Guys, I'm too busy enjoying this thing to take super detailed pictures tonight. I do have some that I took when I opened the case for the first time at the guitar shop. They are below.
Short/quick review: It's freaking great and totally worth the 5 month wait that I "endured."
Long review/detail: This does not "feel" like a PRS guitar in the sense that the neck profile/frets/radius are all totally different than what you experience when you play a Custom 24 or any "normal" PRS guitar. The frets are "smaller" than the standard PRS frets, but they are not what I would call "vintage" like on a AVRI or something of that nature. They're thin side to side like those, but taller. The neck profile, to my hands, feels like a 57 reissue strat, but with less depth front to back. I guess that I'm saying is that I noticed more "shoulder" on the sides of the neck than what I'm used to from a PRS carve. It took a few minutes, but I quickly adjusted. It comes strung with 10s. I play 9s on 25.5" scale instruments, so that was my first move after the initial jam session. I'm playing the guitar through my Carr Mercury V amplifier. With the volume control on the guitar on 10, it sounded "ok." It wasn't quite as "snappy" and "quacky" as I like my strat-style guitars, because I tend to favor maple fretboard/50s era pickups. I was concerned. We all know it was modeled after a 60s strat, which are "known" for being more bassy/less quacky/trebly, perhaps. The problem got "worse" (for my taste) when I rolled the volume knob down. I immediately noticed that this guitar does *not* have a treble bleed circuit installed. I love the clarity and chime of single coils and I use "old school" channel switching by rolling the volume knob down for rhythm and up for overdrive/solos. This was a second concerning factor (for me and my taste and playing style).
I put the guitar on my bench and took the 10s off. The neck was darn-near straight, which is just the way I like it. Barely any relief at all. Usually I have to adjust the rod on my PRS guitars out of the box. This one I didn't need to touch. It was perfect. That was a positive. I had decided that I was going to use alligator clips to non-invasively install a treble bleed capacitor (180uF, which is what PRS uses on ALL guitars EXCEPT the 594 variants and the Silver Sky). I started to take the screws out of the pickguard and *DANG*. Those suckers are TIGHT. That's one thing that I have to comment on. The tolerances on this guitar are tighter than any other strat-style guitar I've owned, and that includes Suhrs and Custom Shop F guitars. I got the pickguard off and noticed that the volume pot has a resistor on the left-most lug (L1). My *guess* is that this modifies the taper of the potentiometer in some way. I clipped in the treble bleed and reinstalled the guard. Again, putting the screws back in was tough. Everything on the guitar is *so* tightly put together. Obviously, this is a good thing! I put the 9s on the guitar and lowered the action to just a hair under 4/64" on the bass side and right on 3/64" on the treble side. Of course, I wanted to try out those dreaded "above the 12th fret bends" on that "crappy" and "unplayable" 7.25" radius. No fret out *at all*, even on 2 step bends with the action as I said above and a straight neck. I set the intonation for the new string gauges. DANG! Those screws are just as tight as the pickguard screws! Again, this is good! I then dropped the pickups a whole turn on each side of each pickup to compensate for the slightly lower action than factory spec.
I plugged back into the Mercury V. Much better, but still not what I was hoping for. I love that Sultans of Swing tone, which was a 1961 Strat. How can this guitar be *that much* different? It was modeled after a 1963/4. This is much more bassy and darker, with less quack. I was disappointed. For the record, the bass/middle/treble on the amp were all set straight up and down. I decided to switch the character voicing on the amp from a 60s-style Marshall to a 70s/80s style Marshall, which is a feature of the Mercury V. BOOM! The guitar comes alive! There's the chime! There's the quack! Roll off the volume knob and it cleans up nicely and maintains the chime perfectly! The neck pickup is Jimi, the middle SRV, and Knopfler quack is there, the bridge pickup sounds great! Blackmore in spades!
Moral of the story? If you want the quack/chime, make sure and tweak your amp! One simple toggle switch on the amp took me from relative disappointment to being totally in love. This things sustains and rings so very well. Obviously I'm *now* in the honeymoon phase, but I sure wasn't when I started. I'd be willing to bet I could have left the 10s on there and been perfectly happy if I'd have just flipped that switch at the start!
Also, I installed the same treble bleed circuit on both of my 594s a month or so ago, one with humbuckers and one with the soapbar P90s. It's just my style, it's not a knock on the guitar. I like that sound. That's a "me" thing. I love the thing now. Very satisfied customer.
- I kid, I kid...........
