All the following assumes for the moment that you're not a troll, and only ranted exuberantly in your first post out of shock and horror that the SE wasn't everything you hoped, and/or you wanted to make a big splash. I respond with a measure of your outraged woundedness.
I've played guitar since 1967, first electric in '69, gig-stage-studio, tech'ed on'em for 6 years in the 80s before finding a job that paid a living wage, have never stopped playing, collecting, and obsessing, and have done work for a couple major brands. I have a pile of guitars now that no sane and responsible mortal fool could defend. I've handled a few guitars.
So far I've owned over 30 SEs, birthdates from 2010 to 2022, used and new, Korea and Indonesia. I've yet to taste a lemon. I'd like to think I just choose wisely or am extraordinarily lucky at buying from a distance - but the universe doesn't usually arrange itself to bless me in particular, so I think I've probably assayed a pretty representative selection of the breed.
I'm always impressed - and sometimes
astonished - at the quality, playability, and gigglingly good value for the dollar. I've found no substantive difference between guitars of Korean and Indo manufacture. (There's probably something wrong with me, but my experience with Indonesian guitars from several brands has been so consistently positive that I now consider "made in Indonesia" a badge of honor, a good-feature bullet point.) I've also had numerous Cort-built guitars, starting in the 80s, a couple with "Cort" on the headstock. I think
Cort is an ugly
name for a guitar brand (sounds so hard, brutish, and short) and I don't like their script logo - but, again, nothing but good experiences and a lot of earned respect from me.
And yes, the PRS tremolo - while it
looks a little like other brands', and was obviously based on them - works remarkably well. Paul Smith is a brilliant refiner of hardware. Lots of little tweaks, even more attention to manufacturing precision, and it all works together to contribute to the cohesive stability and musical responsiveness of the guitars (across all price ranges and places of manufacture). Everything learned in Maryland has been adapted and applied to the SE series. They're only (slightly) junior by comparison to the Maryland-built machines, but are fine in their own right and certainly stand
more than tall in their price range.
Also, yup, it's the world standard of gig bags!
For the moment, I'll take your specific objections as though they were a sincere review and not projectiles lobbed ashore to rile the natives. And I'll ignore "junk" and "crappy built" as colorful rhetoric unsubstantiated by any specific observations. (Like:
what is junky about it, and what elements of crappy build do you observe?)
You'd like the neck to be 3/16" slimmer (which seems a lot for a neck that's already pretty thin - you must be a ferocious shredder). But like favorite underwear, neck profiles are notoriously personal and subjective. PRS makes a variety of profiles, and I bet one or more would be fat enough for you.
You accuse the pickups of "atrocious, no-balls" tone. I find them just the opposite - so it might be illustrative to ask what you're comparing them to. What your playing context has been, and what tone you're looking for. I sup
pose I come from a more vintage, classic-rock/jazz/country/blues/rockabilly/old prog context - not a modern metal place - so both the 85/15 and TCI pickups (which are probably in your 24-08) are, to me, both hotter and brighter than I'm used to.
But playing the SEs has taught me the value of the tone control and the volume knob - both of which are much more effective on PRSes than I'm used to from other guitars (another illustration of PRS attention to detail). So for "normal" humbuckery tone, comparable to other guitars, I back the tone off to 6 or 7 most of the time. When I want all the extra clarity and bite, crank'er back up. When I switch to single-coil mode, I find I want to back the tone down to 3-5 - and get the same edge I get on actual single-coil guitars at almost full-up. Volume knob is just as effective.
The PRS is a different guitar than whatever you've been playing; it might require some knob-turning and gain-changing at your amp/other output device to sound its best. But while so far
I'm enjoying the SE pickups for what they are -somewhere in a carefully considered range between "classic/vintage" and "modern" - certainly not all PRS buyers agree. There's
lots of pickup swapping in PRSLand, from the top of the Core range down to the SE series. I wouldn't expect you to profess love for a guitar that
feels wrong neck-wise - but aside from that, when a guitar is otherwise A-OK (feel, playability, stability, look, etc) but doesn't
sound just as a guy likes, obviously a pickup change can bring it home. Pickups
are the single most important contributor to the tone of an electric guitar. (And surely I'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know.)
Also, the pickups are very sensitive to string proximity. If you haven't already, experiment with pickup height.
It's horrible that we are at the place where we are forced to pay at least $1,000. just to get a barely usable, entry level guitar.
I have to say, this sentence surprises me in many ways.
From my perspective, the world is
swimming in sub-1,000.00
way more than just "usable" or "entry level" guitars. I've bought 200.00 new guitars in the last decade which stomp all
over the 200.00 guitars of the 70s and 80s. And, especially after adjusting for inflation, quality guitars at every price point cost less (by comparison to other goods) than they have at any time in the past. It's a freakin' golden age for guitar manufacture. I have to wonder what time periods, and what guitars, you're using as a benchmark here. And what guitar (at any price) do you consider a usable entry-level guitar...
... and why, if you've been playing guitar for 45 years, are you buying "entry-level" guitars anyway?
