UNDER THE HOOD
What’s inside this latest Core model?
When the original MEV launched, it boasted three mini-toggle switches, a five-way lever pickup selector switch and a pull-switch on the tone control: switch-tastic! Today’s circuit is basically the same, although we’ve lost the switch that simulated the effect of either a 500k or 250k volume control. To be fair, its effect proved pretty subtle, and here, as with many recent PRS instruments, a resistor (1.5meg-ohms) is placed (in parallel) on the volume control to lower the resistance from its nominal 500k to a resistance that actually measures 384k.
Two three-pole mini-switches are used to switch each humbucker to ‘true’ single coil where the screw coil of each is removed from the circuit as opposed to the usual method of dumping (fully or partially) the unwanted coil to ground. Remember the neck pickup is reversed, so the slug coil faces the fingerboard not the bridge.
Further tuning is achieved by a parallel capacitor on each pickup switch: 220 picofarads on the bridge, 330 picofarards on the neck. “It’s TCI – tuning the capacitance and inductance of the pickup to the sound I want. If you unsolder the capacitors, then it’s not going to sound as good: you’d hear a huge difference,” says PRS.
A third small capacitor is used for the treble bleed on the volume control, which is 180picofarads, as usual for PRS.
The pull-switch on the tone control creates what many will know as the ‘seven sound’ mod, which is typically used on a Stratocaster and allows positions 1 and 5 on the five-way for the bridge and neck pickups to be combined, and all three pickups to be voiced in positions 2, 3 and 4. These selections are the same in either humbucker or true single-coil mode. As with all of the two-control PRS guitars we’ve evaluated over recent years, the circuit is wired modern style with a .033μf tone capacitor.
All of this tweakery produces plenty of sonic textures from the MEV, 17 in total, but some are more subtle than others, not least the four combinations of ‘all three pickups on’ in humbucker mode, single-coil mode, neck hum/bridge single, and neck single/bridge hum.