The PRS DGT Is Frustrating In The Best Way.

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Have you ever had a guitar that just frustrates you every single time that you pick the thing up and you want to play it? That's this guitar for me. This is a Paul Reed Smith DGT core model.

[00:00:09]It's in Solano burst. Very fitting cuz I'm a San Diego boy and I used to go to Solana Beach all the time. But, I mentioned the first time I showed you this guitar on previous video that this had become the ire of my guitar playing and I think a lot of people took that the wrong way. They thought maybe I used the wrong word, but no, I was deadly serious. However, I didn't use any context to explain why I felt that way and it's because this guitar frustrates the living hell out of me, but for all the right reasons.

[00:00:36]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> I want to start by letting you know exactly what we're going to be doing today. It's not going to be a demo video. You're going to hear more playing passages like the one you just heard, but each one I picked deliberately because it shows with context why I love this guitar so much and why it works so well for me and also why it kind of does frustrate me a little bit. And after that, I mean really the main reason I'm making this is talk about the things that are impossible to kind of get across via a video on YouTube, but you notice immediately when you have these sorts of guitars in your hands.

[00:01:54]To begin with, the reason why I kind of have my own preferences and my own kind of tendencies as the guitarist that I like is because when I first started playing guitar in the late 90s, I picked up the best guitar that I could afford.

[00:02:06]It was a Japanese 1982 Fender Japan JV Stratocaster. I still have it to this day. I love it, but I ended up following that trend for decades with a few breaks in between, but the long and short of it is 7 and 1/4 inch radius tiny frets.

[00:02:23]No problems, right?

[00:02:25]I made it work. You get used to it. You put in enough hours, you put in enough time, you can make anything work and it's really what I got used to and when I first started to get into the Paul Reed Smith guitars, my favorite model of theirs is the original McCarty, not the 594, the original McCarty and when I saw that that DGT was out there and it had a vibrato on it. I know they call it a trem, but it's a vibrato. I was really, really, really excited and I thought maybe that'd be a great guitar for me, but being the spec sheet merchant that I can be at times, I noticed it had huge frets, jumbo frets on it and I was always kind of a little bit hesitant at that point to pull the trigger on because, you know, I'm used to really small frets. It's comfortable.

[00:03:05]I slide around a lot like crazy. I play lots of funk music and I just wasn't sure it would be a good fit and they're really hard to find core versions in person where I am. All those worries got put to bed fairly quickly. Whenever I get into a new guitar, whether it's for a demo, a collaboration, or just something I got for myself, one of the first things that I do is I start to play my own original music and songs on it. And shoot me because if it doesn't sound right or it doesn't feel right to play them, I don't have a keeper on my hands and that's the first time that I noticed I actually liked the fret wire in certain situations better. Yeah, I can't believe I'm saying this either, than the smaller vintage style fret wire. Some songs and some phrases, some of which that you've heard on this channel before and you might hear momentarily here, they're just little triad things, little intricate things that have a lot of ambient things going on in the background as far as the effects go and I have to really pay attention when I'm playing the vintage-spec fenders because, you know, it's a little bit more intricate. With this guitar, because the frets are taller, what that actually translates to in the playing experience why I like it so much, it makes it so I can be more accurate. I don't have to put down nearly as much pressure with my fretting hand to have the notes ring out true.

[00:04:14]I'm also not finding anything choking because I just have more space and more real estate to work with, and it's really been a godsend in that sense.

[00:04:23]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> The variety of sounds that I can get using this guitar, but more importantly, the quality of those sounds because I know lots of guitars that have a bunch of different switchings, all these different voices and buttons and this, that, and the other. I don't really care if they don't sound great. With this guitar, it's so simple, and I love the fact that, unlike the McCarty that I do love as well, you have independent volume controls for each pickup, the treble and the bass, and it doesn't get better than that because you can roll off either one, and as you roll them off, you're not losing definition, you're not losing clarity, it's not becoming so weak that it's unusable. The way that these taper off, it is insanely good. I had dirt globbed on, and I'm just slowly rolling off. It cleans up nicely. Still got a little bit of presence when you have that much dirt on, but at the same time, it's clear.

[00:06:08]You roll all the way back up to full bore, and it's just like, "Damn." It just kicks you in the best possible way.

[00:06:13]It's kind of the theme of this video, all right.

[00:06:17]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> The main reason I like this guitar so much is because it isn't great at one thing. It truly is the sum of all of its parts, and it does everything that I could have ever asked for out of a guitar like this.

[00:07:24]When I play this guitar, it inspires more confidence in my playing, and that's worth something to me. And not all the guitars that I play, even some of the more modern spec ones that, you know, they give you more creature comforts or whatever, they don't all have that. This has the combination of some key modern things on it, but also, more importantly than that, it's the feel.

[00:07:45]I feel at home when I play this guitar, and it gets the hell out of the way. It allows me to just sit, get lost if I'm sitting and writing, or if I'm performing. Just play a good gig.

[00:07:57]That's it. I know the guitar is not going to let me down.

[00:08:00]And that leads me to kind of an interesting spot, because now there's two guitars I want to try that I've never had on this channel before.

[00:08:08]One of which is the PRS SE DGT, because I think it'd be fun to go back-to-back with this one. You know, I know they're a little bit different on paper, but as what I've learned, paper doesn't always tell the whole story.

[00:08:19]And then, you know, I have a sweet tooth. I would love to try one of the core production model DGT semi-hollows.

[00:08:26]Leave that one in standard tuning. This one's half step down. Then you have the original pickups in that one, 5909s in this one.

[00:08:35]You can make all these sorts of justifications for having multiple pieces of gear if you just map it out in the way that I just did, but it would be fun to try one of those. If you enjoyed today's video, do me a favor and hit the like button. I know it's cringe to say that, but honestly, it does impact the algorithm and potentially how many other people might see a video like this.

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