As we all know by now, PRS Guitars announced its new John Mayer signature model, the Silver Sky, back on March 5. According to PRS, the guitar—the result of two and a half years of collaboration between Mayer and company founder Paul Reed Smith—aims to be the idealized version of a vintage single-coil guitar.
“It’s been a dream of mine for years to design a guitar that includes some of my favorite vintage specifications but with a modern spirit and aesthetic," Mayer said at the time. "After two years of study and refinement, the Silver Sky is my vision of what a reboot of the electric guitar should look and feel like."
That GW story (which you can check out here) trended for several days and proved to be a magnet for commenters, both pro and con. Since then, Mayer teamed up with YouTube's The Music Space to discuss the controversial ax. Below, you can watch the complete Music Space video—or check out some printed highlights directly below the clip. In the clip, he also demos the guitar.
"I had an idea for a guitar—and this goes back about 10 years—a guitar that is sort of the future of the classic [Strat] design. It was not going to work with Fender. They weren't gonna be able—one way or another—to bring the vision that I had to life. So—not pissed off—I wanted to go somewhere where they could bring that vision to life. And it made a lot of sense to go to Paul because that's the guy who started the company.
"To be able to call the guy who started the company on the phone and talk directly about ideas and how to build them—that's good for you. It's good to have artist be able to call the guy who runs the company. I couldn't do that really at Fender because it's musical chairs.
"I'm not talking shit. I never talk shit. It's just musical chairs. You don't know who to call."
"The first thing I want you to understand is that I embrace the Fender thing. I've seen people kind of disregard the Fender thing where they should regard it. As a customer at heart, I want to see people play Silver Sky through the Fender amp. Because that's what makes the sound. I was watching someone play through like a Victory amp and going, 'Just play through a Fender!' And that's the first thing I wanna say, this guitar is made to coexist with Fender amplifiers, with Fender guitars, with Gibson guitars, with any other guitar out there in the world. It's not trying to revise history, it's just a new way forward."
"It's sort of a higher-definition Strat to me. I wanted to go in and take out a lot of those frequencies that you sort of have to work to roll off. They're not there now, they're just gone. So they're tuned a different way."
