Thank you Bob.
The guys at GC are a good bunch, I know they will take care of the issue. As I stated, sounds like a fluke, which happens. My guy at GC has his tech waiting for me, I know it will be fine. I will keep you posted on the results.
cheers,
Bogiedr
No offense to you Bogiedr, but a lot of us are not exactly what you would call fans of GC. In fact a lot of us really don't care for GC at all, except maybe to check out some equipment we are interested in - and then we order it from places we trust, either local or online. GC has a very bad reputation for having some seriously messed up guitars hanging on their walls. Why? Because they get beat on by a whole bunch of people that abuse the $hit out of them. I can't tell you how many messed up guitars I had to pass on at GC because they were messed up.
Think about a super nice Santana SE hanging on the wall at GC . . . A significant number of people are going to grab it and try it out and a very significant number of them are going to abuse it, hammering on the selector switch, etc.
The PRS SE's are real decent guitars, no problem there. They are definitely in another class from Epiphones and a lot of these other inexpensive brands. At the same time I can understand that laying down 700 dollars for a guitar is not exactly small change. Usually a real decent guitar costs about that much though, at least. Rest assured that the PRS SE's are not junk.
I have had switch problems on a quite a few guitars. I replaced them myself with very minimal effort. Most recently I had the switch do the same thing yours did, with a brand new, couple week old, 800 dollar made in Mexico Fender '72 Deluxe Telecaster reissue. It is a really nice guitar and I was surprised when the switch messed up. I replaced it with an American Fender three way switch. I have had a few strats develop messed up five way switches and I always replace them with American strat five way switches which are super inexpensive and easy to put in.
A messed up switch can keep you from using a certain pickup and it is annoying, but I wouldn't hold it against PRS personally. In fact it is possible that you could have fixed it yourself by taking it out and looking at it. Maybe something was stuck in the switch or something like that. It shouldn't have been binding up and it is a simple mechanical device.
I have been working on my guitars for years and a lot of the stuff that goes wrong is easily correctable with just reasonable skills. Learning how to do simple repairs like replacing a switch can be interesting and even fun. I wouldn't want my guitar sitting at some place waiting for the warranty repair to get done when I could get them to give me the part and I could put it in myself.
No criticism of you. Different people do things different ways.
You have a super nice guitar there. I would be highly surprised if any other problems show up. Personally I would not let the GC "so-called" guitar techs touch one of my guitars. Any good guitar shop should have "real" guitar techs on site that can do a good job with almost everything. For serious work that I don't feel comfortable doing I have a guy around here that I found that is really good with fixing guitars and he actually builds and sells amps. He is a retired Air Force dude and musician. He is also very reasonable. I had him completely rewire a nice Epiphone LP Standard special edition and "correctly" rewire the kill switch I had a "so-called" tech install. The guitar came back well fixed and it sounds and plays great.
I would say hold onto the Santana, a beautiful guitar, and give it some time to show you what it is. I doubt that it will disappoint you for a very long time.
Your personal experience aside, I would strongly advise exercising a high level of caution when dealing with GC, and I wouldn't let their techs mess with my stuff. You have to do what you personally want to do, but experience has taught me to be very skeptical of GC dudes.
I just hope that you haven't been turned off to PRS guitars. I hope you are able to bond with that very nice Santana guitar. Give it a chance. I play at lot of other brands of my guitars, but my Santana SE and other two SE's are great guitars and my Santana is at arms length, plugged into a nice amp. I also have my Hartley Peavey Signature double humbucker guitar with tiger maple top plugged into another great amp and it is also at arms length.
I understand how you might be apprehensive toward your Santana because of this obvious fault that should have been caught by someone, somewhere along the line. I agree with the others that it is highly unlikely that it came from PRS with that fault. Again, be wary of GC.
