I first learned about PRS guitars from a print advertisement in a guitar magazine in the 90’s. I remember the guitar being unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, with highly figured wood and a very orange paint job. The artist was from some nu-metal band, I forget which; there were quite a few of those around back then. I didn’t give the brand much thought; none of the stores in my area sold PRS, and as a penniless high schooler I was content with my Epiphone SG copy.
A lot of time went by before I took another look at PRS guitars. It wasn’t until I moved to the DC region that I got to see one in person. By then the guitar gear YouTuber was very much a phenomenon, and they raved about how perfect these guitars were. Some said that this was even a drawback; much like automobiles that are too well-engineered, PRS guitars can come across as, they said, a bit sterile and emotionless. A few repeated the “they are too pretty to play” viewpoint. But none of them contested the guitars’ playability and craftsmanship.
My first PRS
One fateful day after the 2018 Paul Reed Smith Experience, an event the factory hosts every year, the local Guitar Center had a McCarty 594 SC (single cut) semi-hollow hanging high up on the wall. It looked like this:
I tried it out at the store, and three things struck me:
- It was also pretty up close, and;
- Wow, it was really easy to play, and;
- I can’t get a bad sound out of it!
The difference is in the details
There’s a tremendous amount of handwork that goes into making these guitars. Up until this point I was used to the concept of “handwork” as exercised by Gibson, which meant obvious signs of filing, scraping, and the occasional screw up. Not on the PRS: the fingerboard was the darkest rosewood I’ve ever seen and finely finished, with no file chatter marks. The fretwork was astounding with no high frets causing buzzing.
And as I played, it was obvious that the guitar had more than just a pretty face. The neck felt perfect. The knobs were of a different make and turned almost too easily. And the sound!
This guitar had “PAF style” humbuckers, so-called because they resemble the covered (and coveted) “Patent Applied For” humbucking pickups on the original Gibson Les Paul. I was used to modern Gibson Les Pauls with modern PAFs that sounded muddy. But these had a clarity that I’ve never heard before, and sang into the high registers without being shrill. (I would later find out that the original PAFs were rather bright-sounding, meaning that at the time PRS got closer to the originals than Gibson itself.)
This particular guitar was a semi-hollow version of the standard solid-body McCarty 594 (PRS has a way with naming things) and was available only for a limited time. The salesman also gave me a great price. So I took it home, making it my first PRS ever.
If you build it…
I learned more about PRS as a company as time went by. Its founder, Paul Reed Smith, did guitar repairs for a guitar store in Maryland named Chuck Levin’s. He went on to make his own guitars, and went on in 1985 to start the company bearing his own name. He convinced one of Carlos Santana’s roadies to give Santana a guitar Paul made for him, survived some early close-calls, delivered two more masterpieces, and Santana’s been playing PRS ever since. I got to see him introduce the 2020 lineup at Chuck Levin’s and he said something that gave me some insight into how he thinks. He thinks like a builder, a tinkerer. While folks from Gibson and Fender go on about historical accuracy and their heritage, Paul said stuff like:
“Everything the string touches is God.”
And he went on to explain why he selected the materials he did for anything that touches the string to give it as much freedom to vibrate as humanly possible, giving the guitar as much note sustain as possible. He mentioned a comparison test between his guitars, some vintage Gibson Les Pauls, and modern-era Gibson Les Paul historical reissues at a store he didn’t name but had a dedicated Les Paul wall. (We all know that this store is Chicago Music Exchange.) His guitars and the vintage ones rang out for 40+ seconds. The reissues didn’t even make 20. The salespeople there were kind of depressed.
Something old, something new
PRS may have earned an early reputation as a nu-metal guitar brand, but this isn’t to say that PRS doesn’t pay any attention to guitar history and its icons. They’ve actually done the opposite. One of Paul’s own first guitars was a Gibson Les Paul Junior copy. Later his company issued the “Singlecut” (later succeeded by the SC245) which resembled the Les Paul. Gibson thought it resembled it too closely and started a lawsuit which PRS later won.
In future years PRS would release the McCarty 594. The name is history in two parts: Ted McCarty was Gibson’s president until 1966, and ran the company as it pumped out many of its iconic designs and patents. Paul hired him as a consultant. The 594 comes from its scale length which matches that of “vintage guitars” (i.e. the Les Paul) at 24.594 inches. Paul himself admits that he was inspired to make this guitar during one of his clinics in which he raved about the guitars of the 50’s and 60’s, and in which someone in the audience basically responded with “yeah we don’t know what they sound like so what’s the big deal?”
The McCarty started as a double cut. PRS then got bolder and issued a single cut which is pretty much a Les Paul. For 2020 it even has keystone tuners that mimic the Les Paul’s Klusons.
PRS’ homages to history don’t end there. There’s also the Silver Sky, John Mayer’s signature guitar, which is PRS’ riff on a Fender Stratocaster from the 60’s. It lit the Internet on fire when it was announced; some folks hated it. Then it got into peoples’ hands and everyone learned that PRS made the best Fender Stratocaster available today. Backorders stretched over a year, and PRS had to put more people into its production.
At the same time, PRS puts out models like the Special 22 Semi-Hollow and the Modern Eagle V, so it’s not all vintage homages. You still get beautiful woods, great playability, and the iconic birds on the fretboard.
What’s next
For PRS, it’s the pickups. For decades, pickup makers tried to mimic vintage pickups by replicating their winds, materials, and even acquiring and using the same old machines that once produced them. PRS tried a different approach, coming up with what they’ve branded as “Tuned Capacitance and Inductance” or TCI for short. They have a whole video explaining what it is, and I honestly can’t tell a lot of difference. But where I do tell the difference is when you split the humbucker and, instead of dropping in volume, it sounds about as loud!
I went on to sell the 594 semi-hollow, but after seeing Paul at Chuck Levin’s I couldn’t pass up on a deal to get another one, this time in River Blue in a “10-top” (read: prettier wood) with “hybrid hardware” (read: you get nickel AND gold!) It didn’t have the new TCI pickups but it sounded spectacular. And I even got it signed by the man himself.
So far I’ve written (poorly) about Gibson and PRS. Of the current top three electric guitar manufacturers, that’s two. You know what’s coming next.
