The PRS DGT SE Review : Is this the best guitar for the money available?

Before someone accuses me of using a click-bait title, I admit that I am doing so. If it got you this far, that’s a start. In this review, I spend time with the PRS DGT SE guitar. I must thank Ryan and the team at The Arts Music Store for their work in making a review instrument available. You should shop with them.

Overview

I am an admitted fan of PRS Guitars. I own several, and one of my fastest to grab is my PRS DGT Core. It took 30 months to arrive after ordering and it is, in my view, spectacular. I have yet to find a less than excellent PRS guitar in the Core series and have always been pleasantly impressed with the guitars in the SE family. The DGT SE arrived in Canada within a week of the arrival of my custom order Core model and sold out very quickly. Stock availability has returned and so I arranged to get the gold top version with the moon inlays for this review.

For those not familiar with PRS in the early days, the standard fret markers were moons, and indeed the carve at the top of the headstock was an echo of the curve in the moon inlay. I have a few very old PRS guitars with moons, although most everything these days now come with the birds inlays, which used to be a surcharged offering.

I chose the gold top with moons because it is most like David Grissom’s original PRS guitar.

The DGT

DGT stands for David Grissom Tremolo. This guitar has two vintage voiced humbucking pickups, the patented PRS tremolo bridge, two volume pots and one push pull tone pot. The push pull taps the coils in the humbuckers. The pickup selector is a simple three way switch. There’s no learning curve and the guitar is playable without manual, pictograms or documentation. The only learning is that the volume pot closest to the bridge is for the bridge pickup, different from some other guitars.

For me, and for those who care about such things, the biggest differentiator of the DGT SE and its parent the DGT Core is the neck carve. PRS guitars these days use what they call Pattern based neck carves. Back in the olden days, they offered Wide Fat and Wide Thin. The DGT SE carve is a duplicate of the carve on the DGT Core. It’s more a very comfortable D / U shape than a C shape. I have average sized hands and shorter fingers and the neck just drops right into my hand with no air gap and no sense of being too big. This is one of those things that no online store can show you personally, you MUST get into a real guitar shop and pick one up to get the feel of this neck.

The body is made of mahogany as is the neck. There is a solid maple cap on the body. While this does increase the weight, the choice of woods do not make this guitar uncomfortably heavy. It balances perfectly on a strap. For the non-gold top version, there is a figured maple veneer installed. The tuners are designed by PRS and are of the non-locking type. The pickups are the S version of PRS’ DGT pickups and sound great to me.

There are 22 frets on a rosewood fingerboard. The neck is actually multi-ply which improves stiffness and increases resistance to bending or twisting. Fret finish is as usual for PRS, utterly superb. The radius is 10” so barre chords are simple, but extreme bends will not fret out. The guitar comes strung with PRS 10-46 strings and includes a padded gig bag.

Example Sounds

To record the PRS DGT SE, I plugged the guitar into a Universal Audio Lion 68 pedal amp and then straight into a UA Apollo interface. The examples were recorded in Logic Pro

Of the samples, in the first, I used both pickups, tone at 10, volume at 7 with the amp channels about 9 o clock. This gave a nice clean tone with a bit of brightness. Boost was up as was Room/Air on the Lion 68. The second clip is both pickups, with volume at 8, and both amp volumes to about noon, boost turned down and room/air turned down. The third clip is bridge pickup only, volume at 10, amp volumes at 1 o’clock, bass at 10 o’clock, mids, treble and presence at 2 o’clock. The fourth clip is the neck pickup at 10 tone at 5, amp volume 1 at 1 o’clock, amp volume 2 at 3 o'clock, bass at 1 o'clock , mid, treble and presence at 3 o’clock.

All examples were processed in Logic Pro as follows;

• 1 - TC Electronic DVR 250 Sweet Room

• 2 - TC Electronic TC1210 Guitar Spreader

• 3 - TC Electronic TC2290 Doubler I

• 4 - TC Electronic DYN3000 Adaptive Presence Lift

All samples were mastered out using a TC Electronic Master X HD using my modified Tight Master preset.

Settings on the tc electronic Master X HD

Wrapping Up

I will be as clear as I always am. The PRS DGT SE is not the same as my custom ordered PRS DGT Core, but it comes scarily close. When I took it out of the gig bag, it was set up perfectly for me from the factory. While SE guitars are built at the PRS Cor-Tek factory in Indonesia, they are all checked at the PRS Maryland headquarters before they go to the dealers. This step creates a powerful statement and deliverable of quality. The Gold Top with Moons retails for $1149,99 CAD MAP and the Tobacco Sunburst with Birds retails for $1199.99 CAD MAP. Regular channel followers know that I invest a lot of time in my review process and have checked out many dozens of guitars. At this price point, there is nothing that I have played that is better. You could start with it as your first guitar, and play gigs with it for decades and never be disappointed. Should you buy one? Hey that’s your decision, your money and your need/wants but if you told me you could afford this and it suited your playing style, I would say do not wait.

If you decide to get one, please consider getting yours from The Arts Music Store as they help support the channel and please support the channel yourself by becoming a member on Patreon. Send in questions or post comments, I read and respond to all. Thanks as always. I’m Ross Chevalier and we will speak again soon.