CE 22 Review
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Guitars
CE 22 Review
From sefstra--(at)--ol.com Wed Sep 16 09:25:02 CDT 1998
Article: 239142 of rec.music.makers.guitar
From: sefstra--(at)--ol.com (SEFSTRAT)
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers.guitar
Subject: REVIEW: PAUL REED SMITH CE22 GUITAR
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Guitar: Paul Reed Smith CE22
Features:
--Quilted maple top
--cherry sunburst color
--22 fret rosewood fingerboard with bird inlay
--trem
--Dragon pickups
--controls: rotary pickup selector, volume, tone
List price: $2540.00
Typical selling price: approx. $1500.00
(I traded another guitar and paid a nominal cash sum)
Appearance:
The body is composed of mahogany, with a quilted maple top. The quilt pattern
on this instrument is subtle; it doesn't have the wild and highly defined quilt
I have seen on some other guitars. The cherry sunburst color actually begins
as an amber color in the center of the body, around the pickups, and gradually
fades to a cherry red at the edges of the body. This combination works well,
and I think it sits better than the cherry burst finish would look on a more
highly defined quilt pattern. Personally, I've never been attracted to the more
extreme quilt patterns; they always looked fake to me! The body is an arch
top, in the usual PRS manner. The back of the body is cherry red. It’s a very
resonant guitar; you can feel the body vibrating against you when you strike a
string, and acoustically, the instrument sounds pretty and sweet.
The neck itself is a wide-thin; interestingly, it is not as thin a neck as the
wide-thin was on a CE24 I once owned. The neck is maple, with a very straight
grain. It is finished in the same light poly as the other PRS bolt-on (really,
bolt-in) models; it feels almost like natural wood, and isn't sticky. The
fingerboard is rosewood, in the manner of every PRS except the Swamp Ash
Special. It has the typical "PRS birds" 22-fret inlay. The inlay is
beautifully done. The birds look iridescent, and there is no filler evident at
all.
The headstock is black. I wish it matched the body color. PRS does this on
the Custom model and the number of other models, but chooses not to so adorn
the CE. The electronic compartment cover on the back of the body is also
black, as is the truss rod cover, located on the headstock. The tone, volume
and pickup selector knobs are translucent gold. The usual PRS slippery
teflon-type black nut is appropriately cut.
Hardware and pickups:
The guitar includes a PRS trem, in chrome. I think that this trem is probably
the best non-locking trem on the market; nothing else I've ever tried is even
close. It is easy to adjust, returns to tune well, and feels smooth and solid.
You get a bit of up-trem ability, and a good deal of down-trem range. The
back angle all of the saddles is particularly nice; while muting with the heel
of your picking hand, you can feel the strings really well. The design of the
saddle pieces and their fit in the tailpiece is excellent; it's a nice, tight
fit, and nothing moves were goes out of adjustment, even if you're one of those
people who really hit the trem arm hard. The system of PRS's proprietary trem
and locking tuners with the slippery nut works very well. The guitar came
strung with D'addario .09s. I changed these for my usual GHS .10s. Adjusting
setup and intonation was no problem.
This instrument has the usual PRS locking tuners, with chrome tuning keys and
predominantly black posts and locking mechanisms. There is one volume control,
1 tone control, and a rotary pickup selector in the now-familiar PRS
configuration. While I understand the electronic switching reasons for the
rotary pickup selector, and while one does eventually get used to it, I have
never learned to love it.
This model has Dragon pickups with no covers; a Dragon bass in the neck, and a
Dragon treble in the bridge position.
The five-way rotary pickup selector provides the following options:
First position: Neck humbucker. This one is pretty much what you
expect.
Second position: Outside coil of each humbucker, in parallel, in phase.
This is series single-coil-ish "deep and clear" kind of sound, good for Tele or
middle Strat pickup emulation.
Third position: Inside coil of each humbucker, in series, in phase.
If PRS has a sound of its own, this is it. This position yields a Fender-like
snappy attack with a thicker, warmer Gibson-like tone.
Fourth position: Outside coil of each humbucker, in parallel, out of
phase. This is an approximation of the in-between Strat "quack" sound. I
don't know if the coils are actually out of phase in thisposition, but it has
that sound.
Fifth position: Bridge humbucker. What you expect.
This is the first PRS guitar I have owned equipped with Dragon pickups. The
jury is still out on this one, but initially, I'm not wild about them. Of the
neck pickup has an alnico magnet, and sounds somewhat reminiscent of a Dimarzio
PAF pro; it has reasonably warm lows and fairly sweet highs, but has more
definition and is a little louder than a PAF would be. It's the bridge pickup
that is a little more problematic, for me. This one has a ceramic magnet, a
very high output, and a pretty aggressive sound. Although the neck pickup has
a fairly open sound, as do the combination settings on the pickup selector, the
bridge humbucker sounds almost compressed, even when played clean, at low gain.
While it does certain things very well, the Dragon treble does not strike me
as a particularly versatile pickup. In addition, the gain structure of the
pickup is extreme enough so that even at relatively sane gig volume levels, the
pickup tries to feed back on me in certain situations (for instance, at
moderate preamp gain, when I engage a compressor pedal, this is the only pickup
on any of my guitars that feeds back...I discovered this while playing the last
few notes in Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn").
The Dragon II pickups use alnico magnets for both the treble and bass
positions, and have been recommended to me by PRS, if I want to change these
out. You can tell if you have Dragon IIs; they have covers, where the Dragons
(sometimes called "Dragon 1s") do not.
General impressions:
This guitar has the wonderful feel, silky playability and excellent workmanship
that has become a PRS hallmark. There must be some amount of variation from
one wide-thin neck to another, or perhaps the wide-thin 24-fret neck is
different from the wide-thin 22-fret neck. Whatever the reason, I once owned a
CE24 with a wide-thin neck, and neck ultimately proved to be a bit to thin for
me. The neck on this CE22 is thicker, and is substantially more comfortable
for me. It is noticeably more comfortable on a hot, humid, sweaty summer gig
than the fingerboard and neck on my PRS Swamp Ash Special, which gets sticky
under such conditions.
PRS has figured out some nice ways to get a wide variety of sounds from one
instrument. While the single-coil settings on this guitar certainly don't
sound exactly like a Strat or a Tele, they are credible emulations, and are
very usable on a gig. You can produce good country snap and twang, and can
also get a big thick hard rock tone out of the same instrument. Fleetwood Mac
to country to harder rock to faking an acoustic sound all work decently.
Impressive. The PRS CE24 I once owned had different pickups and had an alder
body with a maple cap, and it sounded generally warmer than this does. This
guitar is snappier and brighter, but not in a bad way. It’s just different.
The 22-fret configuration makes the neck pickup sound a LOT better, though, to
my ears.
This instrument is more versatile than my PRS Swamp Ash Special, but does not
have quite the richness of tone produced by the McCarty pickups on that
instrument. It doesn;t have as much sustain, either (it is a thinner neck).
Unfortunately, installing McCartys on the CE22 is not possible if one wants to
retain the five pickup selector settings now available; McCartys lack the
necessary lead wire configuration. I probably will change the pickups out for
Dragon IIs, eventually. The guitar doesn't sound bad this way, but I am
definitely not nuts about the bridge humbucker position. It excels for
screaming solos, but not much else.
I'd not have paid $1500.00 for this, by the way....it was someone else's
special order, they ended up not waiting for it and buying something else (a
Santana, I think!). I was offered a very good deal; apparently someone wanted
my Custom Shop strat! For what it's worth, I'd skip the quilt top and get the
'plain' maple top, and skip the birds (no longer an option on a CE anyway),
knocking about $400.00 off the price. You'd get the same guitar.
When the temperature and humidity are high, I prefer this guitar to my PRS
Swamp Ash Special. I guess this is my No. 1 "summer guitar"!
Steve
Steve
SEFSTRAT
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