Swamp ash has long been a tonewood of choice for its clarity and character, and PRS is leaning fully into its potential with the Swamp Ash Special, a visually striking Core range guitar that showcases the wood's grain across an impressive range of finishes.
Swamp Ash was one of the first woods to be used in solid-body electric guitar production. It’s light, it’s pretty, and it’s known for a clear high end and slightly dipped midrange. Most guitar companies flirt with Swamp Ash from time to time, but Paul Reed Smith seems to really have fun with it across the model range, from the more affordable SE series on up. The Swamp Ash Special from PRS’s Core range is a decidedly modern guitar that uses this traditional tonewood in a very showy fashion across a range of finishes that emphasise its grain and contrast.
Catch up on all the latest features and reviews here.
But let’s back up a bit because Swamp Ash isn’t the only notable thing about this guitar.
The ‘Special’ designation lets you know that this guitar has a humbucker/single/humbucker pickup configuration. But in this case, PRS marketing refers to it as a humbucker/“single”/humbucker, the quotation marks drawing attention to the use of a noiseless NF single-voiced humbucker.
When combined with the five-way pickup selector switch and individual coil split mini switches for each humbucker, you’ve got a total of 12 possible pickup selections available on this instrument. That gorgeous Swamp Ash body – and the review unit’s Jasper Smokeburst finish certainly serves that beautiful grain on a silver platter – features PRS’s ‘Violin’ carve, giving it a three-dimensionality that serves ergonomic purposes as well as aesthetic ones.
The 22-fret bolt-on neck features a rosewood fingerboard, PRS’s Pattern Regular neck shape, and elegantly designed bird outline fretboard inlays. At the top of the headstock, you’ll find PRS Phase III locking tuners with lightweight wing buttons, one of PRS’s more recent features aimed at promoting the smooth transfer of vibrational energy. They also look cool.
The neck is finished in Satin Nitro that feels like there’s no finish at all, while the body is high-gloss Nitro. It’s very shiny. PRS’s patented tremolo is used here, and it’s one of my favourite non-locking units for many reasons, chief of which is that the walls on either side of the bridge prevent lateral movement of the saddles, protecting you from tuning drift or weird oscillations and helping the saddles to sit nice and flat.
The pickups consist of 58/15 LT humbuckers and the Narrowfield middle pickup. These are all vintage-inspired pickups, with the ‘LT’ standing for ‘low turn.’ This means there are fewer windings on the pickup coils compared to a hotter humbucker, and that means clearer treble, tighter bass, and more detail in your phrasing.
The finish options are Black Doghair Smokeburst, Jasper Smokeburst, McCarty Tobacco Sunburst, Scarlet Smokeburst, Vintage Natural and White Doghair Smokeburst. They all look great, but the Black Doghair Smokeburst is really calling to me – this week. Last week I was all about the Scarlet.
PRS has a habit of doing that to you. I’m glad I’m just reviewing and not buying because they make it a very tough choice. And then you realise there’s the option of a maple fingerboard and the agonising decision begins all over again!
Alright, time to play. I plugged the Swamp Ash Special into my IK Multimedia TONEX Pedal, which has plenty of really great models for clean and dirty sounds, including a Dumble, a Fender Bassman and Deluxe Reverb, and some nice Vox models. I also plugged into my Marshall DSL50 and an Ibanez TSA15 Tube Screamer 15-watt combo amp with a Celestion Seventy 80 speaker.
I know it’s a cliche to refer to a low-output pickup as ‘articulate’, but dammit, that’s what it is. This guitar is all about detail. If you’re a player who employs a wide dynamic range and lots of little fretting-hand phrasing tricks to really wring out some expressiveness from your guitar, you’re going to love this instrument. The guitar itself responds differently depending on how hard you pick, of course, but the pickup conspires with the guitar’s natural dynamism to really present your playing to the audience in its full range. That’s another way of saying if you’re a good player, you’re going to retain more of what makes you sound good. If your technique isn’t quite together, you’re going to hear every half-fretted note or timid pick attack.
There are plenty of PRS models with hotter pickups for players who don’t need the absolute clarity of this one, but really, the upshot is, if you’re a virtuoso player or even just a very confident one who knows their own style, you have twelve whole ways to adorn it via those pickup switches.
The hum bucking modes have a bright, lively bounce that pairs really nicely with the single-voiced Narrowfield pickup, and I particularly favour the neck humbucker for expressive lead lines. Flip to single coil mode for either pickup and you’ll get a lower-output, zippier, edgier voice. But a whole different kind of magic happens when you start combining either outer pickup in either of their modes with the Narrowfield. Here you can fine-tune the amount of depth, clarity and body of your sound.
Pile on the gain, and you suddenly have a more aggressive, powerful instrument that retains. It has rich harmonic overtones and plays very nicely with overdrive pedals. This is one of the most versatile guitars in the PRS lineup. It’s dedicated to the nuanced, accomplished player who knows what they like about their style and wants to make sure the audience gets to hear it as intended. But it’s not just a guitar for your audience. It’s a guitar for you.
It’s comfortable to play, it’s built to an impeccable standard, and even just looking at it is going to inspire you.
For local enquiries, head here.
