SE Paul’s Guitar Mods and Info

[NolaBG]

Nice upgrades! Been mulling putting in some Bareknuckles or Dragon 2's in mine. Still happy with the stock pickups though. Curious if you've considered a bridge swap.

i haven’t. What are you considering?

 

[NolaBG]

How easy are phase 3 to put in a CE? I’ve been curious.

Do you mean SE? If so, I think it depends on the model. The Paul’s uses kluson style, which have a smaller bushing. I just noticed today that PRS actually makes a kluson style phase 3. Not sure if they’ll drop right into the Paul’s or not but I hadn’t noticed those before.

 

[Draconomics]

i haven’t. What are you considering?

Well, I like the stock bridge alot. The PRS wraparound design is simple, elegant, and works quite well and the bridge that comes stock on the PG is a very high end piece of hardware.

BUT, there are those times when because you cannot intonate individual strings they can be slightly problematic when you try use the bridge to compensate for those issues. From my tests, I seem to get more precise intonation on my PG when I swapped for an old machined Pigtailmusic bridge I had in my drawer. John Mann also has a similar bridge too. Here's mine with the new bridge. The location of the saddles looks stupid, but trust me, it's intonated.

 

[Broseph]

This has been a super informative thread. Especially the color coding. When comparing the SE wiring to the core there seems to be a big difference with a large resistor on the SE volume pot compared to the core wiring. What I’m most curious to know is how this could impact if I went the Lindy Frailin unbucker route? Could it be as simple as swapping the pickups? Or would I need to do anything with the large 820k resistor? The unbucker was designed to have PAF sound when in full humbucker and then minimal volume loss (by having unbalanced pickups when splitting) so my gut instinct says it should be wired more like the core. But I realize I don't know if the SE was designed in a similar way or not. I can't find any info on it.

 

[markd21]

Dude, that is AWESOME!!! Huge visiual improvement over stock, and if the tones are still there - even better!!

 

[Lewguitar]

Awesome that you figured things out. This might help too. The original PRS wiring, and obligatory stock guitar pic too.

Thanks for that diagram.

Should be very helpful in the future.

That one is going into my guitar wiring file.