Guitarist reviewed the PRS SE NF3 this past June and awarded it 4.5/5 stars — an impressive rating for a budget axe built in Indonesia. Most surprising, the review noted, is that the guitar is part of the SE line as it could quite easily sit alongside the Silver Sky, Fiore and NF 53 in the PRS USA Bolt-On range. If the model seemed like a bargain at its $799 price, it looks even better this Cyber Monday when you can save $120 on the PRS SE NF3 at Guitar Center.
The PRS SE NF3 cuts an impressive figure with its Ice Blue Metallic finish and rosewood fretboard. Add in the new noise-cancelling Narrowfield pickups and the deal gets even better.
As Paul Reed Smith himself has noted of late, where a guitar is made isn’t really relevant any more. It’s about the builder, not the country.
“When we first started traveling to overseas guitar manufacturing facilities, we found that almost all their training over the decades had been to go fast, while our teaching about how to make instruments was about how to go well,” Smith explains.
“Once they knew how to go well, the guitars they produce are of the same caliber as what we make here. So, as a definitive statement, the country a guitar is made in does not matter much. The skill and care of the instrument makers does matter.”
That much is evident in the SE NF3. Its specs reveal a beautifully sculpted poplar body bolted to a slab-sawn maple neck with PRS’s Wide Thin profile on a 25-inch scale-length, rather than the traditional Strat-like 25 1/2.
Electronics include a trio of the PRS-designed Narrowfield DD ‘S’ humbuckers, whose tone is between a traditional single-coil and a humbucker. And indeed, rolling the master volume and tone controls and employing the five-way pickup selector lets you move between Fender Strat and Gibson SG voicing, giving the SE NF3 an impressively wide tonal palette.
If there's one shortcoming Guitarist reviewer Dave Burrluck found, it was the absence of a Tele-style bridge-and-neck pickup combination. “If we were to be picky, then the simple ‘seven-sound’ mod would expand your choices, not least allowing you to voice the neck and bridge pickups together."
That mod would require nothing more than swapping out the stock tone control for one with a pull switch.
“Indeed,” he continued, “installing that simple mod and a set of the SE locking tuners would really bring the NF3 dangerously close to the USA guitars. It really is that good.”
Considering you’ll save $120 by grabbing one at the low price of $679, you’ll have enough to take a sizable chunk out of what the suggested mods will cost.
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