My Magic Bullet – Don Carr’s PRS 513

I should start by defining what I mean by a “Magic Bullet.” In my opinion, it is a box or device that magically makes things better. It’s something that sparks an “A-Ha!” moment, where everything you do immediately becomes better. You feel like you’ve discovered a magic key that unlocks great sound. This is Don Carr’s story about finding his “magic bullet.”

Don Carr played guitar for the Oak Ridge Boys band for over 20 years. Every show, he had to cover all the guitar tones in their huge catalog of songs — a unique and demanding challenge. How did he manage to cover decades’ worth of hits? Was it by carrying a half dozen guitars? I’ll let Don take it from here to discuss the guitar he was looking for... and found.

Don Carr: What guitar did I need to fill the gap? For me, it was the PRS 513.

The beautiful thing about guitars is that they’re all individual and unique, and they all do their own thing. You need a Strat for this, and a Tele for that, and a Les Paul, and a 335, and so on. The issue when you’re on the road is that you want access to a wide range of sounds but without hauling six guitars around with you. So, the problem becomes, “How do you get those sounds effectively?” Sure, there are options on guitars, such as adding a humbucker to a Strat or doing coil taps on a Les Paul, so you can try to blend those sounds together and come up with more sounds, but it still doesn’t convincingly do that, “Oh, this sounds like that guitar.”

Were those options just compromises for the sound you were looking for?

Not even just compromises. They can definitely get closer, but they’re still not that sound I was looking for. Those options give you more variety, but I like a wide sonic palette to begin with and a lot of versatility. When I was playing with the Oak Ridge Boys, these are guys with 50 years of recorded history behind them. Most of their recordings were done in Nashville, but there’s a wide range of guitar tones over those albums, and I needed to duplicate those just to cover the gig. Plus, we’re playing songs that had a lot of instrumentation and covering them with a 5-piece band. For that, I needed the widest sonic palette I could get.

Initially, the closest I could come was a Stratocaster; and I did everything I could to it with pedals and preamps, but it was a quagmire, kind of a nightmare. My Strat was close, but I still never got it to play exactly the way I wanted it to play in terms of ease and even tuning stability. It was close, but it was less than ideal.

So, when did you discover the PRS 513?

Brian Franklin, who was playing with Kenny Rogers, was the first PRS endorsee in Nashville, and we were both playing on shows in D.C. at Wolf Trap. So, Brian introduced me to the PRS artist rep, Winn Krozac, and told Winn he needed to hook me up with a PRS. I had seen PRS guitars before, and I liked the quality and the build; I liked the whole thing. Winn brought a PRS prototype of a guitar they were working on called the 513. So, I sat backstage and played the prototype, and I fell in love instantly because it solved all the problems. It looked great, as all PRS guitars do, it played great, it felt great. The action was awesome, and the guitar really resonated acoustically. I could play anywhere on the neck, and it was even-sounding and even-feeling. The intonation was great. All this was before I even plugged it in! Then I plugged it in and discovered that, by changing this switch and that switch, I could approximate every sound I needed — on this one guitar! Talk about a problem solver.

And the other thing was that I could switch back and forth between pickup settings and the levels were very consistent. I found the back pickup sounds more like a Tele when it’s on single-coil mode, which was perfect because the Tele has a very distinctive rear-pickup sound. It’s very identifiable and also very Nashville, so it was way closer to that.

It had two humbuckers and a single-coil-style pickup in the middle, and it was all proprietary pickup technology for PRS. These were completely new, completely different pickups specifically for the 513 — it was the only guitar that had this option. That was 2007, and the reason I still use that guitar is that I can go from the back-pickup Tele sound and then go to position four and get that silky Strat kind of sound. It gets me so close and represents that sonic signature so well that you think that’s what it is when you hear it. And then when you switch to the two humbuckers, you’ve got something closer to a Gibson-style guitar sound. So, with this one guitar, I could get the Fender sounds and the Gibson sounds, and the level didn’t change. You just flip the switch, and the character of the sound changes without any drastic level differences. For me, it was the perfect compromise.

And did I mention it had a Brazilian rosewood neck? That makes you want to play it all the time. And the great thing about that for a gigging guitar was that, no matter what you’re doing — outside, inside, hot, cold, wet, dry — the neck feels the same. So, the playability is amazing.

The other thing is the PRS tremolo. It’s just a superior instrument. I could get all the travel that I needed out of the tremolo, and get crazy with it, but I could also bend strings without messing up the tuning. It was all the functionality without the compromise. I could even approximate archtop sounds. It was the guitar that I realized that I could do whatever I needed to do with it. If there was one guitar that I could take to any gig and guarantee it was going to work, it was that one.

So, does PRS still make this perfect guitar?

No. (He laughs.)

Paul is always chasing the next best thing. He’s an innovator/creator who’s always working forward, and the 513 sort of sparked him, so there are quite a few PRS models now that share that same concept of versatility. I’ve been playing a PRS Modern Eagle V in videos lately. Paul has refined the whole pickup thing, combining the whole range of versatility, with access to single-coil and humbucker sounds that sound good by themselves and blend well together. The Modern Eagle provides me the same level of versatility as my 513. It operates differently but still provides the same flexibility. Guitars like the Studio, the Special Semi-hollowbody, and the Fiore approach it similarly with different results but still have a wide range of usable tones. This idea has even made it to the SE lineup in the PRS SE Special electric.

But, for me, the 513 was the eye-opener and problem solver. I felt like I could finally relax and just play guitar and not have to worry about the sound so much. I still really enjoy that. I know it so well and what it does so well that I can have one guitar, one rig, and just show up for a gig and get whatever sound I need.

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Have You Found Your Magic Guitar Yet?

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