MusicRadar

• Review

There are only three ways to get a genuine Paul Reed Smith guitar into your life. The first is to save all your money and have an extremely dull life.

The second is to be a hispanic guitar legend (like Carlos Santana) or a metal virtuoso (like Mark Tremonti) and talk Paul into building you a signature model.

The third is to investigate the SE range. By a process of elimination, that is precisely what we're doing today.

When PRS introduced the SE series a few years back, it was the biggest act of class warfare since the storming of the Bastille (ask your history teacher).

By some loophole in the laws of economics, skint teenagers suddenly had access to the same kind of singing tone and glorious looks as the people paying three grand for a PRS Custom. It just didn't make sense.

The quality of these instruments was such that we stopped thinking of them as entry-level models and started doing strange things like wiping them down with a duster after we had finished playing.

It's now possible to get all kinds of variations on the SE theme (from singlecuts to soapbars), but for this review we're going back to basics with a couple of new twists on the trusty Standard.

Overview

Atten-shun! TG has always loved a guitar in uniform, so when we heard about an SE Standard finished in camo paint we had to get it back to our barracks.

It's not like PRS to be so frivolous with their colour schemes (the wildest they usually get is Vintage Sunburst), and perhaps this is evidence that the world's most serious luthier is finally lightening up.

As ever, the contours of the Standard's body and headstock look amazing (a halfway house between modern and vintage), and the fact that this particular model can move undetected around woodland areas is the icing on the cake.

It's fairly obvious that corners have to be cut to get the Standard down to £499. Aside from the country of origin (SEs are produced in Korea), it seems that the first things to get the chop are the luxurious maple top and 'bird' fret inlays you will find on most premium US models.

It's not all bad news, though. What you lose in maple you gain in mahogany (the Standard's body is a solid slab thereof) and these butch dot inlays are more suited to the military theme than some flouncy mother-of-pearl seagull.

The Standard's neck is also made of mahogany, which has been set deep into the body to minimise the risk of damage (the angle of the headstock is also less extreme than the 'standard' Gibson 17 degree).

The fingerboard is another dark wood (rosewood) and should further complement what we suspect will be a fairly warm tone when we actually play the guitar.

Whether you choose the tremolo or hardtail version (we decided to be adventurous and plump for the waggle stick), the Standard retains much of the same hardware as the more expensive US models.

You've got black PRS tuners, which held pitch admirably, and a decent tremolo bridge that wobbled when we asked it to and didn't when we were palm-muting our riffs.