Schecter Guitar Research Unveils the Corsair, PT Fastback, Tempest Custom, & C-1 Exotic Spalted Maple Models
The PT Fastback will feature Schecter Diamond UltraTron pickups, push/pull tone knobs, and a Graph Tech XL nut.
Sun Valley, CA) (May 6, 2020) -- Schecter Guitar Research is proud to introduce the Corsair. With the success of the Corsair Custom series, Schecter has expanded this model with new finishes and a friendlier price point! Staying with tried and true Corsair construction, these new models feature the new Schecter Vintage Tremolo, Diamond 78 pickups and are available in Gloss Black, Gloss Natural and Gold Top! In typical Schecter fashion, these guitars have a dual volume and push/pull tone knobs to coil split and add even more versatility to this axe! This brand new Schecter Vintage Tremolo adds ergonomics and customization to fit your playing style. The adjustable trem arm can be set to the height and position you want with a simple set screw adjustment. Not a fan of trems? Not a problem! Aside from having multiple adjustments, the trem arm is removable as well. Maple body with a 3 piece mahogany neck, ebony fretboard, 14ā radius, 24.75ā scale, 22 medium frets, Grover Rotomatic 18:1 tuners and sleek think āCā neck gives this guitar quite a bang for you buck!
Available models:
- Corsair Gold Top MSRP $1429/STREET $999
- Corsair Gloss Black MSRP $1429/STREET $999
- Corsair Gloss Natural MSRP $1429/STREET $999
Schecter Guitar Research is proud to introduce the PT Fastbackās. The Schecter PT Fastback series is back with some new features and stylish new looks. Available in Olympic White, Gloss Black or, Gold Top with Schecter Diamond UltraTron Pickups. In true Schecter fashion, this a vintage sound with modern features. The PT Fastback has dual volume and push/pull tone knobs that coil split for added versatility. The Olympic White and Gloss Black feature classic block inlays with a maple neck, alder body and classic bindings. The PT Fastback Gold Top has some extra flair with its mahogany body and ebony fretboard! The entire Fastback line is equipped with a Graph Tech XL nut, 25.5ā scale, 14ā radius, 22 X-Jumbo frets, Grover tuners and an extremely comfortable thin āCā neck! The PT Fastback is an excellent addition and a price that wonāt break the bank!
Available models:
- PT Fastback Olympic White MSRP $869/STREET $599
- PT Fastback Gold Top MSRP $869/STREET $599
- PT Fastback Gloss Black MSRP $869/STREET $599
Schecter Guitar Research is proud to bring back the Tempest Custom. Back by popular demand, Schecter has reissued the Tempest Custom! With constant requests on socials and forums, to bring this model back, Schecter has listened to you and brought this original Schecter shape back. Available in Gloss Black, Faded Vintage Sun Burst and Vintage White, these finishes scream class and originality. Loaded with Schecterās USA Pasadena Plus pickups to give you an amazing humbucker sound that, as Schecter does, also has a coil tap option. Topped off with beautiful pearloid split crown inlays on an ebony fretboard with 22 X-Jumbo frets to give you the style feel you have been looking for. A mahogany 3 piece set neck with added carbon fiber reinforcement rods and Schecter locking tuners, make this a sturdy as it is classy. If you are looking for top end sound, construction and a unique design this is the guitar for you!
Available models:
- Tempest Vintage White MSRP $1569/STREET $1099
- Tempest Gloss Black MSRP $1569/STREET $1099
- Tempest Faded Vintage Sun Burst MSRP $1569/STREET $1099
Schecter Guitar Research is proud to introduce the C-1 Exotic Spalted Maple.The Schecter C-1 Exotic Spalted Maple series takes excellence to a whole new level.Ā The C-1 Exotic Spalted Maple packs a punch but doesnāt break the bank. A gorgeous satin finish with a natural vintage burst spalted maple top adorns a mahogany body providing sustain and warmth in addition to its exquisite looks. Loaded with great features such as a Wilkinson WVS50 II K Tremolo bridge for effortless bending and diving and Schecter locking tuners for stable tuning, the C-1 Exotic Spalted Maple will quickly become your āgo-toā guitar for every occasion.Ā The extra jumbo frets are comfortable and the 14ā fretboard radius provides ease of use while navigating the smooth playing ebony fingerboard. The 25.5ā scale length assures a quick response.Ā Armed with Schecter ā78 pickups that serve up a vintage inspired tone, the C-1 Exotic Spalted Maple provides a palette of every tone you could ever need and the coil split function broadens the palette even further.Ā Optional SGR-1C molded hard-shell case sold separately.
Available models:
- C-1 Exotic Spalted Maple MSRP $1,149/STREET $799
For more information:
Schecter Guitar Research
Thereās so much that goes into bringing a pedal to life. Hereās a stash of DIY kits in various stages of completion at the authorās workshop.
Do you scoff at pedal prices? Hereās a deep look at the process and expenses of bringing a pedal to market.
Youāve come up with something special and inspiring on the breadboard and are ready to put the circuit into a pedal. How do you do that? You could hire a contractor, but letās go full DIY.
You will need a CAD program to lay out the schematic and the subsequent circuit board. Once purchased, you need to learn to use the software to create a digital schematic and PC board. This process is not strictly about understanding the softwareāyou also need to learn PCB layout practices as they relate to grounding, trace length, footprint design, and other common elements. While adhering to these, you also need to layout hardware, like potentiometers and toggles, in specific locations that allow them to appropriately mate with the enclosure that they will be stuffed into.
Now that we have our circuit laid out, we need to create specific file types to send off to a fabrication house so that they can open the files and manufacture the PC boards correctly to our design. Once weāve submitted the files and they are approved, we wait with excitement, and dread, until they come in. Why dread? Well, we wonāt know if the PCB is correctly populated with components that fit the package footprints and distribute power correctly, and if the audio sounds like what we designed on the breadboard, until they arrive. There may also be noise or other issues that weāll need to track down before we can call the PCB finished. The first PCB that I ever designed came in looking exactly like the digital file, but did not work whatsoever.
After weāve debugged the PCB to make it work, we get to a fun and frustrating step: putting the circuit into our enclosure. The enclosure part is fun because itās the external, artistic side of the product where the builderās creativity is first seen. An unappealing look could be the deciding factor for a consumer. Iām sure most of us have made a decision on a guitar or pedal before itās even plugged in.
Trying to squeeze everything into an enclosure can become discouraging. The more hardware thatās affixed to the PCB, the more every measurement counts. This means every knob, toggle, footswitch, audio jack, and DC jack will play a role in making the PCB line up with the drill holes on the enclosure. Thatās an aspect we havenāt even covered yet.
āAn unappealing look could be the deciding factor for a consumer.ā
Most of us in the industry have our enclosures manufactured at one-stop-shop locations. This is because having the facilities and tools to do drilling, powder coating, and UV or screen printing in-house is simply not feasible for most. Once we get a line on an enclosure manufacturer, we need to get them our drill measurements. This includes drill-hole diameters and locations related to each other, and from the edges of the enclosure. Once done, we need to get those measurements into digital form along with any artwork. We also need to pick a powdercoat color from the thousands of colors available. Not all powders adhere the same way to metal and not all powders work well with UV printing. So how do we take our drill measurements, powder color, and artwork to the next step? This is stomping grounds for Adobe Illustratorāanother software program to purchase and learn. Crud!
After the enclosure files are sent off, made to spec, and received, we hold our breath and hope the populated PCB fits into the drilled enclosure. If it does, we dance. If it doesnāt, we break out the ruler and calipers and measure the places that we messed up. If the changes are to the PCB, we make them and order new samples. Same goes for the enclosure. While those revisions are being fabricated, we can focus on the packaging for the pedal. This is another fun part, and something that the customer will interact with upon receiving.
This is where I need to leave you. Before doing so, Iād like to point out that we havenāt gone into the remaining aspects of bringing a boutique pedal to life. There are still major considerations like product photos done in a photo area with a nice camera and edited with (more) software. Website construction to display that pedal along with copy and SEO, packaging materials, a label printer, and shipping software that talks to the website.
And at that, Iāve omitted a lot of small and medium steps in the breakdown of bringing a pedal to market. So I ask, are pedals really overpriced?
Strong midrange-focused personality. Particularly vowel-ly and vocal sweep. Feels controlled.
Some players will miss silkier, hazier bass-range sounds.
$249
Dunlop Mick Ronson Cry Baby
Park and fly with this mid-focused but very vocal wah honoring Bowieās right-hand man.
Dunlop Mick Ronson Wah - MAIN by premierguitar
Mick Ronsonālead ripper, lieutenant, riff-dealer, and arranger in David Bowieās Spiders from Marsāwas such a cool amalgam of ā60s British guitar voices. He had Keith Richardsā sense of rhythm and hooks, Jimmy Pageās knack for evil-sounding ear candy, and a preference for loud, simple rigs: Les Paul, Marshall, Tone Bender, Echoplex, and, most critically, a Cry Baby wah. You know the sound of this Cry Baby. Itās everywhere on early 1970s Bowie recordsāāQueen Bitch,ā āMoonage Daydream,ā and āWidth of a Circle,ā to name a fewāand it put discernible fangs and venom in his playing. There are many such sounds in Dunlopās excellent new tribute, the Mick Ronson Cry Baby.
Ronno was not a wah player in the āwocka-wockaā sense. He primarily used the pedal in a fixed position or with subtle longer sweeps. His favorite wah for the job was an early Cry Baby built in Italy by Jen. These wahs were notoriously, shall we say, āuniqueā from specimen to specimen. And without Ronnoās original on hand for comparison, itās hard to know how close the tribute gets to nailing it. But there is an unmistakable mid focus that mirrors and invites Ronnoās biting phrasingāparticularly in Bowieās live recordings from the time. The new pedalās sweep starts out squawky at the heel-down position, where my other vintage-voiced wahs just sound foggy. That midrange emphasis and presence remains through its sweep, suggesting the Ronson Wahās singing range is narrow. On the contrary, the many distinctly different vowel sounds within that range color the base tone more strongly than many wahs with a smoother, bassier taper. That profile lends itself to great control and multiple bold, distinct soundsāparticularly when an angry gain device is situated upstream.
Very diverse slate of tones. Capable of great focus and power. Potentially killer studio tool.
Sculpting tones in a reliably reproducible way can be challenging. Midrange emphasis may be a deal breaker for some.
$199 street
Bold-voiced, super-tunable distortion that excels in contexts from filtered boost to total belligerence.
Whitman Audio calls the Wave Collapse a fuzzāand what a very cool fuzz it is. But classifying it strictly as such undersells the breadth of its sounds. The Seattle, Washington-built Wave Collapse has personality at low gain levels and super crunchy ones. Itās responsive and sensitive enough to input and touch dynamics to move from light overdrive to low-gain distortion and degenerate fuzz with a change in picking intensity or guitar volume. And from the pedalās own very interactive controls, one can summon big, ringing, near-clean tones, desert sludge, or snorkel-y wah buzz.
The Wave Collapse speaks many languages, but it has an accentāusually an almost wah-like midrange lilt that shows up as faint or super-pronounced. Itās not everyoneās creamy distortion ideal. But with the right guitar pairings and a dynamic approach, the Wave Collapseās midrange foundation can still span sparkly and savage extremes that stand tall and distinctive in a mix. Thereās much that sounds and feels familiar in the Wave Collapse, but the many surprises it keeps in store are the real fun.
Heavy Surf, Changing Waves
The absence of a single fundamental influence makes it tricky to get your bearings with the Wave Collapse at first. Depending on where you park the controls to start, you might hear traces of RAT in the midrange-forward, growly distortion, or the Boss SD-1 in many heavy overdrive settings. At its fuzziest, it howls and spits like aFuzz Face orTone Bender and can generate compressed, super-focused, direct-to-desk rasp. And in its darker corners, weighty doom tones abound.
The many personalities are intentional. Whitman Dewey-Smithās design brief was, in his own words, āa wide palette ranging from dirty boost to almost square-wave fuzz and textures that could be smooth or sputtery.ā A parallel goal, he says, was to encourage tone discoveries in less-obvious spaces. Many such gems live in the complex interrelationships between the EQ, filter, and bias controls. They also live in the circuit mash-up at the heart of the Wave Collapse. The two most prominent fixtures on the circuit are the BC108 transistor (best known as a go-to in Fuzz Face builds) and twin red LED clipping diodes (associated, in the minds of many, with clipping in the Turbo RAT and Marshall Jubilee amplifier). Thatās not exactly a classic combination of amplifier and clipping section components, but itās a big part of the Wave Collapseās sonic identity.
The BC108 drives one of two core gain stages in the Wave Collapse. The first stage takes inspiration from early, simple fuzz topologies like the Tone Bender and Fuzz Face, but with a focus on what Dewey-Smith calls āexploiting the odd edges and interactivity in a two-transistor gain stage.ā The BC108 contributes significant character to this stage. The second, post-EQ gain stage is JFET-based. Itās set up to interact like a tube guitar amp input stage and is followed by the clipping LEDs. Dewey-Smith says you can think of the whole as a āfairlyā symmetric hard-clipping scheme.
āThe magic of the circuit is that those gain stages are very complimentary. When stage one is running clean, it still passes a large, unclipped signal that hits the second stage, making those classic early distortion sounds. Conversely, when the first stage is running hot, it clips hard and the second stage takes a back seatāmostly smoothing out the rough edges of the first stage.ā Factor in the modified Jack Orman pickup simulator-style section in the front end, and you start to understand the pedalās propensity for surprise and expressive latitude.
Searchinā Safari
The Wave Collapseās many identities arenāt always easy to wrangle at the granular-detail level. The control setāknobs for bias, filter color, input level, and output level, plus switches for āmassā (gain,) ārangeā(bass content at the input), and ācenterā (shifts the filterās mid emphasis from flat)āare interdependent in such a way that small adjustments can shift a toneās character significantly, and it can be challenging to find your way back to a tone that sounded just right five minutes ago. Practice goes a long way toward mastering these sensitivities. One path to reliably reproducible sounds is to establish a ballpark tone focus with the filter first, dial in the input gain to an appropriately energetic zone, then shape the distortion color and response more specifically with the bias.
As you get a feel for these interactions, youāll be knocked out by the sounds and ideas you bump into along the way. In addition to obvious vintage fuzz and distortion touchstones I crafted evocations of blistering, compressed tweed amps, jangly Marshalls, and many shades of recording console preamp overdrive. The Wave Collapse responds in cool ways to just about any instrument you situate out front. But while your results may vary, I preferred the greater headroom and detail that comes with single-coil pickup pairings. Humbuckers, predictably conjure a more compressed and, to my ears, less varied set of sounds. I also found black-panel Fender amps a more adaptable pairing than Vox- and Marshall-style voices. But just about any guitar or pickup type can yield magnificent results.
The Verdict
Though itās hard to avoid its filtered midrange signature entirely, the Wave Collapse is a pedal of many masks. Once you master the twitchy interactivity between its controls, you can tailor the pedal to weave innocuously but energetically into a mix or completely dominate it. These capabilities are invaluable in ensemble performances, but itās super enticing to consider how the Wave Collapse would work in a studio situation, where its focus and potency can fill gaps and nooks in color and vitality or turn a tune on its head. Pedals that stimulate the inner arranger, producer, and punk simultaneously are valuable tools. And while the Wave Collapse wonāt suit every taste, when you factor together the pedalās sub-$200 cost, thoughtful design, high-quality execution, and malleability, it adds up to a lot of utility for a very fair price.
Paul Reed Smith also continues to evolve as a guitarist, and delivered a compelling take on Jeff Beckās interpretation of āCause Weāve Ended As Loversā at the PRS 40th Anniversary Celebration during this yearās NAMM.
After 40 years at the helm of PRS Guitars, our columnist reflects on the nature of evolution in artistryāof all kinds.
Reflecting on four decades in business, I donāt find myself wishing I āknew then what I know now.ā Instead, Iām grateful to still have the curiosity and environment to keep learning and to be in an art that has a nonstop learning curve. Thereās a quote attributed to artist Kiki Smith that resonates deeply with me: āI can barely control my kitchen sink.ā That simple truth has been a guiding principle in my life. We canāt control the timing of knowledge or discovery. If profound learning comes late in life, so be it. The important thing is to remain open to it when it arrives.
I look at whatās happened at PRS Guitars over the last 40 years with real pride. I love what weāve builtānot just in terms of instruments but in the culture of innovation and craftsmanship that defines our company. The guitar industry as a whole has evolved in extraordinary ways, and Iām fortunate to be part of a world filled with passionate, talented, and good-hearted people.
I love learning. It may sound odd, but thereās something almost spiritual about it. Learning isnāt constant; it comes in stages. Sometimes, there are long dry spells where you can even struggle to hold onto what you already know. Other times, learning is sporadic, with nuggets of understanding appearing here and there that are treasured for their poignancy. And then there are those remarkable moments when the proverbial floodgates open, and the lessons come so fast that you can barely keep up. Iāve heard songwriters and musicians describe this same pattern. Sometimes, no new songs emerge; sometimes, they trickle out one by one; and sometimes, they arrive so quickly itās impossible to capture them all. I believe itās the same for all creatives, including athletes, engineers, and everyone invested in their art.
Looking back over 40 years in business and a decade of preparation before that, I recognize these distinct phases of learning. Right now, Iām in one of those high-gain learning periods. Iāve taken on a teacher who is introducing me to concepts I never imagined, ideas I didnāt think anyone could explaināthings I wasnāt even sure I was worthy of understanding. But when he calls and says, āHave you thought about this?ā I lean in, eager to absorb, not just to learn something new for myself, but because I want him to feel his teaching is appreciated, making it more likely that the teaching continues.
āLearning isnāt just about accumulating knowledge; itās about applying it, sharing it, and evolving because of it.ā
Beyond structured teaching, learning also comes through experience, discovery, and problem solving. We recently got our hands on some old, magical guitars, vintage pickups, microphones, and mic preamps. These arenāt just relics; theyāre windows into a deeper understanding of how things work and what the engineers who invented them knew. By studying the schematics of tube-mic preamps, weāre uncovering insights that directly influence how we wire guitar pickups and their electronics. It may seem like an unrelated field, but the many parallels in audio engineering are there if you look. Knowledge in one area has a ripple effect, unlocking new possibilities in another.
Even as I continue learning, I recognize that our entire team at PRS is on this journey with me. We have people whose sole job is to push the boundaries of what we understand about pickups, spending every day refining and applying that knowledge so that when you pick up a PRS guitar, it sounds better. More than 400 people work here, each contributing to the collective advancement of our craft. I am grateful to be surrounded by such a dedicated and smart team.
One of my favorite memories at PRS was at a time we were deep into investigating scale lengths on vintage guitars, and some unique pickup characteristics, when one of our engineering leaders walked into my office. He had just uncovered something astonishing and said, āYouāre not going to believe this one.ā That excitement and back-and-forth exchange of ideas is what keeps this work so rewarding.
As I reflect on my journey, I see that learning isnāt just about accumulating knowledge; itās about applying it, sharing it, and evolving because of it. I get very excited when something weāve learned ends up on a new product. Whether lessons come early or late, whether they arrive in waves or trickles, there is always good work to be done. And that is something I just adore.