PRS SE STANDARD 24-08

12
GUITARIST AUGUST 2022
PRS SE STANDARD 24-08
UNDER THE HOOD
What spaghetti and magic is lurking inside the 24-08?
PRS’s COO, Jack Higginbotham, joins us to fi nd out
I
nside the relatively small rear cavity there’s
certainly plenty of wire. It’s all neatly done,
though, and the circuit and TCI ‘S’ pickups
appear the same as the previous SE Custom
24-08 and the SE Paul’s Guitar we’ve looked
at previously. Indeed, Jack Higginbotham
confirms: “Yes, this is the exact pickup,
electronic/switching rig found in those guitars.”
We have Alpha ‘Made in Korea’ pots with a
nominal value of 500kohms, the tone cap being
.033 microfarads and the treble bleed cap 180
picofarads – standard PRS values. There’s an
additional resistor (820k) placed from the input
lug to ground on the volume, which means the
pickups ‘see’ an approximately 310k volume pot,
which, in theory, will subtly reduce the high-end
compared with a 500k pot without that resistor.
And when the coil-split is introduced, voicing
the slug coil of each humbucker, the screw coil
isn’t just dumped to ground, it’s completely
removed from the circuit. There also seems to
be some added ‘tuning’ of the bridge pickup
via an extra-long braided shield on the bridge
pickup only, which, again in theory, will very
slightly attenuate the higher-end via its
capacitive effect.
Measured at output the bridge pickup here
has a DCR of 8.31kohms in humbucker mode
and 4.11k in single-coil mode; the neck is
7.88k and 3.99k. Each pickup is labelled with a
product code plus ‘Paul’ clearly as the pickup
name – these are versions 10.2021.
Typically, four-conductor humbuckers have
an additional fifth, usually bare, wire that
grounds the metalwork; here we just have four
conductors (one from each end of each coil).
“Our method of single-coil switching without
the fifth wire is part of our TCI methodology,”
Jack tells us. “This omission helps remove one
of the variables when tuning inductance. I think
the fun thing to mention about these pickups is
that we develop them using commonly available
components found in Asia, but we build the
recipe in such a way we can imbed the PRS DNA
and give the guitarist a very high-value pickup
system in our SE Series. Our partnership with
Cor-Tek on the guitars and PSE on the pickups
has allowed us to take the development of the
SE Series in some interesting directions.”
Remove the second
back cover and you’ll
see four vibrato springs,
just like the USA models
It’s a busy control cavity,
even though the treble
bleed and tone cap are
hidden under the wires
These two mini-toggle
switches control the
24-08 action
“We imbed the PRS
DNA and give the
guitarist a very high-
value pickup system”
Jack Higginbotham
GIT487.rev_prs.indd 12GIT487.rev_prs.indd 12 09/06/2022 11:1409/06/2022 11:14