Stevensville, MD (November 17, 2016) -- Last month saw the release of the 2017 PRS SE Series, which included new pickups and a new headstock design. PRS Guitars has now unveiled the Core and S2 Series electric guitar line up for 2017, which brings with it both entirely new models and some subtle refinements that highlight the company’s innovative spirit and dedication to the details. The highlights for 2017 include the introduction of the McCarty Singlecut 594, 509, Santana Retro, and Gen III tremolo bridge in Core and new pickups for the S2 Series.
Singlecut McCarty 594
With endorsements from artists like John Mayer, John Wesley Dearth, and Jimmy Herring, the McCarty 594 saw a great reception in 2016. For 2017, PRS has introduced a single-cutaway version of the 594 as both the November Private Stock Guitar of the Month and a new Core model. The 594 family embodies vintage tone and feel while incorporating modern manufacturing techniques that deliver superior playability. Here is what some artists have been saying about the 594:
- “To hear that old PAF sound but be able to articulate the notes in a way that only modern manufacturing could allow is so exciting,” said John Mayer.
- “It’s kinda freaking me out a bit. Causing me to re-think my touring set...I am a bit stunned. The 594 sounded like a good concept on paper, but, just wow. This is killer,” reacted John Wesley Dearth (Porcupine Tree).
- “I love the two volume/two tone layout, while still keeping the overall feel of PRS,” offered Jimmy Herring (Widespread Panic, the Ringers).
The addition of the McCarty Singlecut 594 will be sure to turn some more heads.
509
The 509 is another new model for 2017 that began as a Private Stock Guitar of the Month. One of the most versatile guitars in the PRS Core line up, the 509 starts with a 5 single coil platform – with the outside four coils grouped as humbuckers. The addition of the 509’s innovative switching system (a 5-way blade switch and two mini-toggle coil-tap switches), gives players an array of humbucking, singlecoil, and blended tones. Additional unique appointments include a longer 25.25” scale length, which adds some upper harmonic sparkle, and the PRS Gen III Patented Tremolo (more on that below).
“The 509 is a "Swiss-army-knife" five pickup/nine sound instrument with a highly-usable switching system that has evolved in recent years through experimentation, feedback, and experience. I believe the 509 will feel right at home to players who want a longer 25.25” scale guitar with this pickup configuration, but also want several more musical sounds,” said Paul Reed Smith.
Players familiar with PRS will recognize this as a marriage of the company’s 513 and 408 models that celebrates the best of those two models in one guitar.
Santana Retro
The last major update to the PRS Core line lies with the company’s longest-running artist signature model: the Santana. The 2017 Santana model has been reintroduced as the Santana Retro, a model previously only available through the Private Stock program. Based directly off of Santana’s “Pre-Factory” guitar, the Santana features several design elements from the early 1980’s, including a deeper body carve and scoop, an original style heel, and the original headstock shape and nut placement. For players interested in historical specs and a guitar that in many ways started PRS, check out the 2017 Santana Retro.
The Details
Throughout the Core line, there are also more subtle details being announced, including the PRS Patented Gen III Tremolo and piezo model shake up. The PRS Patented Gen III tremolo, which will now come standard on all trem-equipped models except for the DGT, maintains the functionality and incorporation of brass and unplated components of PRS’s tremolo, but also has some notable updates that further support the fidelity of the guitar’s tone and maximize sustain. Updates include redesigned mounting screws with larger thread and a larger custom head. This update increases the mass of the screw by 50% and creates 32% more contact from the screw to the guitar’s body, notably increasing the harmonics and sustain of the guitar. Groves have also been added to the bridge plate that match the saddle height adjustment screws’ radius, again for more contact between the components. Also on the Core line, the piezo-equipped P22 and P24 have been rebranded as the Custom 22 Piezo and Custom 24 Piezo respectively, and the popular Hollowbody II is being offered with or without the piezo option.
In the S2 Series, S2 Custom and Standard models will now come outfitted with 85/15 “S” pickups. 85/15 “S” pickups are modeled after the 85/15 pickups Paul Reed Smith designed for PRS’s 30th Anniversary and offer remarkable clarity and extended high and low end. All-mahogany models in the S2 Series (Standards, Mira, Starla, and Vela) are now offered solely with dot inlays.
Though there are no introductions in the Private Stock or Amplifier categories at this time, Private Stock is still finishing out its 20th Anniversary Guitar of the Month celebration and there have been recent whispers in the amp world. More introductions before the 2017 Winter NAMM show are anticipated. In the meantime, check out the complete PRS offering at www.prsguitars.com.
For more information:
PRS Guitars
Valerie June’s songs, thanks to her distinctive vocal timbre and phrasing, and the cosmology of her lyrics, are part of her desire to “co-create a beautiful life” with the world at large.
YouTube
If you’re familiar with June’s sound, you know how effortlessly she stands out from the singer-songwriter pack. Her equal-parts warm, reedy, softly Macy Gray-tinged singing voice imprints on her as many facets as a radiant-cut emerald—and it possesses the trademark sincerity heard in the most distinctive of singer/songwriters. Her music, overall, brilliantly shines with a spirited, contagiously uplifting glow.
Owls, Omens, and Oracles opens with “Joy, Joy!” with producer M. Ward rocking lead guitar over strings (June plays acoustic on nearly all of the tracks and banjo on one). It then recurringly dips into ’50s doo-wop chord changes, blends chugging, at times funky rock rhythms with saxophones and horns, bursts with New Orleans-style brass on “Changed” (which features gospel legends the Blind Boys of Alabama), and explores a slow soul groove with electronic guest DJ Cavem Moetavation on “Superpower.” Bright Eyes’ multi-instrumentalist Nate Walcott helmed the arrangements with guidance from Ward and June, and frequently appears on piano and Hammond organ, while Norah Jones supports with backing vocals on the folk lullaby “Sweet Things Just for You.” The entire album was recorded live to tape, which was a new experience for June.
June shares her perspective on the album and her work, overall. “It’s not ever complete or finished, your study of art,” she offers. “It’s an adventure, and it keeps getting prettier as you walk through the meadow of creating or learning new things. Every artist that you bring in has a different way of performing with you, or the audience might be really talkative or super quiet. And all of that shapes the art—so it’s ever-expansive. It’s pretty infinite [laughs], where art can take you and where it goes.... I kinda got lost there a little bit,” she muses, laughing.
June’s favored acoustic guitar is this Martin 000-15M, with mahogany top, back, and sides.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
June didn’t connect with guitar in the beginning, but discovered her passion for it later, when the instrument became a vehicle for her self-empowerment. She took lessons as a teenager but was a distracted student, preferring to listen to her teacher share the history of blues guitarists like Big Bill Broonzy and Mississippi John Hurt. “I didn’t pick it up again until I was in my early 20s, and my band that I was in with my ex fell apart,” she says. “I still was singing and I still was hearing these beautiful voices sing me these songs, and I didn’t want to never be able to perform them. It was a terrible feeling, to be … musically stranded.
“And I was like, ‘Now, I could go get a new band and get some more accompaniment, but how ’bout I get my tail in there and keep my promise to my granddad who gave me that first guitar and actually learn how to play it, so I’ll never feel like this again.’ The goal was that I would never be musically stranded again.”
She became a solo performer, learning lap steel and banjo along with guitar, and called her style “organic moonshine roots music.” Today, she eschews picks for fingers, even when strumming chords, and is a vital blues-and-folk based stylist when she lays into her playing–especially in a live,solo setting. After two self-released albums, 2006’s The Way of the Weeping Willow and 2008’s Mountain of Rose Quartz, she connected with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who recorded and produced her 2013 album, Pushin’ Against Stone, at Nashville’s Easy Eye Sound, which helped launch her now-flourishing career.
Valerie June’s Gear
Guitars
Amps
- Fender Deluxe Reverb
Effects
- TC Electronic Hall of Fame
- MXR X Third Man Hardware Double Down booster
- J. Rockett Audio Archer boost/overdrive
Strings
- D’Addario XL Nickel Regular Light (.010–.046)
- Martin Marquis Silked Phosphor Bronze (.012–.054
Photo by Travys Owen
As we talk about art being a shared experience, June says she can be a bit of a hermit at times, but “when it’s time to share the art, then there you are. Even if you’re a painter and you just put your painting on a wall and walk away, that’s an interaction that brings you out of your studio or your bedroom to understand this whole act of co-creating—which to me is a spiritual act anyway. That’s why we’re here, to really understand those rules and layers to life. How do we co-create together?
“And I think it’s so fun,” she enthuses. “I enjoy learning, even when it’s hard. I’m like, ‘Okay, this chord is killing me right now, or this phrase.... but I’ma stick with it. And then that likens to something that I might face when I go out into the world. I’m like, ‘All right, I can get through this.’”
I suggest, “When you say ‘co-creating,’ it sounds like you mean something bigger.”
“Both in the creation of our art, but also in the creation of a life,” June replies. “’Cause how can a life be something this artistic? You get to the end of it and you’re like, ‘Wow, look at what I co-created! With all these other people, with animals, with nature, with sound that’s all around....‘ All of my life has been a piece of art or a collective creation. I imagine them like books: different lives on a shelf. And you go pick one—‘Whoa! I created a pretty fun one there!’ or, ‘Oh, man, I had no hand in that....’ Close the book, next one!” she concludes, laughing as she illustrates the metaphor with her hands.
“So does that make all of your inspirations your co-creators?” I ask.
Valerie June at one of her several Newport Folk Festival appearances, with her trusty Gold Tone banjo
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
“Yeah! Even if they’ve gone before,” says June. “I was listening to some beautiful classical music the other day, and I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know who any of these artists are; they’re all dead and gone, but I’m just enjoying it and it’s putting me in a zone that I need to be in right now.‘ So, we’re always leaving these little seeds for even those who are coming after us to be inspired by.”
Some of her current non-musical co-creators are poets and authors, such as the poet Hafez, the philosopher Audre Lorde, poet Mary Oliver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist whose works include Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.
“It’s not ever complete or finished, your study of art. It’s an adventure, and it keeps getting prettier as you walk through the meadow of creating or learning new things.”
“These books are so beautiful and show the relationship of humanity with nature and the way trees speak with each other; the way moss communicates to itself,” June explains. “Those ways of being can help humans, who always think we know so much, to learn how to work together better.”
As she’s sharing, I see her glance out her window. “Right now, I just saw a muskrat go across the pond,” she continues. “It’s about this big [holds hands about three feet apart] and it digs holes in the yard. It’s having such a great time and I’m just like, ‘Okay, you are huge, and I’m walking through the yard and falling in holes because of you [laughs]. I’m just watching you live your best life!’ And then there was a blue heron that came yesterday, and I watched it eat fish.... They’re my friends!” she exclaims, with more laughter.
Valerie June believes in the power of flowers–and all living thing–as her creative collaborators.
It might seem like we’re getting a bit off subject, but it’s residents of nature like these who are important in her creative process.
I share how, in my own approach to art, I feel as though we can always access creativity and our ideals, as long as we stay receptive to experiencing and sharing in them. June agrees, but comments that sometimes her best self only wants to sit and focus: “No more information; no more downloads, please.”
An encounter with Memphis-based blues guitarist Robert Belfour, who June frequently saw perform, expanded that perspective for her. She shares about a time she went up to him after a show: “I was like, ‘Hey, I would love to work with you on some music and maybe we could co-write a song or something.’ He was like, ‘Nope! I don’t wanna do it.’ And I said, ‘Whaaat?’ And he’s like, ‘No. I do what I do, and I do not do what anybody else does; I just do what I do.’”
Sometimes, she says, “I think that’s just as much of an outlook to have with creating as anything. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m there, I’m where I wanna be. I don’t want to be anywhere else.’”
“That’s why we’re here, to really understand those rules and layers to life. How do we co-create together?”
Part of what’s so enjoyable about speaking with June is realizing that she truly exists on her own plane. She has no pretense, and in that, doesn’t hide some of the fears that weigh on her mind at times. But she doesn’t let those define her. It’s her easy, exuberant optimism that sparks a feeling of friendship between us, without having known each other before that afternoon. What are some of her guiding principles as an artist, I wonder?
“I sit with the idea of, ‘Who am I creating this for?’” she says, “and returning to the fact that I’m doing this for me, and, as Gillian Welch said, ‘I’m gonna do it anyway even if it doesn’t pay.’ This is what I wanna do. And reflecting on that and letting that kind of be my guiding force. It’s just something that I enjoy, that I really wanna do.”
YouTube It
From there, the conversation meanders in other directions, and June even generously asks me a few questions about my own artistic beliefs. We share about trusting your gut instinct, and walking away from situations and people who don’t serve us. This reminds her of a bigger feeling.
“With everything that these times hold for us as humans,” she shares, “from the inequality that we face to the environmental change, the political climate, and all the things that could lead us to fear or negativity.... I started to think about it, and I’m like, ‘Okay, well, maybe we are fucked! Maybe the planet is going to eject us and all of the other things are gonna come true! Well, if that’s what’s gonna happen, who do I wanna be?’
“I want to go out in a way that’s sweet or kind to other people, enjoying this experience, these last moments, and building togetherness through music. I want to co-create a beautiful life even in the face of all of that. That’s what I want to do.”
