the Custom 24 spec which put PRS on the map is indeed a classic configuration, an "iconic" standard along with the classics of the previous decades. It deserves to be the perennial flagship of the line, the spec against which all other PRS guitars are defined in terms of their variation from it. I have several, and every time I play one I'm impressed all over again at its achievement in seamlessly merging 30 prior years of electric guitar evolution into one species. It could almost be said that the Custom 24 is the apotheosis of electric guitar - the golden mean, possibly the distilled essence of the instrument. Every time I play one, I'm tickled all over again, and find it impossible to sell.
But it's not my favorite PRS to play. Maybe it's that the slightly longer neck and its associated playing position is a bit less comfortable for a short-armed, short-torsoed, small-handed old guy (though I'm not consciously aware of that when playing - and have no trouble with longer-scale instruments). Or maybe it's just all those prior years of conditioning. The 22-fretters consistently get more of my playing time - and, leaving the full hollowbodies out of this conversation, my favorite solidbodies tend to be those which aren't solid. Semis and heavily chambered guitars always press my juicy tone buttons.
Which probably makes a Custom 22 Semi - with separately splittable Paul's Guitar pickups - my personal Ultimate PRS. Luckily, I can cobble one together.
But I'm happy to stand right up with the rest of y'all and praise the 100% True Classicness (time-tested, no less) of the Custom 24.
