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Stratocaster loyalist Philip Sayce has compared and contrasted his go-to Fender with the PRS Silver Sky, after the blues hero recently welcomed John Mayer's signature guitar into his arsenal.
Sayce has always relied partly on his trusty 1963 Fender Stratocaster, but these days, it has a new stablemate in the Silver Sky.
“It’s really its own thing,” Sayce says of the PRS in an interview with Guitarist. “It’s not competing with the ‘63s; it’s got its own lane. It’s incredibly comfortable, it stays in tune, and it just goes where you want it to.
“I always say that vintage guitars are like muscle cars,” he notes. “You hear that rumble, and you just know what it is. The Silver Sky is like a modern performance car. It’s got all the bells and whistles, and it handles the corners really well. It doesn’t fight you at all. It’s like the wind is at your back when you’re playing it.”
The John Mayer signature guitar was introduced in 2018, with the SE line coming four years later. That affordable version went on to top Reverb’s best-selling guitar charts in 2022 and 2023, placed third in 2024, and rose to second last year. Every step of the way, it has gone toe-to-toe with the Strat.
It was a collab that saw Mayer sever ties with Fender, and though the Silver Sky’s lineage goes back to that model, he, too, doesn’t see them as the same.
“I want you to understand that I embrace the Fender thing,” Mayer said in an Instagram livestream upon the Silver Sky's release. “I want to see people play the Silver Sky through a Fender amp. This guitar is made to coexist with Fender amplifiers, with Fender guitars.”
Sayce agrees. He says the two guitars represent the very best of vintage and modern, with both available when needed. Because, by his own admission, modern guitars still fall a little short of replicating vintage gems.
“The wood on a vintage guitar that’s 60-plus years old is dry and settled. When those guitars were made, that wood might’ve already been 100 years old,” he continues. “You can get really close now, but there’s maybe that last five or 10 percent [with modern builds] where it comes down to the resonance and the age of the wood.”
Indeed, Sayce isn’t looking to replace ‘Mother,’ his tried-and-true Strat, rather, the Silver Sky is suitable companion, and together, they’re powering Sayce’s work in the studio and on the stage.
Sayce’s full interview features in the July issue of Guitarist. Print and digital copies of the magazine can be ordered from Magazines Direct.
In related news, the link between the Stratocaster and the Silver Sky has been put under the microscope in recent months, after Fender issued PRS a cease-and-desist as part of its legal campaign to protect its rights to the Strat.
