In the 1970’s Schecter built a guitar for the famous Pete Townshend of The Who. This guitar was a legendary creation that may be partially responsible for the success of the company. These days, Schecter has made a point to manufacture the “PT”, a tribute to the original Pete Townshend model.

We’ve done a few PT reviews in the past, such as the super epic Wes Hauch PT Signature, but today we’ll be taking it down a notch and looking at a more affordable PT model. The PT Custom Rosewood.

Features:

  • Swamp Ash Body
  • Flamed Maple Top
  • Black Cherry Burst Finish
  • Thin “C” Maple Neck
  • Bolt-on Neck Design
  • Rosewood Fretboard with 12″ Radius
  • 25.5” Scale Length
  • 21 Extra-Jumbo Frets
  • Diamond Hardtail Bridge
  • Schecter Locking Tuners
  • Schecter Diamond Plus Pickups
  • Volume/Tone (Push-Pull)/3-Way Switch
  • Graph Tech XL Black Tusq

First things first, gotta be shallow and talk about the cosmetics.

This guitar basically looks like your standard Tele-style guitar, but with a Flamed Maple top. I like the Black Cherry burst on this guitar, I usually prefer brighter finishes, but it’s a nice subtle burst if you don’t want anything too flashy. The white pickguard is a nice touch on the dark finish as well. I’ve never been a big fan of pickup rings when a guitar has a pickguard. It doesn’t look so horrible on this guitar, but I think I would have preferred a direct mount approach.

The best features on this guitar are probably the inclusion of the GraphTech XL Black Tusq nut, locking tuners, the Swamp Ash body, and the really neat bridge choice. Something that can make any guitar absolutely suck is a poorly cut, or cheaply made nut. Schecter managed to throw in a really nice one on this guitar! The bridge is quite comfy, it’s sort of Hipshot-ish in style, but with an elevated piece so you’re not resting on the strings.

Tone:

This guitar features a Swamp Ash body, which is really neat to see on such an affordable guitar. You don’t generally get that. I really enjoy the tonality that Ash can bring to the table. It’s quite resonant in the high frequencies and has a percussive attack to it. Not to mention, Swamp Ash is known for it’s insane clarity. On this guitar it’s no exception. Obviously, it’s not as resonant and lively as a more expensive cut of Ash might be, but the guitar is quite acoustically loud and present.

The pickups chosen are the Schecter Diamond Plus. Let’s face it, most stock pickups in this range suck. These aren’t so terrible. They are a high-output, punchy pickup set that actually sound pretty decent for really saturated tones. I’d say they would fair well for metal and rock applications. The overall sound of the guitar is fairly scooped. A lot of bass and treble coming from the pickups. Not too much mid-range character though.

My main complaint is that these guitars are part of the Schecter ‘California Vintage’ series and yet, there’s really nothing vintage about these pickups. They can do cleans okay enough, but the mid-gainy tones are not so great from these.

Build Quality:

Overall, this guitar met my expectations at it’s $600 price tag.

No playability issues or anything like that. I did however notice a few scratches on the neck. Nothing deep or anything, just a few surface scratches.

The guitar is really comfortable to play and stayed in tuning fairly well. I played it in Drop D, so I didn’t really test out anything too crazy, but it was well setup and held tuning right out of the box!

Final Verdict:

The PT Custom Rosewood does mostly what I expected out of it. It had a nice look, played really smooth, and it even had a few little features that surprised me!

My only complaint is that I think the pickups are a little bit mediocre. They can deliver a fairly usable rock/metal sound, but not much else, and they don’t have very much character to them.

Other than that, the guitar is a really nice gem that I feel sort of falls under the radar (like most of the PT models for some reason do). If you performed a quick pickup swap on this (Check out our Seymour Duncan Reviews for some recommendations!), I’d say you could end up with a really sweet guitar for the price!

7-8-9

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This article was written by Zac Buras, our editor located in Louisiana.

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