PRS EXCLUSIVE guitarguitar 20th Anniversary Guitars
Published on 21 March 2024
It’s our 20th Anniversary this year! Have we told you that yet?
We’ve invited some of our best friends in the industry to celebrate with us, and all-year long we’re gonna have cool stuff happening, but we’re off to a spectacular start here! One of our lifelong favourite brands, PRS, have collaborated with us on a special selection of 20th Anniversary guitars! We are both humbled and excited by this, but forget all that: let’s see these guitars!
Contents
PRS guitarguitar 20th Anniversary
The guitarguitar Wood Library Spec
PRS guitarguitar 20th Anniversary CUSTOM 24-08
PRS guitarguitar 20th Anniversary MODERN EAGLE V
PRS guitarguitar 20th Anniversary
So, we’ve got two different models here, in a blaze of beautiful colours. We’re so excited! These really typify and define the PRS experience for us, and our association with these models only deepens that experience.
So, what do we have? In very limited numbers, we’ve got a 20th Anniversary Modern Eagle V and a 20th Anniversary Custom 2408!
You want to know more? But of course! You’ll have noticed that these guitars all have ‘Wood Library’ in the title. Before we delve into each of the two different PRS models we have here, let me take a second to tell you about the Wood Library.
PRS Wood Library
PRS are already a relatively mythical brand in the sense that they make unbelievable Dragon guitars and are perhaps the builders of the most aspirational guitars - outside of Fender and Gibson - in the whole business. There’s a mystique around PRS, and that extends to their brand terminology. Things like ‘Artist Pack’, ‘10 top’ and ‘Private Stock’ are terms relative to PRS only: it’s part of their identity and brand allure.
This is also true of ‘Wood Library’ and with the greatest will in the world, some people make up some crazy stories about what this Wood Library is and isn’t. Let me speak plainly, and clear this up once and for all.
The Wood Library is a large area inside the PRS Maryland premises that holds a huge selection of different timbers. These timbers cover many species and all levels of grading, so they are not all automatically ‘AAA’, since those grading systems don’t even apply to certain timbers! Instead, the Wood Library is all about range: it’s about selecting timbers for parts of a guitar that do not often share the same build; it’s about creating unusual combinations that are not offered within the Core range. From the everyday to the exotic, the Wood Library has it all under one roof.
So, it’s not about only the highest grade timbers, although those are certainly in there! It’s about choice and creativity.
The guitarguitar Wood Library Spec
We have two main guitars models for you, and what we’ve done is decided on the same set of timbers and appointments for them all, in order to make a sort of ‘anniversary spec’ shared by all of the guitars.
Each PRS in this run will is made with:
- Hand-selected flamed maple top
- 1-piece Mahogany body
- Mahogany neck
- Cocobolo fingerboard
- Smoked black hardware
This is all in addition to the features relevant to each model, which I’ll look at right now…
PRS guitarguitar 20th Anniversary CUSTOM 24-08
Our first Anniversary guitar from PRS is the Custom 24-08. This wonderful design builds on the classic Custom 24 with extra switching options that really opens up the sonic possibilities!
So, like the Custom 24, you get a 25” scale length Pattern Thin neck with Bird inlays and a 10” radius. You get 2 PRS’s special TCI pickups (more on that in a sec) and the guitar is finished in nitrocellulose lacquer.
That’s already a pretty special deal, but the differential with the ‘24-08’ suffix is the addition of two mini toggle switches. These are independent coil taps, which offer more combinations (8 in fact, hence the 24-08 name) than the usual single push/pull knob. It’s a clever and efficient way to get a large variety of sounds all from the one instrument. As expected from PRS, the sounds have exceptional clarity and note separation, with all of the creamy sustain you’d expect from an expertly-built mahogany & set-neck guitar.
We’ve got some amazing finishes here for you, too: Aquamarine, Blue Fade, Yellow Tiger and River Blue. These all make the most of those flamed tops! Visual beauty is obviously a priority for PRS, and we all love seeing these wonderful things popping colour and vibe as soon as they spring from their hard cases!
TCI Pickups
So, the TCI pickups. TCI stands for Tuned Capacitance and Inductance. So, all pickups have capacitance and inductance, and all pickups are ‘tuned’ to some degree or another. The difference lies in having a specific intention in mind, and then tuning the guitar pickup in line with this intention. Each pickup has its own resonant curve - a point where certain frequencies resonate more than others, producing a sonic peak. I’ll use Paul Reed Smith’s own words here:
“When you put them together (resistance, capacitance, and inductance), they resonate like a whistle… They have a note to them. It resonates a certain note, it resonates how loud that note is, and how wide that note is… and we’re approaching pickups this way.”
This resonant peak is somewhat like a ‘Q’ value in a wah pedal: the part in the wah sweep where your guitar signal really cuts through.
What PRS do is alter and vary the capacitance and Inductance until they get the resonant peak that they want to hear, and because of the consistent signal, they’re able to reproduce this every time they build a pickup. PRS analyse what they consider to be great sounding pickups and then use that data - those frequency peaks - to apply to new pickups.
Here’s the most important part, though: they then retune those pickups once they are fitted to each guitar (not each guitar model: each individual guitar!) to make sure that those resonant peaks are hitting the preferred frequencies. PRS notice small changes once the pickup is fitted to the wooden body, so these changes are adjusted back to the desired sound. Talk about perfectionism? It pays off though: these sound incredible!
PRS guitarguitar 20th Anniversary MODERN EAGLE V
The other main attraction today is the PRS guitarguitar 20th Anniversary Modern Eagle V. Like the Custom 2408, the Modern Eagle V has more under the surface that first meets the eye. This is quite benchmark-setting stuff, with everything that typifies PRS guitars: exceptional build quality, wonderful feel and superlative sounds. Hopefully the pictures on here will ably demonstrate how gobsmackingly beautiful our Anniversary MEV guitars are, whether in Blue Fade, Aquamarine, River Blue, Yellow Tiger or Cobalt Blue. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of seeing a gorgeous flame-topped PRS in an aquatic shade of blue!
So, those ‘under the hood’ features include two mini toggles as with the Custom 2408, but also a 5-way lever selector and a push/pull on the tone knob. This is in addition to the third pickup, a middle position single coil that gives the MEV an H-S-H configuration.
With all of this, you can achieve a prize-winning 17 different pickup options! This includes true single coil modes, both humbuckers at once, and a myriad of other combinations. Whether you’ll make equal use out of all 17 sounds is somewhat of a moot point: this level of exactitude allows you to find exactly the sounds you do want, rather than working around compromises in tone. It’s a very clear and expressive guitar indeed.
A Pattern neck profile reminds me fondly of the Wide Fat neck that was on my old CE22, still a high watermark for guitar necks as far as I’m concerned. 22 frets, the classic bird inlays and a Gen III tremolo complete this incomparable package.
Very Very Limited
These are not production line guitars, and we won’t be seeing large numbers at all. Each is its own work of art, made that little bit more special because of the anniversary connection. Have you already decided on your favourite? Each guitar is individually photographed and listed on our site, so the one you order is the one you’ll receive. These are pretty special guitars, and we are extremely excited to bring them to you!
Thanks for being a part of our 20th Anniversary!
Click to View our PRS guitarguitar 20th Anniversary Guitars!
