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Well played and highly playable. If you want a naturally aged vintage guitar that you will not be afraid to take out of its case and which will build value for as long as you own it then you’re in the right place. There is notable fret ware as seen clearly in the photographs. It tapers up to the 9th fret.  The guitar could use a dressing but somehow it still plays beautifully just as is with no buzz and strong natural resonance.  I would play it as is until it needs it.  The guitar has minor button mark swirls in the clearcoat on the back.  Zoom the picture provided to see them.  The neck, the top and the edges have no dings dents or scratches of any kind.  The headstock tips must have taken some solid dings at some point in this guitar’s lifetime.  Both have been drop-filled.  Not a great job, but very effective.  They do not stand out in the over-all appearance of this elegant, 34 year old vintage guitar.  Plenty of pictures provided.  This guitar is beautiful where it matters.  If not for the headstock touch-ups, I would rate the cosmetic condition of this guitar a 9.5 out of 10.  I’ll call it 9.0 / VG++ condition, all things considered.  Comes with original PRS hard case and tremolo bar.

These vintage pre-factory PRS guitars are an investment.  You'll ALWAYS have the option to re-sell it for as much or more than you paid.  This guitar was hand made by small group of craftsmen who were on a mission to build a world class guitar company.  The outstanding quality of the pre-factory PRS guitars that they produced in the first ten years at the Virginia Avenue shop, is the dynamic that built the PRS factory and launched their global brand. 

A word on Pre-Factory PRS Guitars and Factory built PRS Guitars

The new core guitars built in the factory are fabulous instruments.  Rock solid and perfect.  Perhaps too perfect.  I look at it as the result of feeding a blank of wood into a machine at the front end of a production line and taking a very fine guitar out of a different machine at the end of that line.  Every single step of the build that can be automated, has been automated.  The virtual absence of a craftsman’s hands throughout the build process somehow makes them feel like identical coins stamped out of a machine.  Very, very fine coins, Yes!  Yet still, a sterile product of hyper automation compared to the guitars from the Virginia Ave. shop, that were made before 1995.

Before the factory opened in 1995 the PRS team built approximately 30,000 guitars in a warehouse shop over the ten years prior (~20KCustoms and ~10K CE-24’s).  The Second Tier (S2), Third Teir (SE) instruments were not even remotely on their radar.  The fork in the road that started PRS down a path to flood the market with cheaper models started seven years after the factory opened with the introduction of the Santana III.  The S2 and SE lines that followed, have produced over 650,000 of these Second/Third Teir guitars, in addition to the half-million cores built since 1985.  The USA PRS factory now produces over 25,000 core guitars each year, every year.  The guitar in this listing is from the first 15,000 PRS ever made 

Here is an overview of the permanent design changes that took place for the Custom 24 and CE-24 model when mass production began at the factory in 1995.

• The neck heel was extended, impeding access to the upper frets

• The solid block Mil-Com tremolo bridge was redesigned to a five-piece assembled unit

• The mechanical rotary (3 unique versions in the first 10 years) was replaced by a switch with a Printed Circuit card on it

• The small headstock decal that identifies the guitar as a vintage original was abandon for a larger, polished gold decal

• The individual character of each instrument, was homogenized away in favor of sterile, mass production protocols

Why These Things Matter:

I’ve bought, sold, owned and gigged over 300 hundred PRS guitars throughout the past 25 years.  The original, Pre-Factory, mechanical blue wafer rotary switch provided direct connection between the vintage pickups and the output jack.  All guitars that came after 1995 have newly designed rotaries, which utilize a printed circuit board to channel the pickup’s signals. Where there were three versions of the original rotary which provided unique pickup coil combinations, all rotaries after 1995 are coil-configured exactly the same.  The circuitry of the printed circuit rotaries also suppress the raw signal from the pickups subtly, in a way that the original mechanical switches do not. I’ll never understand the neck heel change.  PRS put a short neck heel on their brief “Throwback 1985” run of Custom 24’s in 2011 (otherwise not true to spec).  Why can’t the put a short heel on all of them?  The one- piece Mil-Com bridge is said to be more resonant.  I don’t know if anyone could tell the difference but it is unique to the pre-factory guitars and was probably re-designed just to cut costs.  The headstock decal change is sort-of a good thing.  Like the short neck heel, the small signature decal is an immediately recognizable indication that the guitar was made between 1985 and 1994 in the Virginia Ave shop, with a considerably higher level of hands-on, personal craftsmanship in the build. 

A Word About Vintage Instruments:

You can tell when you have a true vintage instrument in your hands.  The resonance of the wood which has aged naturally for decades simply can NOT be duplicated in a new instrument. The Retro, Relic, Custom Shop, Re-Issue, Private Stock, Murphy Lab, Master Built, Throw-Back guitars can all be built to original spec, but will never replicate natural aging of the wood through the passage of time.  This is a vintage PRS guitar in mint condition, which is ready for you to honestly, respectfully and authentically “relic” as you make it your own.  All at ½ the cost of a new core Custom that will sell for half what you paid for it, four years from now.  If you’re casually looking here out of curiosity, while thinking more seriously about buying your sixth SE in a different color, your third S2 or a new CE-24, give some thought and consideration to selling some of what you’ve already got to buy a vintage Core PRS instead. Pre-Factory PRS guitars are still affordable and will always increase in value, for as long as you own, play and hold them.    

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It may be gone soon.  Send me an e-mail and we'll talk.  

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$2400.00 plus $50 for shipping anywhere in the lower 48.  

(Shipping with insurance will cost 3-4X that much. I'll pick up the rest)

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I recently heard someone a lot smarter than I am say: 

"Life is short..... Buy the guitar".