🎸 PRS Follow-Up

Following my purchase of the PRS SE Custom 24 last weekend, I did some upgrades to the guitar. There were some things I did not like about the guitar and I just had to change those things. Enter the new and improved PRS SE Custom 24!

Can you spot the difference?

The first and most important upgrade is the tuning heads. With a tremolo not being a fixed bridge, it is important for the tuners to hold tune perfectly. The stock PRS tuners are wonderful, but it could be better. Took out those stock PRS tuners and replaced them with Gotoh SG381-MG Chrome tuners.

These new tuners hold tune perfectly well; that's what locking tuners are supposed to do anyway. The locking mechanism differs from my Fenders though. Instead of tightening at the back, these tuners are tightened from the top via a screwdriver (a little more troublesome but that's fine with me).

Next up, I present to you the classic PRS look and feel. Say goodbye to those ugly zebra pickups!!! However, I merely just covered those ugly pickups instead of swapping them (still got a lot of experimenting to do on the 85/15 'S' pickups). The strange discovery was, both neck and bridge pickups are the exact same pickup, both at 50mm pole spacing.

Funny why PRS just puts the same pickup in both position, just upside down of each other. No wonder my tone sounds similar at either position. This might be good, might be bad, but until my tone experiments are done, I'll just keep it as it is.

Both upgrades weren't done by me though. They were done by Michael from Magnify Studios at Bishan Street 11. Found his guitar setup services on Carousell and decided to let him help me with my upgrades, as well as help me set the new guitar up.

He did a great job with the pickup covers and the tuning heads. Now let's talk about the setup. Action is low, neck feels smooth, almost perfect. Almost, because the tremolo is still giving my G string problems. I still feel that the nut can be widened further for my new string gauge of 10s, but Michael doesn't think that way. Granted, I don't really use the tremolo on this guitar anyway (Fender Deluxe settles all my vibrato needs).

Total cost for this whole thing is: $25 for both pickup covers (brought elsewhere), $20 for the new Elixir strings (Davis Guitar), $60 for setup (with pickup covers installation and soldering) and $90 for the new set of Gotoh tuners (with installation too). Seems pretty expensive to me but I know it will all be worth it.

Now I'm left with a full set of unused PRS tuners. Don't really know how I can put these into use so I'll probably sell them away. Thought of keeping these tuners for a future project guitar but I doubt I will like the idea of making a project guitar (takes too much time and effort).

Done, there's my sweet little axe! Looks awesome and ready to rock! Why do I get the feeling that I will be keeping this guitar even longer than the others in my collection? Why do I get the feeling that I will perform more upgrades to this guitar in the future? Hmm...

I love my PRS SE Custom 24!!!

Edwin Ang

30th March 2018

***Update as of 13th May 2018: Guitar has been sold for $950.