u/fmeloni

For a while now I’ve been dedicated to my hobby of tinkering guitars. A couple of years ago I’ve found a beautiful PRS SE Bonnie Pink body, stripped of every hardware and electronics, in The SRATosphere. I hesitated a lot before pulling the trigger on it.

Once I got it, the adventure of bringing it back to life started. The easiest path would have been get all the missing SE parts from eBay and Reverb and assemble it again as it was supposed to come out of factory. But I already have an S2 Standard 24 with a set of American HFS/VB and a MannMade bridge, plus some other guitars, so I wanted it to fill a sonic gap I couldn’t cover with the others, but without killing the PRS soul of it.

So the first thing I did was to get PRS locking tuners. That was non-negotiable. For the bridge, a MannMade bridge was an overkill (it was more expensive than what I paid for the body!) so I dedicated a good chunk of my time to investigate options. The best? Musiclily has a full tremolo, including the claw, that fits PRS SE perfectly. It’s the perfect balance between not a crappy cheap one (there are a lot out there) and a MannMade one. Since I had the tremolo plate from the S2 after I upgraded it, I just got a brass block and brass saddles.

When I assembled the tremolo the second epiphany came with it: the combination of black, gold and chrome will be the main design style for this guitar. It’s already in the tuners, now it’s in the tremolo, let’s go for it everywhere.

Now the sound. I didn’t want another PRS sounding exactly like a PRS because I already had them. I didn’t want to go down the Seymour Duncan path because it’s so obvious and everywhere that it didn’t make sense. After months (not kidding) of reading about humbuckers and how they sound and combine and so, I decided to go for a DiMarzio Bluesbucker in the neck and a DiMarzio Air Classic in the bridge.

The Bluesbucker is a very particular pickup: it’s a single coil P-90ish pickup trapped in the body of a humbucker. Only the screw coil of it generates any sound. The slug coil is mute, it is there only to kill the hum and give the pickup a humbucker punch a regular P-90 lacks. Also, the pickup can be split, leaving the screw coil still sounding like a P-90 but now more in the realm of the single coil sound a PRS has.

Then the Air Classic for the bridge. It lands on the same place as the 57/08, maybe warmer and with a more vintage sound. But the great thing is that the Bluesbucker and the Air Classic have opposite polarities, meaning that when split they’ll cancel hum, like PRS pickups do!

I used an Oak Grisby Super switch for the selector. As it is 4 pole 5-way it allows for any combination possible. So:

1. Air Classic
2. Air Classic + Bluesbucker (the modern PRS humbucker + single coil)
3. Air classic screw coil + Bluesbucker screw coil (the PRS “in-between”)
4. Bluesbucker screw coil (the P-90 single coil sound, as when you split a PRS humbucker using the push-pull)
5. Bluesbucker

With this, the Bonnie Pink retained its PRS soul but with its own very strong personality.

Sorry for the long post, I hope you like what you see.