Prina
Avoiding imperial entanglements
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2023
- Messages
- 1,292
After hearing about the quality of Korean SEs and being so impressed with my Christmas-time S2 McSC I decided that my brother needed his own PRS felicity. Serendipity smiled and placed this '12 245 at the local GC for under $500. It had been there over a month, likely because it was a rescue effort: a decade of dirt on components, no oil ever on the fretboard and a non-adjusted neck with a massive bow due to strings so big that they had to be literally yanked, hard, out of the nut. A long evening, tung oil, isopropyl alcohol and new, appropriate strings brought it back.
It's a very different beast than the McSC. In some ways the 245 outshines it: the Grover tuners, the unbound neck which is perfect compared to the S2 having a slight step-off between the binding and the mahogany, the fretboard has better color, the veneer on top of the thick slab of nicely contoured maple is still perfect after a decade and the electronics covers on the back are flush rather than sticking out.
The S2 is a great PRS and sustains forever on the open strings, the thicker & heavier 245 is an unabashedly awesome Les Paul. The downside: the pickups. My humbuckers have always been vintage style, lower output A2's with that vintage clarity. These moderate, 9k A5's don't really do clarity, the neck has a lot of low-mid mud and the bridge doesn't sparkle, maybe more DiMarzio Super Distortion than PAF. I'm thinking, prior to going with new pups, of swapping the magnets (subject for a later thread) and even before that I dropped the pickups down nearly to the rings which helped a lot. Still they never fully cleaned up. So right now it's more of a one trick pony, but that pony gallops through a cranked Marshall screaming and singing (via Fractal FM9).
My brother may have to wait a bit.
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