PRS SE STANDARD 24-08
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GUITARIST AUGUST 2022
PRS SE STANDARD 24-08
The SE Custom 24-08 was introduced in
2021 and now has a lofty suggested retail
price of £959; our Standard version trims
that by 35 per cent, over £300.
This new Standard 24-08 is pretty much
identical to the current SE Standard (save
for its expanded switching, which we’ll get
to in a while), which was refreshed to this
specification back in 2018. Offered in just
two colours, the very workingman Tobacco
Sunburst and this deep translucent blue, it’s
pretty much as far as you can get from PRS’s
blingy style. As ever with the Standards,
without that figured maple top your eyes
are drawn to the form – and although the
new ‘shallow violin’ top carve here is a lot
shallower than PRS’s Core models, with an
overall depth of 45mm, it remains rather
classy. The SE Standards have a bound top
edge that’s cream coloured plastic, and
while you can see a little of the wood grain
through the top and back finish – which
suggests the body is three-piece – the finish
to the sides and especially the neck back is
darker and barely translucent at all.
The cream binding continues around
the fingerboard but not the headstock
itself, and the neck here is maple, not the
mahogany of the original. But like that
Custom 24-08 we reviewed last year, it’s
a three-piece longitudinal laminate of
maple – the two outer sections diagonally
1. These TCI ‘S’ humbuckers
are designed in the USA
but made in Cor-Tek’s
giant PSE pickup-making
facility in Indonesia. The
double-black bobbins
di erentiate them from
the SE Standard’s zebra
coiled humbuckers
matched either side of the rift-sawn
centre piece. This construction is used
primarily for the Wide Thin profile and “for
stability”, confirms PRS’s chief operating
officer, Jack Higginbotham. “Yes, it does
work to target the tone we want, but the
impetus is in stability.” It retains the original
PRS scale length of 635mm (25 inches),
halfway between the Fender and Gibson
benchmarks, the 24 frets sitting on a 254mm
(10-inch) radius rosewood that’s peppered
with pearloid bird inlays.
There are no changes to the hardware.
The cast (or ‘moulded’, as PRS prefers)
vibrato is a close rendering of the USA
version, but it uses a steel block and top-
plate – the USA vibrato is brass – and is
also used on the USA-made S2 line and the
bolt-on CE models, though the tuners are
non-locking with a friction-reducing nut.
While both SE Standards have a three-
position lever pickup selector switch, the
difference to the 24-08 comes with the
The ‘08’ switching
turns it into a serious
workhorse for any
player who needs to
cover a lot of ground
2 . These two-position
mini-toggle switches
execute the humbucker/
single-coil switching for
each pickup individually,
allowing a total of
eight pickup sounds,
as designated in the
guitar’s model name
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