Review: PRS Guitars NF3

The reputation PRS Guitars have for quality is second to none. The PRS SE NF3 is a ride-or-die guitar; a reliable performer. It’s also an onion, much like an ogre, and it has layers. Out of the case it presents as a sleek, unpretentious Silver Sky-esque strat, but the eye is quickly drawn to its tasteful array of subtle enhancements. It’s the kind of workhorse you take on tour year after year, and after every show there’s guaranteed to be a handful of eagle-eyed enthusiasts waiting side-of-stage to quiz you: ‘What are those fret inlays all about?’ ‘Are those pickups actually humbuckers or are they something else?’ ‘Surely they’ve got to be, right?’. You can just about hang your hat on it being set up and ready to go the second you open the box. If the SE range is the kind of gear Paul Reed Smith wants his students to use, please take my money and school me.

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The SE (Student Edition) line of PRS guitars was launched in 2001 thanks to a brainwave by legendary brand ambassador Carlos Santana, who wanted to give a larger proportion of their shared fanbase access to PRS quality instruments. The SE line was originally produced out of World Music in South Korea, but in 2018 PRS teamed up with PT. Cort Indonesia and shifted the SE production line five thousand kilometres south. Four years later, they built a completely separate 90,000 sq ft factory exclusively for the production of PRS SE guitars. On the PRS Guitars YouTube channel you’ll find a 20 minute documentary tour of this factory, which I highly recommend watching. In the documentary, PRS Chief Operating Officer Jack Higginbotham explains that “to make a PRS guitar is a pretty singular thing… you have to have our processes, you have to have our parts, you have to use our design elements to make a neck feel the way we want a neck to feel.” This gives you an idea of the rigid quality controls the SE guitars are held to on the production line.

PRS SE NF3

The NF3 is the latest addition to the SE family, bringing with it a key upgrade: a trio of PRS Narrowfield Deep Dish “S” pickups. To the uninitiated naked eye, it resembles a kind of low profile humbucker with post-modern rectangular magnets that sort of look like morse code. According to the PRS website, these pickups “are made with taller bobbins to fit more winds and extra metal pieces in between the magnets for a more focused, powerful tone.” I tried out a PRS SE NF3 in a luxurious metallic Gunmetal Gray finish that reminded me of a video taken from a weather balloon as it crossed the beautiful, stratospheric threshold between blue sky and the black void of space.

First I need to talk about the electronics, starting with those Narrowfield pickups. The absence of a battery box in the back of the guitar came as a bit of a surprise. According to Mr. Paul Reed Smith himself, “it’s not kind of like a single-coil [pickup], it is [a single coil pickup].” Tonally, this revolutionary technology effortlessly treads the line between single-coil and humbucking pickups, giving you the best of both worlds: shimmer and twang, dynamic response and character in the upper register, plus punchy bottom-end girth and a warm, driven sustain. The thing I found most rewarding here was the value of that middle pickup. It perfectly splits the difference between a neck and a bridge humbucker: tamer high-mids than bridge, a little more bite and a little less warmth than neck. And because it’s a 5-way switch, you’ve got the spaces between to explore as well, which I found to be remarkably shimmery and throaty. I invariably ended up using the tone pot significantly more than I would on other strat style guitars, just to flatten out some of the tonal variance between switch positions. This is definitely a guitar that benefits from fiddling with the pots to nail your sound, so it’s a good thing the pots feel great beneath your fingers and are easy to manipulate mid-lick.

In terms of construction, I found the flat top poplar body very aerodynamic and ergonomic. The deep contour in the back was extremely comfortable against my beer belly and the rounded neck heel granted me a frictionless ascension to the 22nd fret. The bolt-on maple neck is a slightly shorter 25” scale length with a Wide Thin profile. The fretboard has a radius of 10”, measuring 42.9mm at the nut and 57.2mm at the 22nd fret and featuring the whimsical and omnipotent signature PRS bird inlays. I personally found that the string spacing felt a little wider than what I was used to, but a reliable source tells me PRS devotees should find it comfortably familiar. Those same die-hard brand followers will quickly notice the PRS logo design (Paul Reed Smith’s autograph) in the headstock, along with the smaller ‘SE’ logo and ‘NF3’ truss-rod cover, all new designs for this latest SE offering. They decided not to opt for locking tuners in this model, instead sticking with the classic PRS designed lightweight nickel tuners. At the opposite end of the guitar you’ve got a PRS patented tremolo system which keeps everything reliably in tune while offering a nice range of motion for whammy bends and flourishes.

You can pick up a PRS SE NF3 in four finishes: the aforementioned Gunmetal Gray; an equally spacey Ice Blue Metallic; a bold and provocative Metallic Orange; and classically elegant Pearl White. Each comes with maple and rosewood options and all are fitted with a black pickguard (save for the pickguard on the Gunmetal Gray model which comes in white).

You’ve heard the name. You know its reputation. Owning a PRS guitar is easier than ever. The PRS SE NF3 is the perfect springboard from which to launch oneself into a world of unrivalled quality that will last a lifetime.

For local PRS Guitars enquiries, visit Electric Factory.