This $500 solidbody may look like a no-frills machine, but it’s a rock-solid player with features that elevate it above most guitars in its price category.
A flat-out bargain. Great vibrato system. Excellent fretwork. Fast playability.
Some midrange clutter in the output at wide-open volumes.
$499
PRS SE CE 24 Standard Satin
prsguitars.com
PRS makes some of the best affordable electric guitars in the world. They also have a talent for making those instruments look expensive. They achieve this trick thanks to quality control standards and practices that better most companies at the accessible end of the price spectrum. But PRS also built their reputation on immaculately crafted and very exclusive guitars. And once that association is burned into the collective consciousness of the guitar playing public—and you figure out a way to cop high-end design cues in down-market versions—well, you can make an inexpensive guitar seem very expensive, indeed.
The $499 Indonesia-built PRS SE CE 24 Standard Satin does not have the advantage of a flame-maple top to give an upscale aura, like its bolt-on cousin the SE CE 24, but doesn’t need it. Because it takes about a minute of playing the SE CE 24 Standard Satin to feel and hear that it’s guided by the same playability-first design philosophies that make top-shelf PRS instruments coveted. There’s a lot of classic PRS essence in the SE CE 24 Standard Satin, and at 500 bucks in the year 2024, that is no mean feat.
The Best Deal Yet? PRS SE CE 24 Demo
Stirring Up Trouble
One really cool thing about a satin finish PRS is that, rather than compelling you to don kid gloves, it invites you play it hard, like a battered old Les Paul Jr. or Telecaster might. Like those guitars, the SE CE 24 Standard Satin is an elemental instrument. There is little in the way of bells and whistles to distract you from picking. Instead, the straight-ahead nature of the design tends to reinforce the sense of how well-made the SE CE 24 Standard Satin is.
Even with the $499 price in mind, I will surprise exactly no one by mentioning that this PRS is, more or less, flawlessly put together. Look all you want—you won’t find anything misaligned, sloppily cut, or improperly glued anywhere. The bolt-on maple neck sits snugly in its pocket and the fretwork is every bit as nice as what you see on guitars much further up the food chain. There’s no fret buzz, and yet the action is low and slinky. The guitar rings like it’s a living thing, too. Strum a first-position E chord and you’ll feel the resonance in your ribs.
When you examine the SE CE 24 Standard Satin at even closer range, you find details that charm and impress. Where an expensive U.S.-built PRS wouldn’t leave the factory with anything other than a perfectly bookmatched mahogany body, the SE CE 24 Standard Satin’s all-mahogany body is made up of at least three sections which look fairly asymmetric in size. The grain looks pretty different at the joins, too. But that does nothing to detract from the pervading sense of craft. In fact, it heightens the SE CE 24 Standard Satin’s all-business, proletarian essence—a nice thing to see in a guitar from a brand which, historically, is associated with fancy appointments.
Other construction details leave you appreciative of PRS’ commitment to advancing electric guitar design rather than being bound to tradition. The PRS Patented Tremolo vibrato system is as smooth as molasses and stable even under vicious handling (a specialty of mine). Among guitars in this price class, I’ve grown to expect vibratos that fly wildly out of tune if you sneeze, with arms that constantly flop and dangle out of reach. Even on this import version of the system, the ridiculously simple solution of a non-threaded arm that sits in a plastic sleeve works without fail. You can situate it at various heights and swing it into any position that feels comfortable, and it will stay there. It’s a fix for the inexpensive vibrato blues that many manufacturers would be wise to study. The dark-hued rosewood fretboard, too, seems luxurious for a $500 guitar. Most guitars in this price zone pivoted to paler Indian Laurel for fretboards some time ago.
Rowdy, Raw, and Refined
I instinctively get apprehensive when I see uncovered humbuckers in an affordable guitar. Something about encountering decades worth of ghastly, harsh, thin, and nasty entry-level humbuckers will do that to you. The 85/15 “S” pickups in our review guitar go a long way toward alleviating this paranoia. In humbucker mode, the bridge pickup is balanced. There is a midrange bump that can lend just a touch of harmonic clutter and some stridency when you play chords at full volume. But lead lines sing with a heated energy that has a nice touch of silkiness around the edges. Volume and tone attenuation are effective cures, too, if the midrange is too hot for your taste. That midrange emphasis is less flattering in the neck pickup, at least when you play big rock chords. But melodic fingerpicking and a dynamic touch summon a sweet side, and, as with the bridge pickup, single notes from the 1st through 3rd strings in particular have a satisfying, ringing presence that is not at all harsh. Combined pickup tones are especially nice. They’re springy, airy, and at times have an almost-Stratocaster-but-fatter ring.
Speaking of Stratocaster tones, there’s more than a little taste of Straty-ness in the split-coil voices. In the bridge position, the fundamental split-coil tone rings a lot like a hot Strat pickup, but with less bite and muscle than a Telecaster bridge. The neck pickup comes off as a bit rowdy and exhibits more overdrive characteristics than a Strat neck pickup, but is very responsive to a nudge to the volume control if you want clear, less-driven tones. The middle position in split-coil mode, which combines the centermost coils of the two pickups, is the most interesting twist on the instrument’s inner Stratocaster spirit. It generates a thick and muscular but clear and snappy version of a Strat’s out-of-phase tones. That’s not a sound I use a lot, but I love the PRS’s take on that tonality. Each split-coil position, by the way, exhibits very little volume loss when compared to humbucker mode.
The Verdict
We probably sound like a busted record at this point—going on about how PRS tends to overachieve in the affordable price category. But, hey, don’t look at us. It’s PRS’s fault. And until they start building junk we’ll keep on raving. The careful construction, useful and flexible coil-splitting capacity, reliable, smart vibrato, and all-around stability make this instrument an uncommon value. And you could very easily spend a lot more money and fail to get a guitar that does as much, and does it as well, as this straight-ahead, no-frills machine.
The octave fuzz section from the Atreides Weirding Module gets its own star turn in a buzzing bruiser that can be absurd and beautiful.
Unusually flexible and sustain-rich octave fuzz. Fat, rubbery synth-like sounds. White-hot fuzz. Versatile tone and fuzz and sub octave levels.
Can’t entirely remove fuzz or octave signal.
$169
Way Huge Stone Burner
jimdunlop.com
Way Huge’s Atreides Weirding Module is one of Jeorge Tripps’ great gifts to the world. It’s a gift that keeps giving, too. The Attack Vector phaser and envelope was its first offspring. But the newest, the Stone Burner Sub Atomic octave fuzz is a killer, maybe the coolest, and probably the most practical pedal from the Atreides family. It’s an unusually useful and forgiving octave fuzz that will generate up to two sub octaves, which feature more or less prominently depending on the sub level.
This sub octave filter works in concert with the fuzz, which you can’t remove entirely from the mix, but which ranges in intensity from nasty and spitty to double-nasty and surprisingly capable of sustain. Various mixes of the sub and fuzz levels yield tonalities that stretch from synthy elasticity and fuzz bass to fractured, tectonic-scale Earth rumblings, and fuzz that sounds like a banshee gargling gravel and rusty nails. (I mean this in the most complimentary possible sense.)
The wide-ranging tone knob, meanwhile, has a profound effect on a given mix’s glitchiness, sustain, and overtone profile. The Stone Burner also responds in fascinating ways to guitar volume and tone input—sometimes emphasizing tight fundamentals and octaves in more concise and equal parts, or enhancing the more synth-like qualities of the filter. Variations in pitch from finger vibrato and whammy bars activate many ghostly responses and overtones, too. Needless to say, it is a fairly confrontational effect, but the Stone Burner is also malleable, sweet, bratty, and beautiful.
An extroverted and beautiful version of BilT’s most affordable model showcases the guitar’s core strengths and the company’s knack for creative onboard electronics.
Ultra playable. Great pickups. Superb build quality. Cool style. Collaborative design options.
Expensive as tested.
$3,200 street as tested, $1,799 for base model.
The folks at BilT guitars and I share a lot of design influences and affinities, so I might be a little prejudiced. But I can’t think of many small builders who bring more fun to the non-major manufacturer market than BilT. They are reverent about quality and customer collaboration, but often irreverent about mixing, matching, and deviating from the forms, shapes, colors, and details that inspired their core models. Take a quick look at the company’s gallery and you’ll see mutant variations on Fender, Ampeg, and Rickenbacker themes, sparkle paint, Fender Antigua-style finishes mixed up with Gibson Trini Lopez details, and pickup combinations of every conceivable stripe.
The new, short-scale Rele is, in its simplest guise, BilT’s most accessibly priced instrument—starting at just $1,799. In typically irreverent BilT style, however, they sent a review version with thousands of dollars in upgrades, from the deep burst finish to the built-in fuzz and filtering switches. But the fancy Rele reviewed here is representative of the creative potential that BilT offers the customer if you have the vision and means. There isn’t much they won’t do to build the guitar of your wildest, weirdest dreams. Our review Rele also reveals what solid, well-made guitars BilTs are at their core. Sure, you can run up quite a bill working with the mad scientists in their guitar-building lab. But you can also get a great USA-built custom guitar at a fair price if you exhibit a little restraint.
Short-Scale Roots Shall Skyward Shoot
The Rele clearly takes a great deal of inspiration from Fender’s Mustang. But the extra-offset waist and extended bass-side horn also hint a bit at Kurt Cobain’s Jag-Stang and the Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay. It’s a lovely, balanced twist on well-worn offset motifs that feels compact and comfortable in hand while making a statement and creating a blank slate for the many options that appear on our review instrument.
On a bare-bones Rele, you can choose between a series of solid colors, an unbound rosewood or maple neck, and Mustang- or Jaguar-style pickups. Clearly, our review guitar stacked a lot of options on top of that formula. The Fralin Hum Cancelling P-90s, Duesenberg Diamond Deluxe vibrato, fabulous dispade assassin supershift pearl finish, built-in fuzz, and filtering switches all ran the total for our guitar to $3,499. This is a highly individual, and perhaps one-of-a-kind, instrument. Yet BilT makes putting one together pretty effortless.
Shortscale guitars aren’t for every player. But if you’re inclined to dismiss them out of hand, it might be worth checking out BilT’s 24.62" scale. On our review instrument, the short scale is combined with a chunky C-style neck, which makes the guitar feel much more substantial. The guitar feels more playable still for the 9.5" radius and medium jumbo frets. Ordinarily, I’m a fan of vintage Fender-style specs (7.25" radius and smaller vintage frets), but I cannot argue how fast this guitar feels under the fingers. The thicker neck fights hand fatigue and makes chording easy. String bending is fluid and precise. And while the action is quite low, the guitar is free from fret buzz and never feels less than responsive. It’s not an exaggeration to say this Rele feels like it’s wired a little more directly with your body and brain. It’s just a joy to play. The natural ease of the instrument also makes more room to experiment with the lovely Duesenberg vibrato, which, with its ability to swing freely toward the bass strings, combines some of the best attributes of Jazzmaster, Stratocaster, and Bigsby units.
A Marauder Loose in Mission Control
Most BilT customers will probably not order a Rele with this many onboard tone-altering features. But as a vehicle for showcasing what BilT can do in cooperation with a player ready to dive in whole hog, this Rele could not be more fun. Visually and functionally, it owes a debt to Fender’s long-lost, mid-’60s Marauder, and the onboard effects recall Vox’s Starstream and Cheetah. Apart from the 3-way pickup toggle, it can be hard to discern exactly what the rocker switches do at times—at least if you aren’t a frequent Jaguar user. Even if you are, some of the differences between the filtered and dark sounds you can get with the switches and the tone wheel can feel subtle—at least until you turn on the BilT Fuzz, which makes these controls feel much more powerful and flexible.
BilT’s fuzz circuit, which is activated by the push-button volume knob and regulated by the slider on the treble horn, owes much, in a sonic sense, to the Jordan Bosstone, Mosrite Fuzzrite, and ZVEX Fuzz Factory. It’s perfect for Davey Allen- and raw, garage-psych-style buzz and malevolence, and works phenomenally well with the Fralin Hum Cancelling P-90s, which are savage or sonorous depending on the combination. But the BilT fuzz also features an oscillator (activated by the push-button tone control) that produces maniacal, pitch-shifting whistles that can be altered via the slider. All of these tones can be dramatically recast by the filter and tone controls. Together, they make this Rele an addictive platform for experimental psychedelic performance.
The Verdict
At its core, our review Rele, with its beautiful neck, impeccably smooth playability, and sweet Fralin P-90s, is reason enough to investigate the possibilities of a more basic and affordable variation on the theme. But it also highlights the possibilities that arise from working with a builder as free spirited, fun, and committed to high quality as BilT. Your own Rele may not be quite as extroverted and insane as this gem, but it is so cool to know you can get there—and many points in between—very easily when you put an instrument together with this creative builder.