PTC Guitar Overhaul - Artist V Model

The Paul Reed Smith Tech Center (PTC) is in the business of making your guitar dreams a reality. In addition to standard PRS repairs and maintenance, the PTC specializes in making unique modifications to your guitar to meet your needs as a musician. The PTC job we are exploring today features an older limited-edition PRS model called the "Artist V." Check out the work done by the PTC below!

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Before visiting our PTC, this guitar began as a limited run Artist V model from around 2011.

If you're unfamiliar with the Artist V, we'll bring you up to speed with its stock features.

The Artist V comes stock with 22 frets, gold hardware, Artist V pickups, and a 5-way pickup selector. This particular guitar had a stock Fire Red finish with a microburst on the edges.

Here's what the guitar looks like after its PTC modifications:

As you can see, the guitar was refinished and the customer opted for Fire Red again, but this time having a stronger and darker contour burst.

Significant modifications were made to the electronics layout. For reference, here are the standard Artist V pickup switching positions.

• Position One: Bridge humbucker
• Position Two: Bridge humbucker with neck singlecoil, in parallel
• Position Three: Bridge and neck humbuckers
• Position Four: Neck singlecoil with bridge singlecoil, in parallel
• Position Five: Neck humbucker

The new modified layout adds two mini-toggles for individually coil-splitting the pickups. Divots were hand-cut into the guitar around the mini-toggles to make sure they looked great.

The 5-way still operates as it would in its stock form, but now the customer has the ability to change the humbuckers to single-coil in any position.

There's more!

The guitar's tone pot was converted to a push/pull pot which adds the ability to reverse the phase of the neck pickup. This control layout gives the musician incredible control over the pickup coils to create a total of 17 achievable sounds in one instrument.

After the refinish and electronics modifications, the pickup rings were swapped from white to black, the guitar received a new nut, fret polish and leveling, and a full setup.

When the customer received his guitar back he mentioned, "The guitar has the best setup I've ever seen. The action is absolutely perfect at every fret."

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Another job well done by the talented folks in our PTC. If you're interested in having work done to your PRS, contact them here!