Ok, this PRS guitar has been one of my top 2 since I got it 5 years ago - the quality, the craftmanship, the finishes, the way it feels... but ... I'm a hard rock guy at heart and the 85/15 PRS pickups just don't even come close to the heavier guitar sound I hear in my head. The stock pickups are great for cleans and mild distrotion, fender-y tones, church worship, but I coudn't find a distortion/eq pedal combo that could get past the honky mid-range tones. I thought about buying another guitar but then this one would just sit around and not get played much so instead I figured it was time to make a pickup change.
After many hours of listening to pickup comparrisons online I finally (this process took a good 6 months, if not more) pulled the trigger on the Seymour Duncan Alpha & Omega set. The eq and distortion just sounded right, along with the clarity of the strings. The combo of those 3 things sold me. So I set out to replace them last weekend only to find my old radio shack soldering iron was no match for desoldering the existing wiring on the pots. So I ordered an upgrade and was out of town for a few days so it got delayed until Wednesday. The new iron worked like a champ and I got the old pickups out no problem:
Now comes the fun part - figuring out how to wire in the new pickups! With a PRS 5-way switch there are so many options and so little information online about this specific setup it took quite a while to find something I was confident in trying.
I wired in the bridge pickup and tested it out and wouldn't you know it - I wired it to where the neck pickup was supposed to go! I desoldered and started over, this time getting it right. Then on to the neck, tighten everything down and put on a new set of strings. To my amazement, everything worked! Super happy with the change, now this will most likely become my #1.
