That was no trouble, because the tiny allen key came supplied with guitar. The trem was fantastic, with a lovely positive feel, once I'd tightened the little grub screw which tightens onto the arm. So have any important sacrifices been made? A good place to look is in the trem system which is a recurrent weakness we on Gi keep commenting on with guitars coming from the Far East, but there are no such issues here. Moving on, the tuners are non locking, but seem to work well and the high gloss finish will obviously be some kind poly, not the very expensive, labour intensive, nitro finish of the U.S guitars. It's still nice though, but just another tiny way of keeping the cost affordable. You get the familiar bird inlays, which are very neatly done, but on close inspection, the actual material used for the inlay is a plainer looking substance (PRS calls it 'pearloid'), rather than the mother of pearl/abalone type material found on the U.S versions. So how does PRS do it? Well, beside making in Korea, labour and construction have been saved by the use of a flat maple top as opposed to the carved style on the high end PRS guitars. And that adds up to good Les Paul tone for relatively little money! To get down to the Custom 24, in a nutshell what you get is a nice flame maple top on a mahogany body and neck, with neck and bridge humbuckers, both of which produce a sweetly voiced midrange bark. How do I know? Because I've seen a few of these SE custom 24s owned by eager young players at the Guildford academy where I lecture, and those too have all been really good sounding, usable, pretty guitars. And I know they are consistently like this and that wasn't sent a hand-picked tri-colour sample. They say this model is based largely on Paul Reed Smith's first run of guitars that were shown at various trade shows in 1985 and you have to look hard to see how they are keeping the cost down compared with those originals. That sort of quality usually comes with a large price tag, but PRS's SE range of Korean made models, from which the SE Custom 24 comes, is a fraction of the cost of the U.S made guitars, but seems to suffer no loss in either quality or tone. My point being, some guitars you could buy unseen and untried and know it will a great one. It's not because I don't like them, because I do, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I add a nice played in PRS to the embarrassingly large number of guitars I already own. I have tried many PRS guitars over the years and they are lovely every time, but I still don't own one. As I've said in Gi reviews before, names that spring to mind include Music Man, Suhr, G&L and, of course, PRS.
Some guitar companies excel at both quality and consistency.