Guitar Gear

Prestige Heritage Elite - Lite Sunburst

I did a gear find about Prestige Guitars a couple of weeks ago, and was very intrigued about how this company could do such high-end work for a reasonable price. So I contacted them to do a review on their top-of-the-line Heritage Elite model. The guitar arrived late yesterday, but I had a gig last night so I couldn’t play it – oh well…

So with great anticipation, I jumped out of bed at 7 am this morning, and unwrapped the package. The guitar came with a nice, form-fitting old-school, black tolex-covered case. When I lifted the lid to see the guitar, I was blown away by how awesome it looked! The abalone binding on the body, neck and headstock was gorgeous, and the mother-of-pearl vine inlay on the fretboard is spectacular. But that said, if I had my druthers, I’d skip the abalone binding on the neck, but that’s just a nit – it’s all beautiful.

The finish on the body is incredible, with the burst stain bringing nicely bringing out the contours of the curly maple top. Around 8:30 am, my buddy Phil texted me and asked if I had received the guitar (I show him all the gear that I review), and demanded that we meet for coffee so he could see this gorgeous guitar. He fell in love with it immediately.

Out of the box, the setup was awesome, though during shipping, the intonation got thrown off a bit on the 6th string. That was very easy to remedy though, so it wasn’t really a problem. I also expect that out of instruments shipped to me, so it’s not a negative. The action on this guitar is low – very nicely low – with no string buzz unless you really hammer the strings, which is to be expected. To me, the action is perfect! The neck is nice and fast, and with a 24 3/4″ scale length, you can really move around on the neck. Another nice feature of the guitar is that it doesn’t have a big neck joint, so reaching notes in the upper registers is a breeze.

So, how does it sound? In a word, awesome. It’s very much like a Les Paul, with a Duncan ’59 in the neck and a SH-4JB in the bridge – two of my favorite pickups. The bridge pickup is nicely damp and rich sounding, and the treble pickup really screams. Played through my Hot Rod Deluxe, it’s got a great, mid-rangy sound. I especially like the bridge pickup. It’s nice and tight and doesn’t lose bottom end, which is a beef I’ve had about some Les Pauls I’ve played.

All-in-all, this is one sweet guitar, and at about US $1450, it’s a guitar that has a ton of boutique features at a relatively reasonable price point. I need to play with it for a few days to get to know it better, and I’ll do a full review.

But my preliminary rating is 4.75 Tone Bones. This is a great guitar!