For those who may not know, my brother and I "are " The Warfield Boogieboys. We are a couple of brothers who like to share the same interest when it comes to music. Namely, Guitars. And the making of music. To make music, one needs a guitar. To record music, one needs alot more in the way of gear. As the saying goes " You can never have enough gear when it comes to making music." Another saying that follows it is " You can never have too many guitars." If you have the love for music and a bit of natural talent, you can play guitar. If you have enough money, you can "own" guitars. Well, I own two guitars at the moment and will probably end up with 4 or 5. My bro. on the other hand, owns 5 ( yes, count them, FIVE guitars! )  And with this review, the count is now 6!  In JetBoy's arsonal we have :

He buzzed me an email over the weekend to say he went to his local guitar store to stock up on his favorite brand of strings and walked out with a New Guitar! I couldn't belive what I read. Another guitar? He just bought an ESP/Ltd. Viper 400 just a few weeks earlier. I said to myself WoW! I gotta get over there and check this baby out! On todays article, I'll give you my impressions of his newly aquired strings as well as a few extras.

I went over to his place bright and early Sunday morning. Gave my bro. greetings and salutations and there in the open was his new Parker PM-20Pro with a nice Sunburst finish. My first intial thought was this guitar looks like if you took my Gibson Sunburst LP and my SZ720 Amber guitar ( with the same abolone trim inlay around the body like his ) and combined then together, trimmed off some wood, you'd end up with this Parker. Until that moment, I did not know too much about Parker guitars at all. ( currently I've been researching Godin guitars )

Brother gave me the low-down on this fine product and proceeded to discribe his modifications on it. Overall, the guitar comes stock with some pretty decent well made parts in terms of hardware. So if you were one to just buy one off the shelf and not be bothered fussing with it, you would probably be pretty happy with it. A few stock features worth mentioning is it consists of a mahogany body with a mahogany set neck. On top of the Mahogany sitsa thin maple cap, about 1/16" thick. Over the body is a polyurethane finish. The bridge consist of TonePros string through. It consists of 22 frets at a scale of 25.5". The fretboard is made of ebony. I thought that was really cool since most of our guitars consist of rosewood. The difference is ebony is a harder, denser, more brittle wood as compared to rosewood, which is softer and rather porus. An ebony fretboard will give the guitar a brighter sound. The nut near the headstock consists of graphite and the headstock itself is pretty small and thin. At first look, it looks odd and kind of weird. After some time in playing around with it, I started to like it. Kind of grows on yah. The tuners are locking Sperzels. My attitude with tuners is they are suppose to tune the guitar and keep the guitar in tune for a reasonable amount of playing time. If it goes out of tune in less than 5 minutes, they are crap. Period. I'm not shy to man handle the strings as I play agressive at times and I expect the tuners to do their job. These tuners did not dissappoint me. Couldn't go wrong with the pickups. They come " supplied stock " with Saymour Duncans! Out of the two guitars I had, I had to change out ALL the pickups. My brother has done the same out of almost all his guitars. So there's something to be stated here. We are both supporters of Seymour Duncan pups, so we were pleased to see them " pre-installed." There's a Jazz in the neck and a JB Model in the bridge. Currently the exact setup in my SZ! This combo is favored by alot of guitarist's out there. The tone/volume dials and it's electrical wiring is where it falls short. Brother took a peek in there and found the wires were taped together! Not acceptable. This is not a $200 guitar.....

The Parker comes with silver chrome knobs ( like my Ibanez SZ ) and I must say they suck! They look tacky, you cannot tell where your knob is dialed ( no numbers or pointer reference ) and they stick out quite a ways from the body. So off with 'em! Bro. had a bit of grief pulliung those little stubborn babies off. He ripped the center pole right out of the pot! Death grip tight. He stated the pots supplied are rather cheap in design to begin with and robs the guitar of it's essential tone.The pots are now short shaft CTS 500K_ohm with some Gibson style bell knobs in amber pushed on top of the pots shafts. I think that suit the guitar very well. Makes it look sharp. Wiring in the back was re-routed, re-solder and replaced as necessary. Each pup now has it's own individual volume control, the original tone control has been eliminated totally.  Makes for more top end in the overall sound.That little project took about 3 hrs. Changing 2 pups in your wood will take you a couple of hrs, so.....

My brother has himself one killer Mesa head + cab. I play through a Marshall with a Mesa Cab and the tones that come out of that as compared to JetBoy's Mesa is like apples and oranges. They both have their own distinct tone. I persoannly love both styles between the two. He started off first with the guitar, with a demo of some riffs of carnage at his disposal, to show off it's sounds. Indeed, the sound was Stellular! After his brief carnage of blazing riffage, he handed it over and said " Now you try... " Now, right off the bat, I tried a PRS guitar ( Custom 22 with a standard neck ) at our local music store a few months back and it had the best neck on a guitar I have ever felt in my hands. The pricetag was $3,500 plus tax. I said to myself, " For that price it should be. " Thought I'd have to save many moons to ever have something like that. Well no more! I had that Parker in my hands and it had a neck pretty damn close to that PRS. I strangled and wrenched that neck! I did some quick riffs, pull offs, hammer ons, vibratos, speed power chords, you name it.... this thing melted in my hands and played like butter. My "only" gripe is I don't have enough talent play a guitar with no fret board makers. Kept going off key. Shows you how reliant I am on fretboard markers. There is one star burst design on the 12th fret of this fretboard and that's all. Overall, it didn't deter me. If I were to own a guitar like this, sooner or later I'd get comfortable enough playing it with practice, where I wouldn't need to rely on fretboard markers too much anymore. We exchanged this guitar back and forth and discussed how well it played and sounded.

In the pic above, you can see me noodling on the Parker still. In the background is sitting my Gibson Classic Les Paul. I brought it over since we made plans to go over a new song I've been working on. Needless to say, it didn't get much playtime. Couldn't keep my hands off that PM-20Pro.

I wanted to go to Tom Lee and get a guitar strap for my LP and some 10 gauge strings for my SZ720. It was afternoon now, and I said let's go before it gets late. As usual, once we get in there, we are like two kids in a candy store. My bro. goes there frequently, but he'll go since he knows I like it there so much. So it's a bit more of a treat for me than him. The turn over rate for guitar sales is pretty good there. Everytime I go in there, there are always a few new models hanging on the wall. I saw a white PM-20Pro hanging there. We took it into the amp room and dished it some punishment. I liked it, but the string / neck action is never set good in a music store I find. I studied it and the albolone inlay stripe around the body didn't suite this colour. I still think my brothers selection was the better one out of the two. They had a high end Parker Fly behind the glass, but it didn't dawn on me to give it a whirl. If I see it in there next time I will. It was a nice visit to the store and I got what I wanted. We went back home and practiced our songs. Made for a cool day and as I was driving home, I couldn't stop thinking how wonderful it was to play a Parker. Wouldn't it be neat to have another for our onging collection? Well...... we'll save that story for....( perhaps ).... another review.