I'm posting this numerous places on the net in the hopes of somebody being able to help.
I’ve been playing mostly rhythm guitar the time I’ve had it, but lately when playing some lead-type stuff I’ve recently noticed something strange in the tone of my PRS Brent Mason signature guitar. It’s like a very noticeable and dissonant harmonic tone. Sometimes it sounds like hammering.
I noticed it on the G string when playing single notes above the 7th fret - but it’s there on all the frets and even the open string. It’s also a bit noticeable on the B string, whereas the high e string doesn’t seem to have this problem at all - anywhere. It seems to be present on at least the D string as well, but not very noticeable, and I’m not sure if it’s on the A and E strings either - it seems like it is “covered up” by the tonality of the latter two to some extent.
The effect is not very noticeable on the bridge pickup, but on the middle and neck pickups it’s very obvious (and also in the middle positions).
Naturally I first suspected fret buzz - but the problem is apparent on the highest fret also (so fret buzz is not the culprit). I’ve tried dampening EVERYTHING (see below), but it has no effect.
I am not able to hear anything amiss acoustically (when playing unplugged). It’s not something I hear when playing on a clean amp either, but once the tones start to break up, the dissonance gets in there - and gets worse with higher gains.
What I’ve tried so far, to no avail:
- A through setup (neck relief, intonation, string height)
- Lowered all the pickups as low as they will go (to rule out “stratits” - pickup magnetism pulling strings excessively)
- Putting on a new G string
- Dampening behind the fretting position, behind the nut, the tremolo springs
- “Dampening” the pick guard in various positions all over the surface
- Checked each and every screw and bolt on the guitar for tightness
- Raising the string height very high
- Lowering the string height very low
- Installing an e string and then a B string in the G string slot. e string did not exhibit this problem; B string did slightly.
- Dampening the bridge as best I could
- Verified that saddles were even (not riding on just a single grub screw)
- Removed G string saddle and checked for any burrs - there were none that I could see or feel
- Played through both my Kemper amp (both headphone out and s/pdif out to my audio interface had the problem) and recording through my audio interface directly into my DAW, putting a guitar emulation plugin on the recorded track - same problem. Even tried into my iPad - same problem.
- Turned down tone knob completely - which helped at first, but recording this signal, and then reamping with a hi mid frequency boost to bring back the highs revealed the problem again
- Possibly other things I don’t remember - but I think that’s all of it.
I’ve linked to a recording on soundcloud where I demonstrate the issues - see the comments in the soundcloud link for explanation.
What is going on here??
