Robben Ford Limited Edition McCarty
On the heels of their successful launch into the world of stompboxes, PRS Guitars has just released several additional new products including an amp, two acoustics, and the highly-anticipated Robben Ford signature model electric guitar.
PRS Robben Ford Limited Edition McCarty Model
The PRS Robben Ford Limited Edition McCarty was first teased by Ford back in the summer of 2021. Limited to 200 pieces worldwide for 2022, this limited edition has been meticulously spec’d to deliver the highest level of playability and loud, clear, soulful tone. As an added detail, Paul Reed Smith has hand-signed the front of each headstock and Robben Ford has autographed the backplate of each instrument.
"As a guitarist, everything is important. All the details have an impact. The willingness of Paul and everyone at PRS to dig deep and refine based on my feedback as an artist has been priceless.” – Robben Ford
This limited edition is based on the PRS McCarty model and features a thicker mahogany back, a bound, 22-fret, 25” scale length Pattern mahogany neck, and African Blackwood fretboard. The guitar is anchored by a Vintage-Style tuners and a PRS Stoptail bridge with brass inserts, both of which add to the guitar’s liveliness and tone – as do its thin, hard nitro finish and bone nut. Perhaps most noteworthy on this model are the Robben Ford signature pickups and the modified control layout. Personally dialed-in by Ford and Smith throughout the R&D process, these pickups are tuned to deliver loud, clear, and full tone across the spectrum. Never too dark or overpowering, these pickups are paired with a single volume and tone control, 3-way toggle pickup selector, and a single mini-toggle switch that splits both pickups into single coils.
“Working on this guitar with Robben has been such an enjoyable experience. He pushed us hard to get every detail just right, and in the end, I think we have made an exceptional guitar that feels and sounds as good or better than many of the vintage instruments we hold as our teachers,” said Paul Reed Smith.
The Robben Ford Limited Edition McCarty | PRS Guitars
PRS HDRX 20 and 1x12 Cabinet
PRS HDRX 20 and 1x12 Cabinet
The PRS HDRX 20 amp sounds like an old vintage plexi. PRS has painstakingly recreated the sound of the old transformers and it makes quite a difference in the musical smoothness of the sound.” – Eric Johnson
PRS launched the HDRX amp family in the summer of 2021 with both 100- and 50-watt heads. The PRS HDRX 20 features PRS’s newly documented “Authentic Hendrix” Touring Circuit. This circuit is heavily inspired by one of Hendrix’s personal amps, purportedly used at Woodstock, which Paul Reed Smith and PRS Amp Designer Doug Sewell were able to study in 2018.
Designed to push the high-end so it is very clear, but not so much that it’s harsh, the PRS HDRX shines without glaring and allows for thick yet articulate aggression that can be backed off for smooth, sweet tones. In this lower-wattage package, the HDRX 20 breaks up beautifully at more usable volumes. The addition of a Master Volume control on the HDRX 20, a new feature for HDRX amps, is another modern convenience. Players can use the Master Volume to control the power amp section of the HDRX, making it more user friendly for players who do not want to add a volume attenuator to their setup. The PRS HDRX 20 also features a 3-band TMB tone stack, 2-way bright switch, high-mid gain switch, and presence controls and is designed with internally bridged channels with individual treble and bass volume controls, eliminating the need for a jumper cable (historically used on the outside of the amp).
The HDRX 20 | Demo | PRS Guitars
PRS SE A20E and PRS SE P50E
PRS SE A20E
We are always looking for ways to expand the sounds we are offering. Sometimes that is revolutionary, sometimes evolutionary. The A20E brings all-mahogany focused midrange and warmth to our most-popular body shape, the Angelus Cutaway. The P50E was actually the first parlor instrument we designed and is now bringing a different sonic presence and some added style to PRS parlor guitars.” – Jack Higginbotham, PRS Guitars Chief Operating Officer
The PRS SE A20E Angelus Cutaway body shape delivers comfort and playability and is well-suited for picking and fingerstyle playing. The all-mahogany body gives the PRS SE A20E an organic, warm voice. The PRS SE P50E is a parlor-sized acoustic featuring a solid spruce top and figured maple back and sides, bringing a sophisticated new aesthetic to the popular parlor platform. This body size offers bold projection with more focused tone, and the maple back and sides provide unexpected warmth and tonal transparency.
PRS SE P50E
Both new acoustics feature PRS’s distinct bracing pattern, which is modeled after a speaker cabinet and creates a single-diaphragm instrument. PRS hybrid “X”/Classical top bracing allows the top to freely vibrate and project, while the back and sides are more heavily braced to “lock them down” and encourage the tone of the guitar to push through the top. All PRS SE Series acoustics also feature the PRS-Voiced Fishman Sonitone Pickup system, which allows the natural sound of the instrument to come through. This electronics system features an undersaddle pickup and soundhole mounted preamp with easy-to-access volume and tone controls. Additional high-quality features include solid tops, ebony fretboards and bridges, bone nuts and saddles, as well as PRS trademark bird inlays and headstock design. Both acoustics ship with high-quality gig bags included.
The SE A20E | Demo | PRS Guitars
For more information, please visit prsguitars.com.
Bruce Springsteen: the last man standing.
Maybe these aren’t the first thoughts you’d expect to have after a rock ’n’ roll show, but rock ’n’ roll is getting old, and one of its most prolific stars has been telling us for the past few years that he’s getting his affairs in order. His current tour, which continues his 2023 world tour celebrated in the recent documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, follows his latest LP of original music, 2020’s Letter To You. That record was explicitly and thematically an exploration of the Boss’ mortality, and this year’s jubilant roadshow continues that chapter with shows across the U.S. and Canada.
“The older you get, the more you realize that, unless you’re über-wealthy, you probably have a lot in common with the characters in Springsteen songs.”
I was at the Montreal show on Halloween night, where Bruce, the E Street Band—Steven Van Zandt, Nils Lofgren, Garry Tallent, Max Weinberg, and Roy Bittan, along with Soozie Tyrell, Charles Giordano, and Jake Clemons—and a brilliant backing ensemble of singers and musicians performed for roughly three hours straight. The show rewired my brain. For days after, I was in a feverish state, hatching delusional schemes to get to his other Canadian shows, unconsciously singing the melody of “Dancing in the Dark” on a loop until my partner asked me to stop, listening to every Springsteen album front to back.
“The stakes implicit in most of these stories are that our time is always running out.”
Photo by Rob DeMartin
I had seen Bruce and the E Street Band in 2012, but something about this time was different, more urgent and powerful. Maybe it’s that the older you get, the more you realize that, unless you’re über-wealthy, you probably have a lot in common with the characters in Springsteen songs. When you’re young, they’re just great songs with abstract stories. Maybe some time around your late 20s, you realize that you aren’t one of the lucky ones anointed to escape the pressures of wage work and monthly rent, and suddenly the plight of the narrator of “Racing in the Street” isn’t so alien. The song’s wistful organ melody takes on a different weight, and the now-signature extended coda that the band played in Montreal, led by that organ, Bittan’s piano, and Weinberg’s tense snare rim snaps, washed across the arena over and again, like years slipping away.
The stakes implicit in most of these stories are that our time is always running out. The decades that we spend just keeping our heads above water foreclose a lot of possibility, the kind promised in the brash harmonica whine and piano strokes that open “Thunder Road” like an outstretched hand, or in the wild, determined sprint of “Born to Run.” If we could live forever, there’d be no urgency to our toils. But we don’t.
Springsteen has long has the ability to turn a sold-out arena into a space as intimate as a small rock club.
Photo by Rob DeMartin
Bruce has never shied away from these realities. Take “Atlantic City,” with its unambiguous chorus: “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.” (Then, of course, an inkling of hope: “Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”) Springsteen used those phrases on Nebraska to tell the story of a working person twisted and cornered into despair and desperation, but on All Hallows Eve, as the band rocked through their electrified arrangement of the track, it was hard not to hear them outside of their context, too, as some of the plainest yet most potent words in rock ’n’ roll.
In Montreal, like on the rest of this tour, Bruce guided us through a lifecycle of music and emotion, framed around signposts that underlined our impermanence. In “Letter to You,” he gestured forcefully, his face tight and rippled with passion, an old man recapping the past 50 years of his creative life and his relationship to listeners in one song. “Nightshift,” the well-placed Commodores tune featured on his 2022 covers record, and “Last Man Standing,” were opportunities to mourn Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, his E Street comrades who went before him, but also his bandmates in his first group, the Castiles. It all came to a head in the night’s elegiac closer, “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” performed solo by Bruce with his acoustic guitar: “Go, and I’ll see you in my dreams,” he calls
I’m still trying to put my finger on exactly why the show felt so important. I’ve circled around it here, but I’m sure I haven’t quite hit on the heart of the matter. Perhaps it’s that, as we’re battered by worsening crises and cornered by impossible costs of living, songs about people trying desperately to feel alive and get free sound especially loud and helpful. Or it could be that having one of our favorite artists acknowledge his mortality, and ours, is like having a weight lifted: Now that it’s out in the open, we can live properly and honestly.
None of us know for sure what’s up around the bend, just out of sight. It could be something amazing; it could be nothing at all. Whatever it is, we’re in it together, and we’ll all get there in our time. Until then, no matter how bad things get, we’ll always have rock ’n’ roll.
Meris MercuryX Modular Reverb System Pedal
MERIS
MercuryX
A modular reverb system with pro-audio and studio-rack heritage, advanced processing, and a high-performance signal path.
Boss RV-200 Reverb Pedal
BOSS
RV-200
The RV-200 delivers inspiring reverbs and premium sound in a streamlined design. Twelve versatile reverb types provide everything from subtle spatial color to complex, dreamy textures for ambient explorations.
Universal Audio UAFX Evermore Studio Reverb Guitar Effects Pedal
Universal Audio
Evermore Studio Reverb
This pedal gives you the grainy ambient trails and mesmerizing modulations of iconic late-'70s-vintage digital hardware, in a compact, elegantly crafted stompbox.
LR Baggs Align Reverb Acoustic Reverb Pedal
L.R. Baggs
Align Series Reverb
Built from the ground up to complement the natural body dynamics and warmth of acoustic instruments, this circuit seamlessly integrates the wet and dry signals with the effect in side chain, so it never overwhelms the original signal. The result is an organic reverb that maintains the audiophile purity of the original signal with the controls set in any position.
Fishman AFX AcoustiVerb Mini Reverb Pedal
Fishman
AFX AcoustiVerb Mini Reverb
This multi-reverb pedal for acoustic guitar offers Fishman’s unique blending and voicing architecture. Three quality reverbs—hall, plate, and spring—blend in parallel with your direct sound while preserving your tone.
Gamechanger Audio Light Pedal Optical Spring Reverb Pedal
Gamechanger Audio
Light Pedal
The Light Pedal combines the best features of a classic spring reverb with an innovative infrared optical sensor system and a unique effects section.
