PRS SE as a Stones guitar?

[misterwhizzy]

I have a mahogany PRS SE Custom 22 with maple cap, rosewood fretboard and dual humbuckers. I thought about tuning it like Keith Richards and trying to get close-enough-for-Stones tones. What would it take pickup-wise to get there? Is it too far from a Tele to be able to make it work?

 

[JB_From_Hell]

Re: PRS SE as a Stones guitar?

Lots of treble on your amp

 

[chadd]

Re: PRS SE as a Stones guitar?

You'll never get a tele bridge tone out of a humbucker, but you might get kinda close-ish to the neck tone with a seth or full shred neck.

 

[PFDarkside]

Re: PRS SE as a Stones guitar?

Try completely removing the screw pole pieces.

 

[VinceT]

Re: PRS SE as a Stones guitar?

Don’t want to be “that guy” but, if that’s the only tone you’re going for, it might be better to trade the SE for a T-type as a basic modding platform. A pickup change will do some of it, but you’re also talking about scale length and set neck.

If you want to have that tone available among others on one guitar, then it’s a different thing. I would be tempted to go with some vintage output humbuckers and look at a bass contour control similar to Reverend/G&L (once you begin to use one regularly, it really makes sense).


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[donaldr]

Re: PRS SE as a Stones guitar?

Do you have the 85/15S pickups? The coil-split switch is working well for those. That might be an easy mod to start with.

 

[GuitarStv]

Re: PRS SE as a Stones guitar?

You put a tele bridge pickup in a guitar, and the guitar will sound like a tele. There might be some subtle differences, but it'll be close enough.

 

[shadowfire90]

Re: PRS SE as a Stones guitar?

My dad knew Keith back when Brian Jones lived at Cotchford Farm up until Brian's death. I'm sure the stories he could tell. A former person who owned that house wrote the Winnie The Poo books which I always found amusing.

To get treble considering the PRS has 500k pots in all the SE models I'd suggest steel strings by whatever brand you like or graphtech tusq bright picks as well as adjusting the pole pieces a little to help. I actually did see a great video explaining all of Keith's guitars and I doubt any of them have any mods. Vintage is the way to go. Capacitors switch them to 22nf (0.022uf) if you never roll the tone all the way down to 0. I'd link a bunch of videos but Dylan Talks Tone is a great place to start as there is a lot of side by side comparisons.


Now to get a tele sound out of a humbucker Squier had a 4 wire tele bridge pickup wired stock in what is known as "Series out of phase" yet they never officially said it. Long story short. This is a rare mod and to most a mistake but you get a very convincing tele tone out of any pickup. Now with humbuckers the higher the output the better this sounds as it can sound like a pop can as your inductance drops significantly. A Dimarzio super distortion went from 7.4 to around 4-5H which is a much bigger deal than 16k to 14k would ever be.

To do series out of phase
View attachment 103108

 

[beaubrummels]

Re: PRS SE as a Stones guitar?

You'll never get a tele bridge tone out of a humbucker, but you might get kinda close-ish to the neck tone with a seth or full shred neck.

Never say never. T-Deco in my mahogany SG or Jazz bridge in my LP Studio sound like the Broadcaster in my ash Tele. Twang comes partly from scale length, but changing string gauge, pick type, picking technique and picking location along the strings can get you closer on a gibson-like guitar.

59/Custom or 78 Model can kind of do it too but you need to lower the gain on the amp.