Long Time Coming
PRS’s SE line has featured numerous signatures over the past two decades, including those from Carlos Santana, Mark Tremonti and Bernie Marsden. David Grissom had to wait…
As a PRS player since 1985 and an official signature artist since 2007, David Grissom seems rather late in joining the SE party. What took so long? “Maybe they were reluctant to bring it up with me because I tend to be pretty hands on,” laughs David today. “To be honest, I’m pretty shocked because the DGT actually came out some 15 years ago. I thought it’d have a lifespan of three or four years and here it is doing better than ever, so PRS is doing something right – we’re doing something right. I guess they thought this was the right time.”
PRS’s COO, Jack Higginbotham, weighs in: “I always liked David personally and his guitar playing; he’s very talented and I’m always surprised when other people aren’t [so] familiar with him. I like the thought of giving him his due.
“I have a friend who owns an older DGT model,” Jack continues, “and I mentioned we were working with David on a new pickup and he said he’d like to check those out, so he shipped me the guitar so we could get it to current specs. It came to my office and I pulled it out, put my hand around the neck and went, ‘Holy smokes, man – I love these guitars!’ I like the way the neck feels, I like the intention of the instrument. I was just noodling on it and that’s really what planted the seed: how awesome would it be if we could give more people around the world the opportunity to have the experience to play one of these things?”
“I’ve been onboard since day one,” continues David, “and they [PRS] have been very cool. I said so long as I can pull the plug on it at any point if it’s not up to snuff then I’m cool with giving it a shot. It’s been very rewarding.”
The project has taken about a year, although “the heavy lifting has been done over the past 20 years”, continues David, “through the McCarty and then the DGT. The challenge was to make that guitar translate to something that costs 25 per cent of the Core DGT model. The whole philosophy and specs were in place, so it was a much different project than coming up with a completely new model.”
Doing Time
You could suggest that the SE DGT’s journey to production actually started in 1985. This was when David traded in a 1959 Fender Esquire for a first year of production PRS all-mahogany ‘Standard’ (although it wasn’t actually called that until 1987). Meanwhile, his Fiesta Red 1960 Strat, which he’d previously bought in Memphis for $400, became a spare.
“The PRS had more horsepower with the [humbucking] pickups,” says David, “but it wasn’t like a Les Paul; it didn’t have as much low-end. At the time I was playing with Joe Ely and it was like my ‘Tele on steroids’. It sat in the mix in a really nice place – I was playing Marshalls with 4x12s at the time
“The heavy lifting has been done over the past 20 years through the McCarty and then the DGT” David Grissom
and there was so much low-end coming out of the amp setup. Midrange is really your friend in the electric guitar world. The 25-inch scale really appealed to me, the tremolo stayed in tune, it was Seafoam Green and nobody else was playing them!
“The Strat made me play in a certain way, but the ’85 seemed like it was a blank canvas,” he adds, “which was appealing in a town of Strat players – an opportunity to do something different, especially in a trio with Joe Ely. I got that guitar and the first Marshall at the same time, so the combination was really the beginning of me getting my own sound.”
Paul Reed Smith caught David in action at the Dallas Guitar Show in 1987 and subsequently gifted him another key guitar: an ’87 Gold Top Standard (which, confusingly, had a maple top at the time). Surviving neck breaks and more, the guitar was used with Joe Ely and John Mellencamp before David custom-ordered a PRS in 1991 with a more vintage aim in mind, including a 22-fret neck, thicker
mahogany back and PRS’s then brand-new Stoptail wrapover bridge.
“The PRS artist relations person I was working with at the time, Bonnie Lloyd, was all into it,” remembers David today of that original sunburst custom-order. “There was some scepticism in the company that the changes weren’t going to make any difference. My intuition was, ‘I need a little more clarity, a little more low-end and not quite as much midrange.’ I didn’t necessarily mean getting rid of midrange but expanding the top and bottom to get a little wider sound, a little clearer pickup. When they brought it to the Winter NAMM Show in 1992 I think there were a lot of people who really dug it. That guitar became the McCarty Model [which launched in 1994]. “It was the first [PRS] guitar that has an 1/8 th-inch more mahogany on the back. I think it’s the first PRS that has covers on the pickups, the first with that [then slightly increased] headstock angle and the first with Klusons – there are so many firsts. I think we used two Bass [neck] pickups just to try to get that clarity. This was sort of the beginning for me of getting away from the more midrange-y Treble and Bass [pickups] and getting it a little more full range, a purer, clearer tone. The pre‑McCarty McCarty.”
About two months after that first customorder, David ordered another. “I said, ‘Give me the same guitar but with a trem,’ because I used the trem so much. I probably used that guitar more on records than the Stoptail guitar, but today when I A/B those two guitars, the one with the Stoptail… I don’t know whether it’s the time that’s gone by or what … but it’s really a magic guitar.”
The David Grissom Tremolo (DGT) launched in 2007 after 15 years of touring and recording and a heck of a lot of experimentation, particularly in finding the right pickup recipe. “In many ways, the DGT was a combination of numerous small changes, although I would argue that the pickups were a big change,” David explained to us back in 2010. “I think they were a real step forward. They were a yearlong project for me to try to capture the sound I was looking for.” Working alongside
veteran guitar repairer Ed Reynolds who had constructed a guitar so that David could swap pickups in seconds, David evaluated 40 to 50 different pickup sets that were wound by Paul, plus many more from boutique makers.
Sound Choice
While PRS is now well into its stride in replicating the essence of its USA-made pickups in Indonesia, David was initially apprehensive, as he relates in one of three short videos released recently by PRS on the birth of the SE guitar: “I was real sceptical about the pickups. I spent a couple of years going back and forth on the [original DGT] pickups so I said, ‘How are you going to tell the guys in Indonesia how to make these pickups that took sweat and blood to finally arrive here?’”
Jack explains that the process was similar to the development of other Indonesianmade ‘S’ pickups: “We let Cor-Tek use the materials they can get and then we play with the recipe to get that sound where we need [it] to be. I actually had pickups before I had a guitar. We wound those pickups to what we thought they were going to be and we sent a guitar – an all-mahogany PRS S2 Standard – to David.”
“I like the intention of the [Core DGT]. That’s really what planted the seed [for the SE]” Jack Higginbotham
“They were in the ballpark,” David says. “I think I said, ‘I’m willing to consider them, but there is no way I can tell you anything different until we get them into the actual SE guitar.’ The pickups amplify the sound of the guitar and I just think that the acoustic properties of an electric guitar often are undervalued. So they asked if I thought they were close enough, I said, ‘Yes, but I have to hear them in a version of the SE DGT.’ And when they did that I was blown away. As soon as we got those pickups into the right guitar I was knocked out. I was like, ‘We’re done!’”
Neck & Neck
The pickups weren’t the only challenge; the SE DGT’s neck shape caused a few more problems along the way, including that the DGT’s neck profile is unique to the PRS range. “Originally, we measured the ’87 Gold Top and then we measured the ’93 ‘McCarty’ that I’d used forever,” David tells us, “so we interpolated those two guitars, which were my favourite necks.”
But replicating that shape in Indonesia is something that Jack – “hands down” – found the hardest part of the jigsaw. “The width is slightly narrower in higher positions as I fret with my thumb,” explains David of the DGT’s neck. “Then if the fret ends are too slanted you lose some of the real estate, so this way I can have the width I want but not have the strings fall off the edge of the fingerboard – a balance without the bigger frets feeling like railroad tracks.”
It is different from the Pattern Vintage profile that Jack and the team have replicated for the new SE 594s. “It’s a 32nd-inch narrower at the nut,” Jack says. “It’s about the same front-to-back, but the shoulders are taken out so it’s got a sort of V’d feel from the 1st to the 5th fret; the taper is different, obviously because of the width. I think of it as if you go back to 1985 – it’s real close to the original PRS ‘regular’ neck profile before there was a Wide Thin.”
“On the first batch [of SE prototypes] the necks were too big, too round,” David remembers. “I mean, every Core DGT is slightly different due to the hand-finishing [sanding]. Over the years the specs have varied slightly [with] the CNC programme, but I have a good set of callipers and I picked the DGT that I play the most [from 2010] and we had a long Zoom meeting where I measured every dimension and that’s what we were shooting for – to recreate my favourite neck. On the second go around we were much, much closer. I’m holding one of the last four prototypes, I’m not playing what’s coming off the line. If anything, it’s on the slightly bigger beefier end – it’s not one of the skinnier ones.
“[Developing the SE] was not anything like the process on the original DGT,” concludes David. “Jack Higginbotham and everyone at PRS did a great job, and they were so conscientious and respectful about making sure I was cool with it all. They know I would have told them if it wasn’t [laughs]. If I’m going to put my initials on a guitar, then it’s got to be something I’ll play – and I will play it.” www.prsguitars.com