PRS GUITARS
While 2020 marks 35 years of PRS Guitars, the Maryland guitar maker has experienced massive growth since its 30th anniversary in 2015. With the help of Paul Reed Smith and his team, we look back to celebrate these unprecedented past five years
This year marks 35 years of guitar making for the company helmed by Paul Reed Smith, whose drive and passion for the guitar is as strong today as it was in 1985. Join us as we take a detailed look at the models that define the brand, plus new offerings for 2020, and we chat to Paul, his team and the artists whose instruments bear the PRS name
When the first Paul Reed Smith guitar found its way into the Guitarist office many, many years ago we knew we were looking at something really special. Suddenly, there was a new kid on the block and, boy, could he make guitars… Coming back up to date and that passion for design and sonic excellence continues apace as the brand celebrates its 35th anniversary…
Guitar makers are little different from artists writing songs, making albums and touring the world. They have their successes and they have their failures; they fall out due to musical differences while their drummers spontaneously combust. Okay, so while that last bit might be a thing of fiction, for many the definition of a successful guitarist is simply one who sells records. It’s just as true of a guitar maker, large or small.
PRS Guitars has long since been considered the ‘third’ guitar brand after the icons that are Fender and Gibson. It’s not something that stacks up from production numbers, but there is plenty to support the perception. There’s the quality proposition for starters. From day one, PRS’s focus on quality signalled a call to arms and helped restore the craft of the luthier. There are few contemporary electric guitar makers who haven’t been influenced or inspired by PRS’s obsessive drive to produce the highest quality instruments with little or no compromise – something that’s easy to claim but not easy to do. Then there’s the fact that the man who has his name above the door is still the driving passion behind the brand 35 years on, considerably longer than Leo was at Fender or Ted McCarty at Gibson. Indeed, in guitar making terms, Paul Reed Smith is a virtual deity to his legion of dedicated followers.
Returning to our music analogy, there’s little doubt that while PRS has a good few albums and big hit songs in its back catalogue, the past five years have not only been a hugely creative period for the company, the results have connected with the brand’s audience, too. PRS has certainly shifted units across all its ‘formats’ – the USA-made Private Stock, Core, Bolt-On and S2 ranges, as well as its offshore-made SE electrics and acoustics. Let’s not forget the USA and offshore amp ranges, too.
“85 per cent growth over the past five years would be a safe comment,” says Jamie Mann, PRS’s president who joined the company in 2008 as VP of operations, reflecting on the combined strands and price levels. “Right now, we are back-ordered in every one of those categories to different degrees. Our Core business is not going as aggressively right now, because we have put a lot of focus and energy into relaunching the CE and the S2, but, strategically, Core is the essence of what we are and the rest of the business supports the higher-end guitars. The output of our factory with the multiple price points has been going up, up, up. The Core volume is not up so much, but the dollars out of the factory are way, way up.”
A Different Song
It’s no surprise when an artist into his or her fourth decade decides to put out an album of classic cover songs. The purists might sniff, but sales and bums on seats speak for themselves whether you’re Rod Stewart or The Rolling Stones, or more recently James Taylor. The difference with our story here is that PRS continues to create some original bangers for the die-hard fans alongside a couple of ‘covers’ that have brought in new fans and considerable sales.
In the past five years, we’ve seen yet further evolution of that original hit, the Custom, culminating in the second version of Paul Reed Smith’s eponymous guitar. Introduced in 2019, it seems to distil all of the decades of learning, craft and experience into a guitar that, as Paul says today, “there’s not one thing about the PRS Paul’s Guitar that I don’t like. It does the job for me; I like the guitar. But I don’t think those [smaller-footprint] 408 pickups are going to get accepted in the marketplace the way humbucking
The man who has his name above the door is still the driving passion behind the brand 35 years on, considerably longer than Leo was at Fender or Ted McCarty at Gibson
PRS Paul’s Guitar (2019): this is the second version of Paul Reed Smith’s ‘signature’ model, the first of which appeared in 2013. Despite admitting it has “the worst name for a guitar in the history of the guitar business”, Paul says today that “it does the job for me”. It’s a standout guitar from the past five years of PRS and introduced the TCI pickup methodology now used to inform the majority of the company’s current pickup designs. The SE Paul’s Guitar was launched simultaneously
and Strat [single-coil] pickups are in my lifetime. But there’s not one [Core Paul’s Guitar] in stock in Europe, not one. Ricky Hodgson who’s in our sales department said that every single Paul’s Guitar that comes up on his list that doesn’t have a home disappears in seconds.”
But either side of guitars like that, PRS has widened its range with instruments that are clearly more, well, vintage-inspired in style: the company’s cover versions. In 2016 PRS unveiled a guitar that moved that original PRS style much closer to the classic Gibson melody, the 594. “The 594 is intended to be in that zone,” says Paul today. “I did it because there’s a wide variety of guitar players that if it’s not in that zone they won’t even consider it, because that’s how they learned to drive. I won’t call it an argument, but here we had an incredibly ‘active discussion’ about whether that [the 594] was a good idea or not.” And speaking of good ideas…
Reach For The Sky
Continuing further into the PRS stratosphere, the Silver Sky, introduced after huge anticipation in 2018, was PRS’s cover version of the Fender Stratocaster and the signature guitar of John Mayer. Yes, it might well have polarisied opinion, but it has clearly connected with and expanded PRS’s customer base.
Exactly how important is John Mayer and his guitar to PRS? “It’s not a fair question,” replies Paul. “As Jeff Beck said, John Mayer is the Eric Clapton of our time.” (He actually said, “He’s the new Eric Clapton, I would imagine,” in an interview some years back with Spinner.com – Ed.) “Him standing behind our company, he’s another new guitar hero. It’d be like Bonamassa doing it. It makes a difference.”
Speaking at the PRS press conference on the first day of this year’s Winter NAMM Show, Paul Reed
“I did [the 594] because there’s a wide variety of guitar players that if it’s not in that zone they won’t even consider it, because that’s how they learned to drive” – Paul Reed Smith
Smith was unguarded about the ‘Mayer effect’. “How many orders on the maple Silver Sky have we got?” he asked his staff, referring to the new maplefingerboard Silver Sky launched at the show. “Already a thousand, right? I like it when John lifts his little finger and we get a 1,000 orders.”
Another launch, the Silver Sky Nebula, a limited run of 500 pieces with its colour-changing ‘flip-flop’ finish, sold out “in a minute”.
“But, really, you’re asking a damaging question,” says Paul with hindsight. “Mark Tremonti is still one of the number one guitar endorsers in the world: he’s huge in Europe right now,” says Paul of the long-time PRS ambassador. “Carlos? He’s a household name. You go to Africa and they know who Carlos Santana is.”
The point is well made: without Carlos Santana adopting his handmade Paul Reed Smith guitars from the very early 80s, this story might not have got started. But even an artist of this stature seemed a little forgotten when PRS introduced, with zero fanfare, a cracking new SE Singlecut signature in 2019, which would have been a PR dream for many companies. After all, it was 50 years since Santana’s incendiary performance at Woodstock, and it was also the 20th anniversary of his ‘comeback’ album, Supernatural, which has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and counting. More people have probably seen and heard a PRS guitar in the hands of Carlos Santana than any other guitar player. But, in truth, PRS had a bigger hit on their hands.
Did the success of the Silver Sky surprise you? “No. What surprised me was all the negativity before we did it. Although we knew it was coming,” says Paul Reed Smith. “You can print this: we were getting slagged on the internet, pretty bad. I knew it was going to be okay once people held the guitar but not until. I talked to John and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He said when he joined the band, Dead & Company, ‘it was really tough on the internet, but we weren’t worried, because we’d been at the rehearsals and they hadn’t. We knew what the band sounded like.’ Same thing with the Silver Sky. Before we’d released it, we’d played it, they hadn’t. When people got their hands on it they went, ‘Oh, I like this.’ They were assuming they’d play it and not like it, that it’d be another me-too thing. We retooled everything on that guitar.”
Details Matter
The more cynical among us may believe this guitarmaking lark is a walk in the park. Clone a classic, get a ‘name’ to play it and, bang! You’ve got a hit on your hands. The reality is quite different. In dialling in the Silver Sky, PRS – out of necessity – upped its game, which directly led to its TCI (Tuned, Capacitance, Inductance) methodology, which now informs virtually all of its pickup designs and associated circuitry. It seems that PRS is looking backwards to move forwards more than ever, but at the same time innovating with far-from-classic designs.
“Nobody put brass inserts into a bridge without plating them,” states Paul Reed Smith as an example. “There weren’t piezos in old guitars, they never made hollowbodies like we make them here, all the colours, the sanded out colours… Oh, then there’s the bird inlays, the 408 pickups…
“But we are doing closer reflections with the McCarty stuff, the single- and double-cuts, we are closer to that ‘one in 100’ vintage pickup – we are closer to the Holy Grail gems of those. The thing I like about the Silver Sky is that the parts where that thing came from that we loved we kept, and the parts we didn’t like we got rid of, so it’s a complete redesign.”
It’s this forensic-like detail and investigation that remains central to the PRS ethos. Even before he started his factory in 1985, from his prior decade as a fledgling, struggling maker, Paul had learned the importance of the raw materials, the parts.
“There is a thing on the internet that the only thing that makes a difference is the pickups, right? But doesn’t anyone in the world think that if you have a Telecaster and you change the bridge, it’s not going to make any difference? I’m mean, let’s put a nut made of rubber on a guitar, that’s not going to make a difference…
The forensic-like detail and investigation remains central to the PRS ethos. Even before he started his factory in 1985, Paul had learned the importance of the raw materials
“We’re working in a very simple environment: a couple of pieces of wood, a bridge, some pickups… but it’s a very complicated little equation. With an electric guitar you’re turning an ant into a dinosaur, you’re taking this little sound, putting a pickup on it… Look, if the acoustic sound of an electric guitar didn’t make a difference, you could take a ’54 Telecaster pickup and put it on a brand-new Tele and it would sound just the same as the old Tele, but nobody thinks that. No matter what microphone you put on Barbra Streisand she ain’t ever going to sound like Paul Rogers: that’s never going to happen. The acoustic tone makes a difference – and the whole idea that it doesn’t, I just don’t buy.”
Quality Costs
Early in PRS’s history, the company was tagged with making guitars that only ‘doctors, dentists or lawyers’ could afford, not real guitar players. But 35 years on it would seem that Fender and Gibson have caught up to the £3.5k of the start-up Core level guitars, not least with their Custom Shop pricing. Many of the increasing number of ‘boutique’ or small-’shop guitar makers often charge considerably more, irrespective of their experience.
“Manufacturing has come a long way in the past 10 or 15 years,” says Jamie Mann. “We have considerably more automation on some of the more sensitive areas: we have a robotic sprayer that we have in-house right now and another one coming. We are investing
significantly in manufacturing to keep our costs under control. We do have the advantage that we are in a facility and we’re expanding within that facility, so we haven’t had to expand [that space]. We have a very, very seasoned team on the ’shop floor.”
That experience, too, is virtually unparalleled. “We did some napkin maths and the years of experience in guitar making here is in the thousands with all the folks we have on the floor right now,” says Jamie. “At this point, many of the key folks have worked together for a considerable number of years.”
But it’s the S2 line, sitting price-wise between Core and SE, that has come into sharp focus as it mixes all-USA build with PRS-design ‘S’ pickups and typically the hardware and electronics that you’ll see with the SE range. Ironically, bearing in mind where the world finds itself as we’re writing this, S2 was a direct response to the financial crash of 2008, “a financial upheaval of the likes we’d never seen”, Jack Higginbotham, PRS’s CEO, tells us, barely a week before the PRS factory was required to close. That earlier upheaval “came at a time where we’d already invested in the expansion of our business at a level that we’d never invested before, so it was the perfect storm. S2, then, was probably a fantastic example of necessity being the mother of invention: we needed to do something, but we wanted to do something that was in keeping with our credo and sensibilities and our ethics in musical instruments. So, originally, S2 was born of that hard time. Since then, it has evolved massively and has simply become one of the flavours that people can play within our company. It’s given us a platform we can really spring off: quality guitars at a price point that we never would have imagined.”
With more emphasis on the McCarty-style guitars in this year’s USA ranges, particularly the S2 McCarty 594s – hit records if ever we heard ’em! – we wonder if Ted McCarty, Paul Reed Smith’s early mentor who passed away in 2001, is still ‘in the building’. “No, what’s in the building is the history of what he did,” concludes Paul. “There’s a reflection of the history of the guitar here and the part that he gave us.”
“Ted blazed a trail and helped create the world we live in,” adds Jack. “Looking back I see the same thing with Paul: he went from being the student to the teacher – I think Paul is looked at today, but by more people, in a similar way that we looked at Ted McCarty back in the early 90s. Paul has never been shy about not knowing something. He’s always saying, ‘Well, I didn’t know that,’ or ‘I don’t know that,’ which makes him learn at an alarming rate. And he remains curious.”
“Ted [McCarty] blazed a trail and helped create the world we live in. Looking back, I see the same thing with Paul: he went from being the student to the teacher” – Jack Higginbotham