The “Dead Spec” Silver Sky, created by PRS for John Mayer’s work filling Jerry Garcia’s shoes with Dead & Company, is a fitting tribute to the Grateful Dead frontman’s famed Fender Stratocaster.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we will have a look at the new PRS John Mayer “Dead Spec” Silver Sky guitar, what’s so special about it, and how close you can get to it with your good old Stratocaster. So, let’s check it out.
Without stepping on anybody’s toes, I think we can say that the Silver Sky is PRS’s own modern interpretation of the Fender Stratocaster without being a simple and shameless copy. The John Mayer “Dead Spec” model was designed for the guitarist to use with Dead & Company, and it has several alterations that are a tribute to Jerry Garcia’s own Strat, Alligator. The “Dead Spec” was released last November and had a limited production run of 1,000 guitars. So your chances to grab one are really limited, and the guitar is not cheap.
So, what’s inside this guitar and how close can we get with a standard Stratocaster without breaking the bank?
Let’s start with the physical specs, which are somewhat special compared to a standard Stratocaster. In general, the body is made from lightweight swamp ash, and the bolt-on neck is maple with a rosewood fretboard, 22 frets, and a traditional 7.25" radius. Nothing special so far.
Bridge/tremolo construction: The “Dead Spec” has a very special kind of hardtail construction that I’ve never seen before. The tremolo is fitted into the body without springs, and the routing is super tight so the tremolo block can’t move. Next to it is the battery compartment (more about this in a minute).
Photo courtesy of PRS Guitars
If you want to get as close as possible, a hardtail Strat is one option. This is virtually the same but without the tremolo block. If you have a standard Strat tremolo, you can use a wooden block to convert it to hardtail specs.
Bridge/tremolo material: PRS decided to use their own Gen III tremolo—their version of a Strat trem—with a brass inertia bar/tremolo block as a surface-mounted bridge. It should be no problem to find a new brass replacement for your Strat’s tremolo. The brass bar will change the primary tone of the guitar (when playing it without an amp), but how much of this will be audible in the amplified tone depends a lot on the individual guitar. If you want to get as close as possible, a brass bar will be the way to go.
Brass nut: This was very popular in the ’70s and early ’80s, and Garcia’s Alligator indeed had a brass nut. It should be no problem to find a brass nut for your Strat, or at least a brass blank to make one. I would like to second what I said a minute ago: A brass nut will change the primary tone of your guitar without any doubts. How much of this will be present in the electrified tone depends on the certain guitar. So, leaving your stock nut in place is always an option.
String retainer bar: PRS decided to add a “cowboy-style” string retainer bar on the headstock, similar in function to the one found on Alligator, which adds a downward force to control the break angle of the strings at the nut. PRS chose their headstock angle very carefully when designing the Silver Sky, and they don’t need a device like a string-tree or a retainer bar. On the PRS webpage you can read: “The brass nut and retainer bar bring warm, piano-like tone while promoting string vibration and resonance.” Well, I think you simply have to try if you can hear any difference in the electrified tone.
Photo courtesy of PRS Guitars
Alembic Blaster: This is for sure the biggest feature of this guitar. PRS added the active Alembic Blaster booster (formerly known as the Strat-o-Blaster) to this guitar, replacing the traditional output jack plate. This is a very basic preamp/booster design that is still available from the Alembic company. It’s not an overdrive per se; it’s a booster that makes your guitar signal louder so you can drive your amp harder, pushing it into distortion. The Alembic Blaster is powered by a 9V battery and has an internal trimpot you can reach with a little screwdriver through the hole in the plate, allowing you to dial in a boost between 3–14 dB of gain when the booster is engaged. This will add a lot of punch and muscle to your tone and is an interesting option.
Photo courtesy of PRS Guitars
If you do not want to invest in an original Alembic Blaster, you can use any other booster device—there are a lot of copies out there doing a great job.
If you’d like to build your own, the circuit is very basic and it’s just a few parts, so with some experience, it should be no problem. I found several circuit drawings on the internet containing errors, some of them in a way that the circuit will not work. Here is the original and error-free Alembic Blaster circuit for you:
Illustration courtesy of SINGLECOIL.com
If you want to build an improved version of this circuit, here is a drawing by my dear friend Bernd C. Meiser from the BSM company. It features two additional resistors (R5 as a pull-down resistor to prevent popping noises when turning the booster on, and R6 to avoid RF interferences), a different transistor, and some changed part values to make it sound more tube-like.
Illustration courtesy of Bernd C. Meiser from BSM (treblebooster.net)
Pickups: The pickups used in this Silver Sky model are the PRS 635JM, which are basically slightly hotter Stratocaster pickups with pole pieces that match the fretboard radius. All three pickups are identical except the middle pickup is reverse wound/reverse polarity (RWRP) for hum-free operation when used together in parallel with the bridge or neck pickup. The pickups can be bought separately or as a set of three. When looking at the basic parameters of the pickups (alnico 5 magnets, 6.4k DCR, 2.33 H inductance), the Fender Custom Fat ’50s and Texas Specials come to mind as a substitute, but every serious pickup company offers a set like this.
Wiring: The wiring is basically a standard Stratocaster wiring plus the active booster circuitry, so nothing too special. The 5-way pickup selector switch delivers all the well-known Stratocaster switching positions with the pickups connected together in parallel in the two in-between positions, which are both hum-free because of the RWRP middle pickup.
The three 250k audio controls are a little bit different compared to a standard Stratocaster with a master volume and the upper tone control for the neck and middle pickup while the lower tone control only affects the bridge pickup. The common tone cap is a standard 0.1 µF type.
The guitar does not have a treble-bleed circuit. The PRS standard is a 180 pF cap between the input and output of the volume pot, though I recommend using a 470 pF cap instead for better control with 250k pots. For clarity, I’ve shown the booster as a module, not the Alembic Blaster plate with the switch and the output jack installed on it. The toggle switch for the booster is a standard DPDT type. Please note that you need a stereo output jack to add power management to the circuit—the ring tab of the stereo jack is used to only engage the battery when a guitar cable is plugged in. This will prevent draining the battery by accident.
Illustration courtesy of SINGLECOIL.com
That’s it! Next time, we will talk about the Fender guitar that never really existed and its wiring, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, EGC Chessie in hands, coaxing some nasty tones from his Hiwatt.
The Jesus Lizard’s sixth album, Blue, served as the band’s final statement from the frontlines of noisy rock for the next 26 years. By the time of their dissolution in 1999, they’d earned a reputation for extreme performances chock full of hard-hitting, machine-like grooves delivered by bassist David Wm. Sims and, at their conclusion, drummer Mac McNeilly, at times aided and at other times punctured by the frontline of guitarist Duane Denison’s incisive, dissonant riffing, and presided over by the cantankerous howl of vocalist David Yow. In the years since, performative, thrilling bands such as Pissed Jeans, METZ, and Idles have built upon the Lizard’s musical foundation.
Denison has kept himself plenty busy over the last couple decades, forming the avant-rock supergroup Tomahawk—with vocalist Mike Patton, bassist Trevor Dunn (both from Mr. Bungle), and drummer John Stanier of Helmet—and alongside various other projects including Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers and Hank Williams III. The Jesus Lizard eventually reunited, but until now have only celebrated their catalog, never releasing new jams.
The Jesus Lizard, from left: bassist David Wm. Sims, singer David Yow, drummer Mac McNeilly, and guitarist Duane Denison.
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
Back in 2018, Denison, hanging in a hotel room with Yow, played a riff on his unplugged electric guitar that caught the singer’s ear. That song, called “West Side,” will remain unreleased for now, but Denison explains: “He said, ‘Wow, that’s really good. What is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s just some new thing. Why don’t we do an album?’” From those unassuming beginnings, the Jesus Lizard’s creative juices started flowing.
So, how does a band—especially one who so indelibly captured the ineffable energy of live rock performance—prepare to get a new record together 26 years after their last? Back in their earlier days, the members all lived together in a band house, collectively tending to the creative fire when inspiration struck. All these years later, they reside in different cities, so their process requires sending files back and forth and only meeting up for occasional demo sessions over the course of “three or four years.”
“When the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.” —Duane Denison
the Jesus Lizard "Alexis Feels Sick"
Distance creates an obstacle to striking while the proverbial iron is hot, but Denison has a method to keep things energized: “Practice loud.” The guitarist professes the importance of practice, in general, and especially with a metronome. “We keep very detailed records of what the beats per minute of these songs are,” he explains. “To me, the way to do it is to run it to a Bluetooth speaker and crank it, and then crank your amp. I play a little at home, but when the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.”
It’s a proven solution. On Rack—recorded at Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle studio with producer Paul Allen—the band sound as vigorous as ever, proving they’ve not only remained in step with their younger selves, but they may have surpassed it with faders cranked. “Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style,” explains Allen. “The conviction in his playing that he is known for from his recordings in the ’80s and ’90s is still 100-percent intact and still driving full throttle today.”
“I try to be really, really precise,” he says. “I think we all do when it comes to the basic tracks, especially the rhythm parts. The band has always been this machine-like thing.” Together, they build a tension with Yow’s careening voice. “The vocals tend to be all over the place—in and out of tune, in and out of time,” he points out. “You’ve got this very free thing moving around in the foreground, and then you’ve got this very precise, detailed band playing behind it. That’s why it works.”
Before Rack, the Jesus Lizard hadn’t released a new record since 1998’s Blue.
Denison’s guitar also serves as the foreground foil to Yow’s unhinged raving, as on “Alexis Feels Sick,” where they form a demented harmony, or on the midnight creep of “What If,” where his vibrato-laden melodies bolster the singer’s unsettled, maniacal display. As precise as his riffs might be, his playing doesn’t stay strictly on the grid. On the slow, skulking “Armistice Day,” his percussive chording goes off the rails, giving way to a solo that slices that groove like a chef’s knife through warm butter as he reorganizes rock ’n’ roll histrionics into his own cut-up vocabulary.
“During recording sessions, his first solo takes are usually what we decide to keep,” explains Allen. “Listen to Duane’s guitar solos on Jack White’s ‘Morning, Noon, and Night,’ Tomahawk’s ‘Fatback,’ and ‘Grind’ off Rack. There’s a common ‘contained chaos’ thread among them that sounds like a harmonic Rubik’s cube that could only be solved by Duane.”
“Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style.” —Rack producer Paul Allen
To encapsulate just the right amount of intensity, “I don’t over practice everything,” the guitarist says. Instead, once he’s created a part, “I set it aside and don’t wear it out.” On Rack, it’s obvious not a single kilowatt of musical energy was lost in the rehearsal process.
Denison issues his noisy masterclass with assertive, overdriven tones supporting his dissonant voicings like barbed wire on top of an electric fence. The occasional application of slapback delay adds a threatening aura to his exacting riffage. His tones were just as carefully crafted as the parts he plays, and he relied mostly on his signature Electrical Guitar Company Chessie for the sessions, though a Fender Uptown Strat also appears, as well as a Taylor T5Z, which he chose for its “cleaner, hyper-articulated sound” on “Swan the Dog.” Though he’s been spotted at recent Jesus Lizard shows with a brand-new Powers Electric—he points out he played a demo model and says, “I just couldn’t let go of it,” so he ordered his own—that wasn’t until tracking was complete.
Duane Denison's Gear
Denison wields his Powers Electric at the Blue Room in Nashville last June.
Photo by Doug Coombe
Guitars
- Electrical Guitar Company Chessie
- Fender Uptown Strat
- Taylor T5Z
- Gibson ES-135
- Powers Electric
Amps
- Hiwatt Little J
- Hiwatt 2x12 cab with Fane F75 speakers
- Fender Super-Sonic combo
- Early ’60s Fender Bassman
- Marshall 1987X Plexi Reissue
- Victory Super Sheriff head
- Blackstar HT Stage 60—2 combos in stereo with Celestion Neo Creamback speakers and Mullard tubes
Effects
- Line 6 Helix
- Mantic Flex Pro
- TC Electronic G-Force
- Menatone Red Snapper
Strings and Picks
- Stringjoy Orbiters .0105 and .011 sets
- Dunlop celluloid white medium
- Sun Studios yellow picks
He ran through various amps—Marshalls, a Fender Bassman, two Fender Super-Sonic combos, and a Hiwatt Little J—at Audio Eagle. Live, if he’s not on backline gear, you’ll catch him mostly using 60-watt Blackstar HT Stage 60s loaded with Celestion Neo Creambacks. And while some boxes were stomped, he got most of his effects from a Line 6 Helix. “All of those sounds [in the Helix] are modeled on analog sounds, and you can tweak them endlessly,” he explains. “It’s just so practical and easy.”
The tools have only changed slightly since the band’s earlier days, when he favored Travis Beans and Hiwatts. Though he’s started to prefer higher gain sounds, Allen points out that “his guitar sound has always had teeth with a slightly bright sheen, and still does.”
“Honestly, I don’t think my tone has changed much over the past 30-something years,” Denison says. “I tend to favor a brighter, sharper sound with articulation. Someone sent me a video I had never seen of myself playing in the ’80s. I had a band called Cargo Cult in Austin, Texas. What struck me about it is it didn’t sound terribly different than what I sound like right now as far as the guitar sound and the approach. I don’t know what that tells you—I’m consistent?”
YouTube It
The Jesus Lizard take off at Nashville’s Blue Room this past June with “Hide & Seek” from Rack.
Phat Machine
The Phat Machine
The Phat Machine is designed to deliver the tone and responsiveness of a vintage germanium fuzz with improved temperature stability with no weird powering issues. Loaded with both a germanium and a silicon transistor, the Phat Machine offers the warmth and cleanup of a germanium fuzz but with the bite of a silicon pedal. It utilizes classic Volume and Fuzz control knobs, as well as a four-position Thickness control to dial-in any guitar and amp combo. Also included is a Bias trim pot and a Kill switch that allows battery lovers to shut off the battery without pulling the input cord.
Silk Worm Deluxe Overdrive
The Silk Worm Deluxe -- along with its standard Volume/Gain/Tone controls -- has a Bottom trim pot to dial in "just the right amount of thud with no mud at all: it’s felt more than heard." It also offers a Studio/Stage diode switch that allows you to select three levels of compression.
Both pedals offer the following features:
- 9-volt operation via standard DC external supply or internal battery compartment
- True bypass switching with LED indicator
- Pedalboard-friendly top mount jacks
- Rugged, tour-ready construction and super durable powder coated finish
- Made in the USA
Static Effectors’ Street Series pedals carry a street price of $149 each. They are available at select retailers and can also be purchased directly from the Static Effectors online store at www.staticeffectors.com.