“As a repairman working on every conceivable type of guitar, I became convinced that vintage instruments were desirable not because they had improved with age, but because they had been built differently from current models,” says Paul Reed Smith.
PRS himself talks about learning from Ted McCarty, building guitars for the stars, elbowing the competition, his distinctive headstock design, and more.
Paul Reed Smith could be gloating. At a time when other majors have made layoffs or are coming down from the lockdown-era sales buzz, the company the luthier founded literally with his own hands in 1985 has become a $100-million business. PRS Guitars’ $849 SE Silver Sky—a 6-stringed Clydesdale—was this year’s top seller on Reverb. Recently, the Stevensville, Maryland-based operation introduced its debut pedals, plus a limited-run Robben Ford signature axe that’s a Rolls-Royce with strings. And a raft of new instruments are already in the wings for 2023.
Instead, at an early November party Smith threw at Nashville’s Soundcheck rehearsal complex during CMA week, he reflected humility. Smith addressed the roomful of players, emotionally recalling the 2015 CMA Awards, where the count of PRS instruments onstage was literally neck-and-neck with the population of Fenders and Gibsons for the first time. That ceremony was an ignition point for greater success as well as an affirmation for the guitars that bear his name.
“We don’t want to be a brand,” he told the crowd. “We want to be guitar makers. Country guitarists really helped take us to another level. I am truly grateful.”
“We didn’t have heaters and we were wearing winter coats inside, because if you opened the door for a delivery, it got to be 30 degrees in there.”
Besides his passion for pursing all aspects of what goes into creating guitars, that humility—sometimes inflicted upon him—has played a role in his success. Smith found his calling while at St. Mary’s College, at the opposite end of the state from his native Bowie, Maryland. Lacking a guitar and the cash to buy one, he persuaded a music teacher to let him build a guitar for credit. He got an A, of course. He also dropped out to play and repair guitars, opening a shop in a reputedly haunted garret in Annapolis.
“As a repairman working on every conceivable type of guitar, I became convinced that vintage instruments were desirable not because they had improved with age, but because they had been built differently from current models,” Smith relates. “The reason some of the electrics from the ’50s and early ’60s felt and sounded so good was that a great attention to detail went into the manufacturing process, and that the manufacturers had a real sense for the subtle points.”
Racked and ready: Four decks of PRS guitar necks wait for their final destinations at the company’s Stevensville, Maryland, guitar-building location.
Pondering how to reintroduce these characteristics in the instruments he wanted to build, Smith hit upon the idea of contacting Ted McCarty, who was president of Gibson from 1950 to 1966—the golden era of electric guitar making. “I would sit at the shop, and I was afraid to call him,” Smith says. “We didn’t have heaters and we were wearing winter coats inside, because if you opened the door for a delivery, it got to be 30 degrees in there. So, Clay Evans [a friend and, later, early PRS executive] and I are wearing our coats, and Clay’s saying ‘Call him! Just call him!’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t....’ But I called him and explained who I was and what I did, and he asked, ‘Would you be willing to come visit?’ So, we picked a date, and I went.
“The first time I went, he got very, very upset at the end of the interview. It was about three hours. And I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He goes, ‘Nobody’s asked me these questions in 30 years. Nobody’s asked me how to glue the fingerboard on, what glue we used to glue the frets in…. All they want to know is how to get rich quick. ‘Where can I find a Les Paul? Where can I find a Flying V? Where can I find an Explorer?’ Nobody’s asked me these guitar-making questions, and this is how I made my living.’
“I thought it was beautiful,” Smith continues. “I just kept coming back and coming back. I was very grateful for his attention, and it ended up being a grandfather relationship. I sang to him on his deathbed, with a guitar.” And, of course, Smith also paid tribute to his historic mentor with PRS’ vintage-informed McCarty series.
Over the decades, Smith and his team have made guitars for a coterie of world-class players that includes John McLaughlin (including a 6- and 12-string doubleneck), David Grissom, Nancy Wilson, Mark Tremonti, Jimmy Herring, Mark Lettieri, and, of course, Carlos Santana.
“What Robben Ford wanted and what David Grissom wants is that every one of those models we ship is a his-caliber instrument. He doesn’t want just the couple we tweak for him and then put his name on a bunch of others.”
“The first guitar I made for Carlos Santana changed my life,” Smith offers. “At first, he didn’t see me as a guitar maker. He made me earn his respect, which I honor. He said the first instruments I gave him were ‘accidents of God.’ He thought it was like somebody wrote a hit song, but it was almost an accident—and he didn’t see me as a repetitive hit writer. He literally said, ‘Okay, it’s an act of God, can you make me another one?’ Then, after the fifth instrument, which was a doubleneck, he called me up and said, ‘Okay, you’re a guitar maker.’ That was tremendous. Every Christmas he would call and thank me about the sound coming out of his guitar. He thought of it as a big, male saxophone tone, and he adored it.”
So, what does a world-class musician demand in a guitar? “If you look at guitars in general as a line, and about four-fifths of the way along that line you draw a vertical line through it, what’s beyond that graduates from being a guitar to a musical instrument,” Smith says. “They want musical instruments. What Robben Ford wanted and what David Grissom wants is that every one of those models we ship is a his-caliber instrument.
Initial sanding happens after the overall body shape, electronics cavities, and other cuts are made.
He doesn’t want just the couple we tweak for him and then put his name on a bunch of others. Carlos Santana wants a guitar that he can take out of the factory, put in the limo, go to the gig, pull it out, and play it. And by the way, I’ve watched him do that. It’s a little scary to have him play to 15,000 people with a guitar that’s only been played about a minute-and-a-quarter its entire life. David Grissom does not take a guitar to clinics. He takes ones off the wall at the store to hold my hands to the fire. Carlos calls me constantly and has requests to make ’em better. David wants them better. He just got one that has a hollow, single f-hole in it, and he’s losing his noodles over it.”
It’s been years since Smith has built a guitar himself. “I have a bench where I repair audio gear, and I’m my wife’s furniture repair person, but that’s it,” he says. Nonetheless, he is a regular presence on the PRS factory floor, checking the progress on models in development, eyeballing the wood inventory, checking out pickups, offering suggestions, and evaluating as he formulates plans for the company’s future. “It’s almost a soothsayer job,” he offers. “It’s like having a crystal ball, but you gotta do it from experience, with your ear to the tracks.”
A high-quality instrument starts with good tonewood, and the factory keeps an abundant inventory for both necks and bodies.
Part of that is trying to rout the competition, which he obviously enjoys. At the Nashville party, Smith recounted a story about paying top dollar for a Klon Centaur, and then putting it through its paces. Pleasing at it was, he felt there were shortfalls in tone and control, so he decided to try to beat it. The result is PRS’ Horsemeat Transparent Overdrive (get it?), but his company’s engineers took it a step further, also designing the Mary Cries Optical Compressor and the Wind Through the Trees Analog Flanger, which all debuted in September. Nonetheless, Smith’s goal was not to expand into pedal making, but rather to lure players who’ve avoided PRS. “I’ve actually heard comments like, ‘I like these pedals, maybe I’ll look at their guitars again,’” he says.
Earlier last year, he took on the template, working-player’s Stratocaster with the release of the SE Silver Sky, a low-cost, high-performance version of PRS’ John Mayer signature model. When I mention the guitar, his immediate response is, “How about those pickups?” He then related that he worked with his suppliers in Indonesia, where the guitar is built, for two years on the remarkably wide-ranged pickups. “Initially, they weren’t right, and we didn’t have direct control over their creation, like we do with models we build here, but the pickups still had to lay in exactly the right place sonically. When John played ’em, he thought they were the best overseas-made single-coils he’d ever heard, and he signed off on them literally that second.”
“The first guitar I made for Carlos Santana changed my life,” Smith offers. “At first, he didn’t see me as a guitar maker. He made me earn his respect.”
Although much has changed over the decades at PRS, the company’s distinctive three-and-three headstocks have remained unchanged since the early ’80s—despite being a turn-off for some trad-minded players. Smith explains why: “The design was half practical and half reflective of the front curve of the guitar. It’s like a Dan Armstrong headstock, where the strings went straight to the tuning pegs. On a Fender, they went straight to the tuning pegs, but they were all on one side. That it goes straight to the tuning pegs is important.
“When I started putting tremolos on guitars, Carlos Santana ordered one and he goes, ‘It’s gonna stay in tune, right?’ I said, ‘Sure!’ I had no idea how I was going to do it. Turns out what makes a difference is how you cut the nut, having it as close to the tuning pegs as possible. Also, the strings need to be as straight as possible, and you have to reduce the headstock angle. It’s a combination of those three dimensions.”
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Lollar Pickups introduces the Deluxe Foil humbucker, a medium-output pickup with a bright, punchy tone and wide frequency range. Featuring a unique retro design and 4-conductor lead wires for versatile wiring options, the Deluxe Foil is a drop-in replacement for Wide Range Humbuckers.
Based on Lollar’s popular single-coil Gold Foil design, the new Deluxe Foil has the same footprint as Lollar’s Regal humbucker - as well as the Fender Wide Range Humbucker – and it’s a drop-in replacement for any guitar routed for Wide Range Humbuckers such as the Telecaster Deluxe/Custom, ’72-style Tele Thinline and Starcaster.
Lollar’s Deluxe Foil is a medium-output humbucker that delivers a bright and punchy tone, with a glassy top end, plenty of shimmer, rich harmonic content, and expressive dynamic touch-sensitivity. Its larger dual-coil design allows the Deluxe Foil to capture a wider frequency range than many other pickup types, giving the pickup a full yet well-balanced voice with plenty of clarity and articulation.
The pickup comes with 4-conductor lead wires, so you can utilize split-coil wiring in addition to humbucker configuration. Its split-coil sound is a true representation of Lollar’s single-coil Gold Foil, giving players a huge variety of inspiring and musical sounds.
The Deluxe Foil’s great tone is mirrored by its evocative retro look: the cover design is based around mirror images of the “L” in the Lollar logo. Since the gold foil pickup design doesn’t require visible polepieces, Lollartook advantage of the opportunity to create a humbucker that looks as memorable as it sounds.
Deluxe Foil humbucker features include:
- 4-conductor lead wire for maximum flexibility in wiring/switching
- Medium output suited to a vast range of music styles
- Average DC resistance: Bridge 11.9k, Neck 10.5k
- Recommended Potentiometers: 500k
- Recommended Capacitor: 0.022μF
The Lollar Deluxe Foil is available for bridge and neck positions, in nickel, chrome, or gold cover finishes. Pricing is $225 per pickup ($235 for gold cover option).
For more information visit lollarguitars.com.
A 6L6 power section, tube-driven spring reverb, and a versatile array of line outs make this 1x10 combo an appealing and unique 15-watt alternative.
Supro Montauk 15-watt 1 x 10-inch Tube Combo Amplifier - Blue Rhino Hide Tolex with Silver Grille
Montauk 110 ReverbThe two-in-one “sonic refractor” takes tremolo and wavefolding to radical new depths.
Pros: Huge range of usable sounds. Delicious distortion tones. Broadens your conception of what guitar can be.
Build quirks will turn some users off.
$279
Cosmodio Gravity Well
cosmod.io
Know what a wavefolder does to your guitar signal? If you don’t, that’s okay. I didn’t either until I started messing around with the all-analog Cosmodio Instruments Gravity Well. It’s a dual-effect pedal with a tremolo and wavefolder, the latter more widely used in synthesis that , at a certain threshold, shifts or inverts the direction the wave is traveling—in essence, folding it upon itself. Used together here, they make up what Cosmodio calls a sonic refractor.
Two Plus One
Gravity Well’s design and control set make it a charm to use. Two footswitches engage tremolo and wavefolder independently, and one of three toggle switches swaps the order of the effects. The two 3-way switches toggle different tone and voice options, from darker and thicker to brighter and more aggressive. (Mixing and matching with these two toggles yields great results.)
The wavefolder, which has an all-analog signal path bit a digitally controlled LFO, is controlled by knobs for both gain and volume, which provide enormous dynamic range. The LFO tremolo gets three knobs: speed, depth, and waveform. The first two are self-explanatory, but the latter offers switching between eight different tremolo waveforms. You’ll find standard sawtooth, triangle, square, and sine waves, but Cosmodio also included some wacko shapes: asymmetric swoop, ramp, sample and hold, and random. These weirder forms force truly weird relationships with the pedal, forcing your playing into increasingly unpredictable and bizarre territories.
This is all housed in a trippy, beautifully decorated Hammond 1590BB-sized enclosure, with in/out, expression pedal, and power jacks. I had concerns about the durability of the expression jack because it’s not sealed to its opening with an outer nut and washer, making it feel more susceptible to damage if a cable gets stepped on or jostled near the connection, as well as from moisture. After a look at the interior, though, the build seems sturdy as any I’ve seen.
Splatterhouse Audio
Cosmodio’s claim that the refractor is a “first-of-its-kind” modulation effect is pretty grand, but they have a point in that the wavefolder is rare-ish in the guitar domain and pairing it with tremolo creates some pretty foreign sounds. Barton McGuire, the Massachusetts-based builder behind Cosmodio, released a few videos that demonstrate, visually, how a wavefolder impacts your guitar’s signal—I highly suggest checking them out to understand some of the principles behind the effect (and to see an ’80s Muppet Babies-branded keyboard in action.)
By folding a waveform back on itself, rather than clipping it as a conventional distortion would, the wavefolder section produces colliding, reflecting overtones and harmonics. The resulting distortion is unique: It can sound lo-fi and broken in the low- to mid-gain range, or synthy and extraterrestrial when the gain is dimed. Add in the tremolo, and you’ve got a lot of sonic variables to play with.
Used independently, the tremolo effect is great, but the wavefolder is where the real fun is. With the gain at 12 o’clock, it mimics a vintage 1x10 tube amp cranked to the breaking point by a splatty germanium OD. A soft touch cleans up the signal really nicely, while maintaining the weirdness the wavefolder imparts to its signal. With forceful pick strokes at high gain, it functions like a unique fuzz-distortion hybrid with bizarre alien artifacts punching through the synthy goop.
One forum commenter suggested that the Gravity Well effect is often in charge as much the guitar itself, and that’s spot on at the pedal's extremes. Whatever you expect from your usual playing techniques tends to go out the window —generating instead crumbling, sputtering bursts of blubbering sound. Learning to respond to the pedal in these environments can redefine the guitar as an instrument, and that’s a big part of Gravity Well’s magic.
The Verdict
Gravity Well is the most fun I’ve had with a modulation pedal in a while. It strikes a brilliant balance between adventurous and useful, with a broad range of LFO modulations and a totally excellent oddball distortion. The combination of the two effects yields some of the coolest sounds I’ve heard from an electric guitar, and at $279, it’s a very reasonably priced journey to deeply inspiring corners you probably never expected your 6-string (or bass, or drums, or Muppet Babies Casio EP-10) to lead you to.
Kemper and Zilla announce the immediate availability of Zilla 2x12“ guitar cabs loaded with the acclaimed Kemper Kone speaker.
Zilla offers a variety of customization to the customers. On the dedicated Website, customers can choose material, color/tolex, size, and much more.
The sensation and joy of playing a guitar cabinet
Sometimes, when there’s no PA, there’s just a drumkit and a bass amp. When the creative juices flow and the riffs have to bounce back off the wall - that’s the moment when you long for a powerful guitar cabinet.
A guitar cabinet that provides „that“ well-known feel and gives you that kick-in-the-back experience. Because guitar cabinets can move some serious air. But these days cabinets also have to be comprehensive and modern in terms of being capable of delivering the dynamic and tonal nuances of the KEMPER PROFILER. So here it is: The ZILLA 2 x 12“ upright slant KONE cabinet.
These cabinets are designed in cooperation with the KEMPER sound designers and the great people from Zilla. Beauty is created out of decades of experience in building the finest guitar cabinets for the biggest guitar masters in the UK and the world over, combined with the digital guitar tone wizardry from the KEMPER labs. Loaded with the exquisit Kemper Kone speakers.
Now Kemper and Zilla bring this beautiful and powerful dream team for playing, rehearsing, and performing to the guitar players!
ABOUT THE KEMPER KONE SPEAKERS
The Kemper Kone is a 12“ full range speaker which is exclusively designed by Celestion for KEMPER. By simply activating the PROFILER’s well-known Monitor CabOff function the KEMPER Kone is switched from full-range mode to the Speaker Imprint Mode, which then exactly mimics one of 19 classic guitar speakers.
Since the intelligence of the speaker lies in the DSP of the PROFILER, you will be able to switch individual speaker imprints along with your favorite rigs, without needing to do extensive editing.
The Zilla KEMPER KONE loaded 2x12“ cabinets can be custom designed and ordered for an EU price of £675,- UK price of £775,- and US price of £800,- - all including shipping (excluding taxes outside of the UK).
For more information, please visit kemper-amps.com or zillacabs.com.