PTC Guitar Overhaul - Hollowbody II With Coil-Taps!

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 our Hollowbody II model with a few tweaks. Check out the work done by the PTC below!

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In its stock form, we’re proud of the versatility offered by our Hollowbody II model! However, the customer sending his Hollowbody II to our PTC was looking for even more tonal variety! To get a better picture of what the PTC was able to achieve, it will help to take a look at the stock electronics on a Hollowbody II.

The three knobs seen above control volume, tone, and blend. The blend knob mixes in the piezo acoustic pickup installed on the Hollowbody II. You’ll also notice a mini-toggle and 3-way pickup selector. In the up position, the mini toggle selects only the magnetic pickups. In the middle position, the mini toggle selects the magnetic pickups and the piezo (this is where the blend knob comes into play). In the down position, the mini toggle selects only the piezo pickup.

The larger 3-way toggle is simply a pickup selector: Bridge humbucker, both humbuckers, or neck humbucker.

So what else could this PTC customer want? How about some single-coil tones! Our PTC guys got to work cutting two more small holes in order to wire up an additional two mini-toggles. One mini toggle controlled the coil-tap on the bridge pickup, the other mini toggle controlled the coil-tap on the neck pickup. Like all PRS guitars, the style in which we tap pickups results in a virtually unnoticeable change in volume.

Check out some photos of the final product below!

Another satisfied musician and a job well done by our talented folks in the PTC. If you would like to make some modifications made to your PRS, get in touch with our PTC here!