Even New PRS Guitars Need Attention From A Tech

Contrary to Paul Reed Smith's claim in numerous interviews, you cannot walk into any guitar shop, pick up any PRS SE and play it on stage that night. It will need a going-over by a tech. Maybe the American guitars are that good, but the SE's are not. The same is true of Fender, Gibson, Epiphone, Squier, or any other guitar costing less than £1,000. You may be lucky, but it would be easier to take it straight to a good guitar tech to look over and sort out the obvious issues.

Over the last not quite four years (seems much longer) I have bought five guitars - traded one - one cheap electronic amp (the Boss Katana) and one not-so-cheap valve amp (the Fender Princeton Reverb 65 Reissue). Here's the schedule of repairs.

The Boss Katana (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom) didn't need any work. It's a PCB and electronic (aside from the final power amp stage), and so can be made to high standards out of the box, and quality control can be digital, and hence cheap.

The Fender Princeton '65 (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom) needed the pre-amp valves replacing- after only eight months. They got it back to me in a week, and I think it sounds better than it did when I bought it.

The first guitar was the Epiphone Les Paul (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom). It needed something doing to the electrics, probably the jack socket, and the tech lowered the action and polished the frets while he was at it.

The second is the PRS McCarty 594 SE (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom). That needed a dry solder joint on one of the tone pots fixing, and later on a decent jack socket, a little neck relief and some work on the nut to correct the playability and intonation of the G string.

The third is the Squier Paranormal Telecaster (from Regent Sounds, Denmark St). That needed a decent jack socket and a better selector switch. Upgrading the pick-ups was my little indulgence.

The fourth is the Fender Vintera Mustang (from Sell Us Your Guitar via Reverb). That came with the tremolo system so badly set-up, the bridge was at an angle to the body and the adjustment screws were cross-threaded. My tech sorted all that out, polished the frets, relieved the neck and oiled a dry fretboard.

The last is the PRS Silver Sky SE (from Wildwire Guitars via Reverb). As delivered the tremolo was locked down and there was some string buzz towards the upper frets. My tech unlocked and adjusted the trem, watered and fed the fretboard, polished the frets, adjusted the nut, and replaced the penny-pinching jacket socket with a proper Switchgear one.

This reminds me of what cars used to be in the 1960's and 70's - there would always be something that needed fixing and usually something that rattled. Automakers spent millions upon millions on robot automation assembly to get rid of those problems. Ordinary cars today are built to standards that were engineers' pipe dreams in the 1960's. Today's guitars are built to the same standards as yesterday's cars. The bodies are cut by CNC routers, and the pickups are wound by CNC winders, all the other parts are made in the same way they would have been back in 1960, and all are assembled by hand. A lot of guitars get sold each year, but not enough to justify the kind of investment that would be needed to make a robot assembler and installer for the wiring loom. If that was even possible.

A basic set-up from a tech costs around £50 - £100 depending on what needed doing. It's worth the money.

Everything you have heard about the Silver Sky SE is true. It sounds like you dreamed a Strat should sound like, plays like a dream (now) and Wildwire had one that weighed just over 7lbs. The Mustang could easily become my default guitar: the Mustang neck pickup should be right up there with the Telecaster neck pickup as something legendary. And it weighs 7lbs. Whereas the Paranormal weighs 8.5lbs, but sounds and plays like it should. The 594SE also weighs 7lbs, plays really well and has a lovely round, thick jazzy neck sound, and a snarly bridge tone - at least that's how I have it dialled in.

Props to Andy at Richmond Guitar Workshop https://www.richmondguitarworkshop.com for sorting all these things out. Support your local tech.

RAF Museum, Colidale - Part One

I will have a longer post about taking photographs at the RAF Museum, Colindale, illustrated by shots that didn't work out so well. When the weather allows my brain to run at more than 70% capacity: I have a mid-1950's brain that did not come with enough cooling for these tropical temperatures. Anyway, here are some that I think work okay.

Top down: Messerschmidt 109; Gloucester Meteor; Jet Provost; Provost, Meteor, AN Other; Fokker D VII. 
 

Centrepoint Close-Up

 

It's Centrepoint of course, and therefore at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, and throughly iconic. But in this picture, you have to know the building to know that. Otherwise it's some random 1960's concrete office block with some random glass geometric gadget in front of it. It's a neat picture, but I'm not trying to exploit the iconicity? iconicness? of Centre Point. In fact, I'm hiding it. A lot of my photos do that: I don't take pictures of iconic things, partly because "everyone does" and partly because the Iconic Thing distracts from the composition and the picture. If that makes sense. 

Saffron Hill

Oh darn tootin' amma blame the weather. It's to do with Europe being off the English coast or something like that, I blame the bureaucrats in Brussels. Or the CCP. Or The Russians. Or the Democratic Party. Or maybe all of them, since they all meet secretly in Mae's Cafe, Brighton, every other month on the third Saturday for a full English and to hatch a new round of conspiracies. They speak in Really Bad International English, which Mae speaks fluently, and she passes on what she can make out of their chatter to me and the editor of the Financial Times, who ignores it and then wonders why he has the feeling he's already heard about whatever it is when it happens. She used to tell the editor of The Economist, but they wrote about what the leaders should be doing. Because The Economist can run the world so much better than anyone else except the BBC. Mae never tells the BBC because she knows the BBC is the propaganda branch of the Security Services when it isn't being the media wing of Right-Thinking-People, or perhaps Left-Thinking-People, or maybe People-With-Their-Heads-Up-Their....

Moving along...

This is looking down Saffron Hill, near Farringdon, and it took me a while to see that it's actually a good picture.

The Ironmonger Est 1835

I do like a photograph of a shop sign. Other people may like snapping celebrities, or pigeons, or cats, or passers-by scratching their ears, or other such cutsie things, but I like a shop sign. So here is one.

Central London from Parliament Hill

This year's photography condition is that I have to use the 90mm (135mm equivalent) prime lens that I splurged for second-hand in spring. It takes shots like this, and there is almost no zooming-by-cropping. I like shots of Distant Things (as opposed to things-in-the-distance) and that lens does it about the way I see the scene. So score one with this...

Cancelling My Subscription to The Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph has put its online subscription price up by about £10 / month. Which means I have to do a whole lot of overthinking about whether I want to carry on with it. I subscribed to it back in 2020 because it was the only paper that had a remotely sensible attitude to the Lunacy of the Lockdowns. I needed to know what idiotic measures the Government were going to impose for the next twenty minutes, and what else was going on.

It gives me something to look at over breakfast, if I'm not watching a movie or a box-set episode. If WW3 breaks out (oh wait, it has, read this https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9914/ . £21.8bn nearly all 'gifted'? We're at war, we're just not sending our unemployed young men to be killed) I'm sure the Telegraph will let me know.

Increasingly, I am less and less interested in what it is telling me. Westminster in-fighting. Which incompetent and clueless person will be the next PM. The Trans toilet thing. A few days ago it did a piece of undercover reporting about people smugglers that I hope our Intelligence Services already knew but didn't want the targets to know they knew. But who knows, maybe our Intelligence Services are too busy with "right-wing extremists" (and how I wish that was a mis-direction, but I bet it isn't). Otherwise I'm reminded of the Bob Dylan lyric: And something is happening here / But you don't know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?

So there are two questions. First, how will I know that WW3 now involves the UK being bombed? I've just put a link to Reuters Europe (translations into English available) in my web browser. That should cover the news. I've also added the ONS front page https://www.ons.gov.uk/ to assuage my endless thirst for statistics.

Second, how will I know what is going on with the culture and trends in the UK and world? Now, see, this is the controversial part. I don't actually care. If I want to see what's new in books, I will browse round Foyles. Qubuz keeps me up with music, and the Curzon website with movies. I could care less about the commercial cinema. I still haven't entirely given up You Tube yet, even though the AI slop keeps on seeping in as fast as I can click Don't Recommend Channel.

Finally, what am I going to read at breakfast?

For the last week, it's been my art books. Much better for the soul.

And I cancelled my subscription.

(Edit 24/7/26) There's no way to actually cancel the subscription from The Telegraph's end. I turned off the payment in PayPal. That got me an e-mail asking me to update my payment details. I called customer services and explained what I was doing and they confirmed that cancelling the payment was the way to do it. I got another reminder, which I ignored. Then I got a slightly snotty mail saying that because I had not updated my payment details, they were cancelling my subscription. Like I was delinquent. Way to make the customer think about going back.