PRS Wood Library FRESH DELIVERY
Published on 10 November 2022
Think ‘PRS’ and one of the first associations your brain is likely to make is brilliantly figured wood. Whilst not the first guitar brand to highlight nature’s own beauty with highly flamed or figured tops and lush veneers, the Maryland-based brand has certainly made it one of their trademarks.
Timber is an integral part of any guitar build, of course, and the importance goes deeper than mere surfaces, as attractive as those may be. PRS know how different wood pairings can affect the sound of a guitar: from body to neck to top, every piece plays a part in the overall sound of the finished instrument. With all of this in mind - the visual and the sonic - PRS offer dealers like us access to their Wood Library, in order to both be creative and take advantage of this knowledge.
We’ve just taken delivery of some quite sublime PRS Wood Library guitars that we spec’d up a good while ago, and we’d love to show them to you! But first: what is the PRS Wood Library?
What is the PRS Wood Library?
The PRS Wood Library is a pretty simple concept, really. The Wood Library is a room upstairs in one corner of the Maryland PRS factory premises. Inside, you’ll find an exhaustive selection of wood species from the regular to the exotic; the everyday to the rare. It’s not just about top grade timbers - though these are bountifully featured - but all woods, from the plainest of mahogany and maple onwards to those infinitely deep and figured burls and flames. The point is that all of these timbers are equally necessary for different tasks within the build, and so all share equal billing in the eyes of the Wood Library.
The Wood Library allows us to create our own special runs of PRS guitars with unusual wood combinations, none of which you’ll find in the company’s ‘Core’ line. Thanks to the Wood Library, we can give you some quite unique, exciting PRS guitars that you will just not find elsewhere!
We collaborate with PRS to choose timbers and finishes that are all carefully considered and tweaked from the norm.
Okay, it’s time to investigate our newest shipment!
Our Latest Wood Library Marvels
The guitars you see pictured here are all models that we’ve recently received from Maryland. Talk about stunning? It’s one thing to have fun collaborating with PRS on a spec for a guitar, choosing options and imagining the guitar that will hopefully emerge. It’s quite another to behold the magic of the creation itself in all its glory!
See what we mean? One that particularly caught our eye was this beautiful Custom 24/08 in Blue Fade. For this one, we chose a 1-piece mahogany body and topped it with a flame maple ‘10 top’, which PRS aficionados will know is the designation for only the most highly figured timbers available. The oceanic-looking top of this guitar is almost three dimensional, such is the flaming! It’s pretty clear that these tops are on another level of beauty.
One other special factor we requested with this guitar was the Maple neck. PRS don’t offer maple as a neck choice on their Core series guitars, so it’s already unusual, but look at the flame figuring on it! We were really looking forward to seeing how these necks turned out, and the answer is pretty obvious from looking at the pictures: exquisite!
Some necks - like the Blue Fade one above - have a natural finish, but for others, such as the Bonnie Pink Cherry Burst model, we opted for a neck finish that matched the body. We think both are are equally lovely in different ways! What about you?
Another stunner is the Grey Fade Custom 24/08, with the same great wood choices for the body but a Honduran rosewood fingerboard here instead of the ebony used on the Blue Fade PRS we just saw. Ebony gives players a snappier, tighter sound, so the option is there for those who prefer that over the deeper, rounder rosewood option. Both also feature multi-coloured abalone Bird inlays, which look quietly spectacular amidst these precious woods.
We chose Custom 24/08 models for this run, because we love the extra versatility on offer via the micro toggle switches. These guitars are pure champagne, with gold hardware putting the finishing touches on a feature range that includes coil taps and TCI pickups, which were originally developed for John Mayer’s guitars. TCI stands for Tuned Capacitance and Inductance, and is basically a way of ‘tuning’ the resonant peak and response of the pickup’s sound. You get the sweetest, most expressive tones, in other words, along with extremely musical harmonics.
In short, we think the 24/08 is one of PRS’s very best sounding designs. Thanks to the additional Wood Library tweaks, these examples are also some of the best looking, too!
Beautiful, Exclusive and In Stock Now
As you might expect, the process from beginning to end is a lengthy one. From initial ordering until the time we receive the finished guitars, the wait can be as long as a year. We hope you’ll agree, from looking at these pictures, that the wait is worth it! These guitars are superb machines of tone and expression, and more significantly, none of them are standard models. These combinations of timbers and colours are selected specifically in order to bring you something that little bit more special and unusual.
This collection of PRS Wood Library guitars can be thought of as kind of a halfway point between a Core model and a Private Stock instrument, in many respects. We feel the extra value built into every one raises their merit considerably, not to mention the exclusivity!
The selection of Wood Library guitars that we have for you right now is one of our best, and we hope you love them as much as we do! Remember, they are very limited in availability, and nobody else has these combinations! Visit us to try one for yourself, or browse our entire PRS Wood Library selection by clicking the button below.
Click to View our PRS Wood Library Guitars
