Grateful Dead Music Forum

Well just to carry over from the post on the SDS-1, why not compare and contrast? I've taken the same backing track as my second stratocaster demo and run my newly modified PRS through its paces. I find it hard to tell which tones are better between the strat and the PRS.

A bit on the guitar. Acquired in a trade for a couple of speakers which came out of my twin and a birch cab I built plus a small amount of cash. I've been picking away at this project for about 6 months. I finally located a decent trem replacement for the Floyd Rose, also made by Schaller and its plug and play, uses the same posts, spacing and so on. Fits like a glove, and its your basic vintage style term. My tech did an amazing job replacing the nut and filled in the space left by the old locking nut with a pretty piece of ebony. I think I've finally got the guitar to the point of all my projects - way more money in than I'd ever get out of it. Funny how that works. If only I had never stumbled upon this forum, I'd have saved a bundle!

It's got a Waldo buffer, and the cool thing is the PU's used to be active so this axe came with a battery compartment. Its a super flat 14" radius neck, very thin and its a stratocaster scale, one of the few PRS makes. The ebony fret board plays like butter and the through neck (maple) construction brightens up the mahogany body. Why PRS took this design and went heavy metal with it is anybody's guess but I suppose that's the bean counters talking. The old style through neck guitars seem to be a thing of the past in production builds.

I believe to balance the PU outputs the Dual Sound is in the bridge position and the Super 2 is in the neck position. I played the entire video in single coil mode - not intentionally. Its a different beast in humbucker mode. I posted a vid before Christmas where I played some original stuff and went all heavy. Its on here somewhere (My Vancouver).

The only thing I'd like to do to this project now is sand off the paint on the neck and go with a gun oil finish and perhaps drop an SDS-1 in the space between the two hum buckers.

Peace,

James

I enjoyed it! My fave were the Dual Sound bridge tones. And also the Persian carpet!

Hey thanks Jon! That darn carpet, it came with a tribe of carpet beetles. It is pretty. I remember being a kid and looking at the Dead Set photo's and seeing those carpets on stage and thinking, wow, that's pretty cool, the Dead make their stage feel like a living room.

Bridge pick-up, yes I like that tone too. The Super II (single coil) in the neck is a little gutless. Comparing this track to what I recorded for my red strat, I have to think an SDS-1 in the middle of a stratocatser is my fav tone, and the SDS-1 blended with the Area 58 in the neck, is my second fav, with the dual sound on the PRS coming in third. No buffer or anything fancy in that strat, just an SDS-1.

When you load up the effects in the Fractal unit they all start sounding pretty similar. Makes me think the key to a good Jerry tone is JBL's and a Twin Reverb, all juiced up (real or simulated with an AXE FX), and not so much the pick-up but that's real important, and definitely not the guitar. A PRS Torero, who would have thought?

I'm thinking now, just for fun, to take the Area 58 that the SDS-1 replaced on my strat and stick it in-between the two dimarzio's on my PRS and see what it sounds like. Probably really sweet.

The one thing about that Torero is its really versatile. Here's a video of it on the bridge pick-up through what may have been a Hywatt amp setting on my Fractal in full humbucker mode (my memory is a little fuzzy on that, but it was not a Fender simulation). Sounds nothing like a Jerry guitar.

Peace,

James