RENAISSANCE MAN

I’VE ALWAYS SEEN the guitar as a tool to make music with, and I was trying to make a tool that worked for everything,” Paul Reed Smith says of the foundational guitars he created decades ago that blazed the trail for PRS Guitars becoming what it is today — a phenomenally successful manufacturer of sleek, beautiful-playing instruments that have consistently delivered exceptional tone and quality. PRS may not have been producing guitars during the birth of rock and roll (or earlier, as some can claim), but in a strange way the company seems almost timeless, as if the entirety of modern guitar history was assimilated into its DNA, spawning concepts that would have been unthinkable, or at least overlooked, prior to its debut in 1985. Only a forward thinker with the inventive smarts, guitar-playing experience and sheer knowledge of how to put it all together could have created an entity that holds such relevance in the guitar-playing community. And, somehow, Smith made it happen in a relatively short amount of time.

Celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, PRS now boasts an extensive array of products. It spans five guitar lines that comprise the Core, Bolt-On, S2 and SE series, and Private Stock models; SE and Private Stock acoustics; a range of basses (Core, SE and Private Stock); and a complement of tube amplifiers that includes the Archon series, Grissom series, J-Mod, MT-15 and Sonzera series.

But it all began with one guitar, the Custom 24, which has remained incredibly popular over the decades and is now offered