The PRS SE McCarty 594 Guitar

in today's episode we're going to be checking out the Paul Reed Smith se594 now if you saw my review of the dgt SE um you'll understand why a lot of this kind of new attitude with PRS is coming from but if you haven't you can check out the link down below and watch that video what you can see is PRS is stepping up the evolution of these guitars everything from the silver sky SE to the new se2408s to the SCD GT and now of course the se594 what you're seeing is Paul Reed Smith Guitars basically taking the SE line and making it shockingly close in fact I would say it's almost exactly like the S2 almost in every way and then very close to the core so let me explain why I'm saying that let's go over the specifications we have a mahogany body this is probably a three-piece body I can't see because the back is like a black dark brown black but I'm guessing it's three pieces I've seen other models like this they were three pieces the neck is three pieces there is no scarf joint then you have a close on style tuning Keys that's to make it like the 594 core guitar so you know these are great however you can upgrade these to godo or close on locking keys that are direct Replacements that'll pop in and I'll put links to those down below in case you want this and you want to go locking it really speeds up the restringing process this is not only just a graphic nut this is the same bronze graphite nut that you would see on the core line of guitars now some of the cores use bone and some of them use the bronze graphite but this nut is the same as a PRS core guitar you have binding on the neck a rosewood fretboard with 22 medium jumbo Frets and they seem to be highly polished and detailed we'll go over those in the geeky stuff now this is a true Mabel cap it's a quarter inch Maple cap you can see right here and then you have a veneer of flame maple wood you have the Vintage pattern neck this neck is the exact same neck as what you would find on the cores and the S2s minus the 594 thin that has a pattern thin neck and these necks feel almost exactly the same to me and of course this is called the 594 because it is 24.594 inch scale length so basically 24 and a half basically so a little shorter than it gives less Paul and that's really where we need to talk about this for a second there's a magic to this guitar it's why it's becoming prs's top selling guitar this and the silver sky are some of the best selling prses they've ever done even though they've had the lineage of the 24 custom 24s and stuff and one of the reasons is is because this neck is very big it's very chunky like um a 59 Les Paul however because of this 24 basically and a half 24.594 in scale length it's so easy to bend the strings and that is what this does beautifully that scale length with this neck is kind of magical especially if you've ever played any of the 59 Les Paul reissues you know that there are some things that are cool about them this kind of hits that spot it gives you a little bit of that magic uh of that you know that time and that way the guitars were created but of course it's a little bit modernized so it's a little bit of nice things a little bit of the past a little bit of the present put together we have two volumes and two tones and they are coil splitable we'll go through those of course in the geeky stuff and go through all that the pickup rings are not the same as the cores in other words the uh the screws are not recessed and they're not rounded like the cores however they are the right color they are ivory instead of the yellowed look that you saw a lot of times on the SES so this is again something that really pops and then the guitar also includes a deluxe gig bag with a lot of features including the fact it has a pouch in the front that will hold your picks there's a little small zipper pocket for your picks some spots for some pens and pencils and of course a bigger pocket if you want to put some paperwork in there and of course there's a hanging I like to show this in every video there's a hook here so you can hang it in your closet or behind a door to get it out of the way and includes a gel pack to keep the case dry a truss rod adjustment tool this is a dual action truss rod the last thing to point out is this guitar is polyurethane so it's a polyurethane finish and on that note we should check it out in the geeky stuff okay so now it's time for the geeky stuff let's start with the headstock and we have the Paul Reed Smith SC logo and the McCarty 594 covered on the truss rod looking at the back of the head stack you can see that they put that it's made in Indonesia by quartet guitars or PRS a nice little tidbit here look at this look how they did this The Binding and then The Binding went underneath like that I don't know if that's just this guitar or if it's going to be all the models but it looks great and look how tight and clean that looks now looking at the nut it looks fantastic we're gonna go ahead and test it and we see they left just a little bit of space and again that seems to be standard and I think it's because they don't want to cut them too low because then you'll be stuck with a problem if you have any issues you can check this by pushing down on the third fret and playing with how much play is there and what's funny is this is dead on exactly to the other prs's I've done so these prsses are so consistent it almost feels like I'm reviewing the same guitar over and over again so sure you might get inconsistent models when you order one however man they're coming in really consistent okay checking the relief on this guitar there was just a little bit of relief and like I said that's fine so let's go ahead and check the action and we're sitting at two millimeters which seems to be pretty standard and we go across each string two millimeters which is very standard for the guitar shipped to us in fact it's the most common setup that we see on the channel when guitars are shipped from the factory to us or from the dealers to us and by the way for the reference of that it's two millimeters or 0.08 so there you go so let's go ahead and check the Frets we'll use the Fret rocker here now one thing that's great is if you remember the 80s Ibanez and guitar companies like Jackson and stuff were known for just amazing fret work and PRS has definitely continued that tradition and it's nice that they really kind of want that to be the standard for the SES if you're looking at an SE that's one thing I think you could is good quality Frets all right now it's time for the front end test so let's go ahead and check the frets and I can feel it you can hear it snagging you can feel it snagging this one what's really weird is I thought the Frets felt really good but you can see they were pretty heavy on the snagging this is definitely a three out of five obviously snags the nylon but doesn't wouldn't snag your hand okay so now it's time to check the base side and very the same it's very much the same yep they look pretty consistent so again three out of five uh without a doubt one of the lowest I think se's I've seen on the sock test but it's still passing great three is is passing now let's check to see how polished their Frets are and if you watch this any of these in the series you know some of these guitars when we move the string it sounds like we're just going on sandpaper sometimes you can't hear anything at all so let's just randomly find some spots and they feel pretty good these don't feel as polished as the Dave Grissom dgt SE I just did but they are really good nothing to complain about again like I said they don't feel like a luthier or Tech has used like a polishing Dremel tool or anything like that to really highly polish them but they feel polished good enough to play I mean definitely so far out of the box this guitar is ready to play and of course this is a paulry Smith so we have the 10 inch radius fretboard which is what they use checking the neck thickness we are at 43.30 millimeters or 1.704 and the 12th fret is at 2.097 so over 2 inches or 53.27 millimeters and the thickness at the first fret is 22.26 millimeters or 0.8 and the thickness at the 12 front is 0.9 or 25.11 millimeters a lot of you are probably going to be curious about the neck carve and like I said if you've played the S2 or the core I think the neck is going to feel very familiar too if it's different it's just slightly different in the way it feels however if you watch the Dave Grissom dgt SE I did you notice in that video I decided that that it was really close to the 1954 Les Paul profile this guitar is totally opposite look at this we go here and you can see right there it's not even close and go here same thing it's not even close so let's use the 59 list Paul and you can see it's still not there but it's a lot closer definitely a lot closer but at the 11th fret it's really close so again it's got the 59 Les Paul Vibe but I think it actually feels a little bit more comfortable to the hand I have a Gibson R9 and I have to say this neck is more comfortable than my R9 to me weighing the guitar this comes in at 6.9 pounds that's super light and I've seen two other se594s and they were super light as well another upgrade to this guitar is putting the exact same style of bridge that you see on the core and of course the S2 what you have is an aluminum ultra light tail piece with brass studs the bridge has brass Saddles with brass adjusters one of the questions you guys might have is how they mounting the bridge to the body and you can see right here they there is inserts right here so this is the stud for the tailpiece and that fits really nice not a lot of Wiggle in there very very nice and this is the bridge right here and you can see there's an insert here I know some of you probably were thinking that they probably were kind of direct mounting it into the wood like Gibson does but it obviously seems to be a threaded insert and again very stable so they are mounted into inserts something to note the back plates sit on top of the body that's something we've talked about in a couple of these videos some of you guys say it matters some of you guys say don't something to point out on this one though is that this plate this screw is a little stripped out so one thing I want to show you is when you do have a hole for a pickguard or a back plate that's stripped out and then you can tell because the screw just isn't tightening anymore there's a way to fix that obviously you just use a toothpick now the important part is clip the end off use the flat inside not the pointy side of a toothpick and it's going to go right in there however this is the way I do it what I do is I use some tight Bond go ahead and give it a real good amount of and let it sit I let it sit for about one to two minutes just to let the wood get soft just go ahead and rotate it that's the perfect amount right there stick it in the hole like that and then what I do is I go to cut it and I lift up just a little bit and there you go and before it dries I use a stick pin like this carefully find the center of the toothpick and push down it just helps the screw going perfectly so now we're going to put the plate on and now you'll notice you'll be able to set the screw in perfectly like this and it's very snug okay let's look at these Electronics we see that the pickups are made exactly like the core guitars where we have the three conductor wire we have the the hot the ground of course is the wrap around it and then this white wire that's going to these switches is the coil split somebody asked about this last time what these resistors are another Improvement to the SES is how they're new how they're wiring the resistors in their coil splits they were doing a different way they were doing it a more generic way than the core guitars and now this looks like it's done pretty much exactly like the core guitars so what you see here if you see these resistors right here you have two resistors one on each tone pot or push pull one is a 2.2 k for the bridge and one is a 1.1 k for the neck what I want to do is show you how paulry Smith is coils splitting their pickups that is slightly different normally you'll have four wires but on Paul Reed Smith pickups we're going to say there's three because there is you're going to essentially have a a wire that goes to ground right here and then of course you'll have the lead wire that'll go off to let's see the switch or the potentiometer and there's a third wire and what that will go to is the switch now whether that's a push pull or a switch I know this isn't the official diagram for switch I just want you to see it's a switch so what happens is you throw the switch this switch is wired to ground and then what you do is you have the third wire this terminal and essentially if we throw the switch and it goes to ground we essentially remove one coil now obviously they're physically both there but you only get a single coil now you get only one of the coils that's what's happening you're just routing that coil to ground this is not the right resistor I just need one for illustration purposes what they're doing is essentially connecting a resistor like so in line or to be honest they're just tapping it over the ground and what they're doing is because this resistor is in place when you hit the switch to send this to ground it doesn't allow 100 of that pickup to go to ground which means that pickup is not really removed in a traditional coil split way what PRS is essentially doing is weakening one of these coils so that one is more dominant and therefore you get a fuller sound so that's why they're doing it now interesting on this model versus the dgt the dgt had treble bleeds this does not have any trouble bleeds this is just a 500K Alpha pot and then the 500k potential armor push pulls with 0.22 microfarad capacitors right there this is shielded so this is shielding paint and it's shielded and the back plate is not shielded and we have the output Jack with a football style plate which I like because it's metal instead of plastic and of course we have the 5815s pickups now the s's course means they're imported and we'll check those so let's go ahead and check these pickups out we're sitting at the bridge and we see it at 7.6 K which is a very low output pickup something like a paf territory and then we have the neck pickup and that's sitting at 7.1 and then we show the bridge pickup inductance at 4.25 and the neck pickup at 4.08 so again these pickups are going to feel and sound probably close to the original pickups let's take a look at the market comparables because they're pretty crazy this SE costs 949 dollars with the included gig bag however the Paul Reed Smith S2 version of this guitar that is made in Stevensville Maryland cost double the price comes with the same type of gig bag it's cosmetically different but quality wise about the same and has the same exact pickups bridge and very similar construction however it has improved locking tuning keys and of course there's a few other small details that are different now compared to the core which is four times the price of the SE and double the price the S2 of course comes with upgraded made in USA pickups a hard shell case and a lot more involved carves and cuts on the guitar with some obviously improvements to some of the quality components as well but just to give you an idea this guitar looks like the best deal of the bunch to the point that I don't even want to say what I'm thinking yet until my final thoughts alright so now it's time to check out the guitar and to see how it sounds we're gonna start with the neck pickup because we're on the clean we're running a fender 65 Deluxe Reverb with a stock Jensen with an sm57 and it's going to sound like this [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] those bins are pretty nice [Music] and then with the big bigger neck it's it's harder to kind of dig in which is good because otherwise you'd be just exaggerated [Music] one of the things I really like about dual coil splits is that you can coil split the neck pickup only I'm not a big user of the coil split Bridge pickup so I'll leave this up and so I'm in the bridge and if I want to go to the neck I'm already in single coil mode because I've left it up [Music] okay so now that's our neck pickup let's go to our Bridge [Music] middle position [Applause] and it's going to be the blend of those two pickups of course [Music] of course think about this you can you can oil split one of these pickups so now we have a humbucker and a coil split pickup [Applause] [Music] both coil split [Music] from Buckner Siegel [Music] hamburgers foreign a lot of tones I mean obviously you'll be able to pull anything out of this guitar and that's kind of like its purpose it's to be like I said a more vintage kind of vibed instrument with some Modern features let's go ahead and use some overdrives so for today's overdrives we're going to be using the bad cat Black Cat and running it through a v30 with an sm57 and we're gonna start on the neck pickup which is a little different for us but I just really love this guitar in the neck pickup [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] mmm [Music] [Applause] I mean that vibrato was just effortless and these are 10 to 46s foreign [Music] okay we have to go to the bridge now okay so here's the bridge [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] so we got to be fair and try the single coil tones here's the single coil Network yep foreign [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] lastly what we'll do is the single coil Bridge pickup that's cool it's really [Music] [Applause] maybe it's the scale and that pickup gonna work [Applause] it's almost like it feels like I'm playing on a rubber band [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] so one of my final thoughts now that I finished the video well I played this guitar for a few weeks and I have to say it just kept impressing me more and more uh I I really like taking the time to do these long you know form videos that I do because I don't think when you first get the guitar where you first start playing the guitar you really can comprehend all the things that they've upgraded on this SE line and over the period of a couple weeks really just going through it I even come back in this video two or three times just because there's so many elements that they've upgraded to the point where I don't know why the S2 is going to exist and as you know I'm a huge fan of the S2 I think the 594 core is a is a work of art it's a collector's piece it's a beautiful instrument and anyone would be very lucky to own such a great guitar the S2 version 594 to me is more of a working product in other words you take it you use it you play it you abuse it I mean obviously you could feel that way about all these levels but I think the average player out there isn't we're going to be really you know really crazy to throw around their 4 000 guitar however this new SE creates a new opportunity which is this guitar versus the S2 is really I think the fight to to have and I didn't mention it I'm sorry I apologize when I was mentioning the differences the S2 is now Nitro lacquer uh on the 594 where this is a polyurethane se but I think if you gave me the choice it's out of the two the SE or the S2 I think I still like the S2 just a little bit more but I don't know how to really rationalize that to you in a double the cost you know logic I can't tell you it's double the guitar it's just not but there's just something I like about it however this is the important thing I think SES like a lot of import guitar versions of their expensive us counterparts have always been like a taste of the guitar it's like this is a little like the real thing enough this is so much like the thing the the real thing that I think there's not a whole lot to miss here and so it's definitely worth checking out if you're curious about how it compares the dgt SC you can check out that video down below like I said and watch both videos and come to the conclusion yourself that's why I do such details in the videos is so that you can consider and weigh all your own options if you're considering these guitars as always I want to thank all of you for hanging out today and until the next time know your gear now just remember the builders who send these guitars for my review have a drive to make great guitars they agree to send non-cherry-picked instruments and let me try to find the best and the worst points of their guitar nothing I say or show is meant to take away from their hard work dedication and I applaud their ability to check their egos at the door and share their workmanship with us let's face it most companies are not willing to do this

Channel: Phillip McKnight

Views: 195,984

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Id: UmvnKxblcik

Length: 24min 17sec (1457 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 14 2023