Welcome to Guitar World’s weekly gear round-up, your one-stop-shop for keeping up to date with what’s been happening in the big wide world of guitar gear over the past seven days.

From new electric guitars to amp modeler updates, the guitar industry is never short of fresh releases, and it can sometimes be hard to stay in the loop with every new launch.

To make things a little easier, we’ve put together an essential must-read guide that will cover the major releases, the boutique drops, and everything in between.

Below you'll find my personal highlights from the week, along with plenty of honorable mentions for the new gear you might have missed. Agree with my picks? Have a highlight of your own? Let us know in the comments.

PRS Tekton

PRS has always had a stake in the heavy music game, but never like this. The PRS Tekton family – a new range of super-engineered metal guitars – reframes the brand in a completely new light.

It could be the firm’s most significant launch since the Silver Sky arrived back in 2018. The four new Tektons are designed exclusively for the most accomplished modern technicians, and geared for prog and shred players through a spec sheet that drags PRS into a completely new market.

Seemingly building on the precedent set by Herman Li’s Chleo model, the Tektons feature ultra-thin bodies and necks, radical body sculpting and contours, stainless steel frets, uber-flat fretboards, and

But it was the new Stylus humbuckers that intrigued me most about the Tekton drop. They offer flatter output with a more moderate tonal character in order to get the most out of digital gear. Think ‘quasi-FRFR pickups’ that will give your digital rig room to breathe. It’s a novel concept, and not one we’ve ever seen from a mainstream brand before.

Safe to say it’s a big drop. So much so that we at Guitar World HQ put our heads together to discuss what it could mean for the guitar world at large…

• PRS Tekton T review
• PRS Tekton SVN review

Fender x Mark Hoppus Stoned Fruit Jaguar Bass

Mark Hoppus has been a staunch Fender fan since he made the switch from Ernie Ball back in blink-182’s early days. As such, he’s got a fair few bass guitars in his collection worthy of a signature recreation.

This week, he launched his second Fender Jaguar Bass model, this time based on his “Stoned Fruit” model. The custom four-string, which features artwork from Ohio-based artist ‘Burrito Breath’ – as well as an exclusive Guava Green – has been Hoppus’ go-to stage bass for a while now.

It’s been given a limited edition recreation that will only be available for 182 hours. It comes with a sticker set for those wanting to cover up that Guava Green colorway a la Hoppus’ original, as well as the hybrid spec sheet that was found on his first Jag Bass from 2023. That means reverse-mounted split-coil P Bass pickups, a Jazz Bass neck, and a Jag Bass body.

We caught up with Hoppus this week to chat about his latest bass – as well as blink-182’s next album.

Fender x Paul Smith Telecaster

Fender sees the PRS John Mayer Defender Silver Sky and raises it the, er, Paul Smith Telecaster? Honestly, we’d like to think these are all just coincidences but we just don’t know anymore.

Anyway, the Paul Smith Telecaster has been designed in collaboration with the British fashion house – not Paul Reed Smith, the guitar maker – to celebrate the pair’s joint 80th birthdays. We’d be interested to know how long this one has been in the works, but as you can imagine commenters online are having a field day with this.

Not only do you now have a Silver Sky that has ‘Fender’ on it, you also have a Telecaster inscribed with ‘Paul Smith’. Cool me a naive fool, but I simply can’t convince myself that these are all planned trolls. Whatever the case, this is a pretty cool Telecaster...

Also Launched This Week

Ovation Viper

The cult Ovation Viper that was once played by Jeff Buckley is back after nearly 50 years. A very lovely single-cut that deserves more love. Unfortunately it’s only limited-edition…

For more: Ovation

Gibson x Tom Petty Flying V

Gibson has celebrated 50 years of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with a collection of five Flying Vs, each with its own distinct colorway.

For more: Gibson

Emerald Guitars X20

A new generation of Emerald guitars is here after the Irish carbon fiber guitar giant discontinued its entire range to make way for its latest X20 evolution.

For more: Emerald Guitars

Ernie Ball Music Man Family Reserve John Petrucci Majesty

John Petrucci’s signature Majesty guitar has been given three new colorways – Chocolate Grizzle, Blonde Roast, and Lost in Space – as it unveils the ultra-exclusive Ball Family Reserve 2026 collection.

For more: Ernie Ball Music Man

DiMarzio The Chopper / The Cruiser

New noise-cancelling Telecaster pickups from DiMarzio. They combine neodymium magnets and twin-blade hum-cancelling coils to offer higher output, faster transients, and a lower noise floor than traditional T-style pickups.

For more: DiMarzio

Crazy Tube Circuits Rapture

Crazy Tube Circuits has lifted the drive section of its fan favorite Triptychon for a standalone stompbox at the request of players, promising amp-like gain with natural compression and harmonic richness.

For more: Crazy Tube Circuits

The internet is abuzz following the arrival of the PRS Tekton range – a new purpose-built metal guitar line that’s ushered in a new era for the brand.

PRS already has a stake in heavier waters, but the Tekton initiative marks a direction shift. The four flagship models are spec’d for a very particular style of guitar playing, designed exclusively for technical players of the highest caliber.

This new family could therefore make for serious competition against the market’s big guns. It might also represent the arrival of a new type of metal guitar.

Given it’s perhaps the biggest PRS launch since the Silver Sky, we asked the nearest handful of GW staffers for their reactions to the new lineup. Here’s what they had to say…

• PRS Tekton T review
• PRS Tekton SVN review

Stuart Williams – Deputy Reviews Editor

A strange phenomenon occurs with time. While the old clichés of Blues Dentists, Yacht Rock Lawyers and, er…Mixolydian Architects may follow PRS forever, there's another, parallel persona to the brand. Silverchair's Daniel Johns, Incubus' Mike Einziger, Wes Borland, and, of corse, Creed/Alter Bridge gunslinger Mark Tremonti are just a few players who planted a heavier flag in the ground for PRS.

Opeth, Mark Holcomb of Periphery, Karnivool's Drew Goddard and DragonForce shredder/end-of-level Guitar Hero boss Herman Li have continued that precedent.

I got to try the Tekton T briefly during the filming of Guitar World's video, and while I'm far from the technically adept target audience, it left me with an overall feeling of 'evolution'.

The PRS DNA is strong, particularly at first glance. There's the mirror-buffed nitro over a heavily-figured top, and the more subtle familiarities such as the Phase III locking tuners and two-point tremolo. But wait! No birds? No rare-breed shellfish? Nope. Instead, it's a streamlined, dare I say tasteful, design across the 'board.

Picking it up is where that body shape turns from a two-dimensional ‘It’s a PRS’ on paper, to a 3D ‘It's a PRS, but not like any other I’ve held.’ I'd sum it up by saying ‘svelte’.

At the shallowest points the carve feels thin and manoeuvrable, and the merging of the offset Vela and traditional Custom designs makes for something that is unmistakably a PRS, while feeling fresh and new.

Progression aimed at progressive players. Now for the shocker. Fans of those bands I mentioned earlier are themselves of dentist-ing, lawyer-ing and architect-ing age. So no, PRS probably won’t shake the preconceptions, but your dentist might well be a better sweep-picker than you’ve given them credit for.

Matt Owen – News Editor

Well, here’s something quite novel: a humbucker that’s been designed with modelers in mind. Are Full Range, Flat Response pickups now a thing? Perhaps ‘FRFR humbucker’ undersells the new Stylus pups somewhat. They still have their own character, but this is the first time we’ve seen a mainstream builder design a humbucker that’s engineered to get the most out of amp modelers and digital rigs.

PRS has a penchant for going above and beyond with its guitar designs, so it’s no real surprise that the firm has managed to develop something new in the pickup department. But I personally didn’t see this one coming.

They have a flatter output than most humbuckers, voiced for articulation and dynamic response while keeping some character to cater more to digital gear. So, like how an FRFR speaker won’t color your modeler tones, the Stylus pickups will supposedly give your digital rigs more room to shine through.

What does this say about PRS and the gear world at large? Well, it proves there are still areas to explore at a time when the playing field in the digital world has never been more level. Will other big brands and pickup makers take note and start dabbling in modeler-minded humbuckers? Time will tell.

Matt Parker – Deputy Editor

Am I the only one that was a little underwhelmed when I first saw these? I heard rumors of PRS making a big pitch for the modern metal market and I was excited to see what would happen when PRS’ talented luthiers were let off the leash with this kind of brief. After all, the prog and metal landscape is one where people won’t blink at a headless design, or one of Abasi Concepts’ UFOs.

Perhaps I should have known better, but to me, the Tektons seem to me less like a tectonic shift, and more like another honed and scraped, detail-orientated evolution of an already successful formula. That approach has obviously proven very effective for PRS, and there’s a significant risk with big swings, but a guy can dream.

I haven’t tried them yet (my colleagues who have got hands-on say they are stellar players) but aesthetics do count. So, if you’ve always wanted a sportier PRS that flips the birds, well, you’re in luck. But if you want to see what PRS can do when it takes off the tie at the office party – well, you might be waiting a moment longer.

Michael Astley-Brown – Editor-in-Chief

I always thought PRS was relatively well-positioned as a brand for heavier players, but the Tekton lineup takes its ergonomic cues from guitars that are far removed from the Ted McCarty lineage. Those back carves are closer to Ibanez and Ernie Ball Music Man than they are Gibson Les Paul. And ultimately, those are the players PRS will be targeting here.

Whether the price point will be too much to stomach is another question. I wonder if, like the Silver Sky, a more affordable model could be what pushes these into mainstream popularity. An S2 model at half the price could seriously shake up the market. Just sayin’…

What is it?

You might already have seen our review of the brand new PRS Tekton T – part of the launch of “a whole new family of guitars”, to quote its maker.

The Tekton range is a serious new proposition, the most overtly modern, possibly even metal guitar range of that we’ve seen from PRS yet, aimed at the contemporary guitarist and built to integrate perfectly with contemporary gear including digital amp modelers.

Being designed for high-performance modern rock and metal guitar at the outset, the specter of extended range must have loomed large over the development process.

A seven-string Tekton will surely have been planned from the start, given how prominent sevens are in those styles. And we've seen seven-strings from PRS before, of course – most notably with the name of Periphery's Mark Holcomb attached – but it’s fair to say that we've not seen anything quite like this from the brand yet.

For a start, as well as being the first USA-built production seven-string, this is PRS's first seven at any price point with a bolt-on neck, bringing it further into the space occupied by various shred-esque models from seven-string pioneer Ibanez.

Then there's the shape – the basis of the new Tekton silhouette is actually the vintage-inspired PRS Vela, but with lots of tweaks. The end result is the thinnest body and neck design that the company has ever put into series production.

Specs

• Launch price: $2,999 | £2,999
• Made: USA
• Type: Seven-string electric guitar
• Body: Mahogany with figured mango top
• Neck: Maple, satin nitrocellulose finish, Modern D profile
• Fingerboard material/radius: Ebony, 16” radius
• Scale length: 26.5”/673mm
• Nut/width: PRS composite, 48.4mm
• Frets: 24, jumbo, stainless steel
• Hardware: PRS Phase III locking tuners, PRS 7-string Hardtail bridge
• String spacing at bridge: 64mm
• Electrics: PRS Stylus bridge and neck humbuckers, 3-way pickup selector, Volume and push-pull Tone control (for coil split)
• Weight: 6.6lb/3kg
• Options: Fixed-bridge Tekton six-string, Tekton T six-string with PRS two-point vibrato, Tekton Floyd six-string with Floyd Rose vibrato
• Left-handed options: N/A
• Finishes: Black Tourmaline (as reviewed), Slate Blue, Imperial Topaz, Violet Tourmaline, Bloodstone Red, Fuchsia Aura
• Case: PRS Premium gig bag (included)
• Contact: PRS Guitars

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★★

And doesn’t that shape look great? Just as with the Tekton T, the aesthetic – and build quality – really impresses. The carved mango top is just as beautifully flamed, and the elegant slimmed-down shape is purposeful without looking over-cooked.

I hinted at scale length above - in today’s world of down-tuning, the industry-standard 25.5” scale adopted for the six-string Tekton models wasn’t really going to cut it for the seventh string. In common with several modern-day rivals (and, indeed, its cheaper stablemate, the SE Mark Holcomb SVN), the scale length here is 26.5”.

This is useful for seven-string as it allows that low B to stay clearer and tighter, especially if you plan on dropping it down to A – or beyond. For a seven-string guitar intended for technical rhythm and lead guitar alike, this scale length is probably the ideal compromise.

The Tekton’s new Stylus pickups make their way over to seven-string, promising the same detail and transparency as the six-strings. The SVN also boasts a substantial-feeling string-through hardtail bridge and, again, a set of PRS ‘Phase III’ lightweight locking tuners.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★½

The contoured back and subtly offset shape allows the SVN to sit very comfortably against the player’s body. There’s the same gripe as with the T – a slightly uncomfortable hard edge to the mango top where it meets the forearm but, other than that, there’s little to complain about ergonomically. And even despite the extra wood involved in making it a longer-scale seven-string, the SVN is similarly lightweight to the Tekton T.

The Tekton SVN’s neck handles its extra string and extra inch of scale length with aplomb. The maple is left unpainted and, as seven-string necks go, it’s up there with the most comfortable we’ve tried.

The shoulders feel just slightly less pronounced; the resultant perception is of a shallower profile, despite the quoted depth measurements being identical.

It’s a wonderfully accommodating seven-string, which otherwise feels very similar to its sibling – the neck feels barely any bigger, and you’ll fly up and down the fretboard with all the same abandon.

As expected, the extra length makes the high strings marginally less forgiving for bends and vibrato, but for many seven-string players, that’s a trade-off worth making.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★★

The Stylus humbuckers impressed first time round with their clarity and punch – important attributes for seven-strings. For low tunings especially, you need less gain than you think, so a cooler-output humbucker (with coil-splitting available) is often the best way. And so it proves to be – the pickups are brilliant here too.

True to the Tekton series’s modern ethos, I focused primarily on my Line 6 HX Stomp, running through compressed cleans and crunchy overdrive, to contemporary extreme metal tones based on Mesa/Boogie, Soldano and Peavey amp models. This proved to be a lot of fun, prompting an instant flurry of riff-writing. There’s something to be said for that.

The full humbucker is, again, very clear and defined, with plenty of top end detail and great string separation, thanks in part to the medium output. It keeps clean sounds clean, and keeps even heavy distortion sounding tight and full. And the split-coil sounds are especially good, with low notes taking on a formidable, wiry snarl.

Whether split or full, though, the 7-string Stylus humbuckers combine with the longer scale to create a tight, percussive and balanced sound – fabulous for technical drop-tuned metal riffs, of course, but far from a one-trick pony. You could easily slot this guitar into a diverse range of settings and not feel limited.

Verdict

I said of the Tekton T that it was easily the best PRS yet, ergonomically, and the same rings true of its seven-string sibling - even with the longer scale and the wider neck, which could easily have made it feel unwieldy and difficult, it’s a fantastically playable guitar.

Then there’s the tone – the Stylus humbuckers repeat their trick, providing a supremely balanced and versatile suite of sounds that needn’t pigeonhole the SVN as a metal guitar at all, if your tastes lie elsewhere.

At its price, it’s likely to appeal mainly to serious seven-stringers who know exactly what they want, but even those less familiar with sevens may find a lot to like here.

Guitar World verdict: For its first USA production seven-string, PRS needed to come out swinging in order to justify an inevitably serious price point; the brand has certainly achieved that with the SVN. This is a truly fantastic instrument; real care has gone into making the Tekton work seamlessly with an extra string.

Also try

Hands-on videos

PRS

Guitarist

Riffs, Beards & Gear

• “There’s more ‘Fender’ to Fiore and more ‘Gibson’ to the SE DGT… Inspiring guitars from inspiring players”: PRS Fiore HH and SE DGT Standard review

What is it?

One could argue that PRS didn't need to come up with “a guitar aimed at “the most discerning, technical players” (they're not just 'metal guitars'), contemporary musical styles and cutting-edge gear setups, as this has been the company's bread and butter for decades.

Even the very first production PRS, the Custom 24, remains immensely desirable among modern guitarists – decades since it was designed.

So a more explicitly contemporary addition to the range could easily look like overkill; it needs to stand apart usefully from the Custom, rather than just packing in a bunch of gimmicks nobody asked for - or it mightn’t be worth the risk at all.

The company has decided to meet the challenge head-on, though, and here's the result – the Tekton range. There are four models, and this is the Tekton T – a six-string with the classic PRS vibrato.

Specs

• Launch price: $$2,899 | £2,899
• Made: USA
• Type: Six-string electric guitar 
• Body: Mahogany with figured mango top
• Neck: Maple, satin nitrocellulose finish, Modern D profile
• Fingerboard material/radius: Ebony, 16” radius
• Scale length: 25.5”/648mm 
• Nut/width: PRS composite, 42.8mm
• Frets: 24, jumbo, stainless steel
• Hardware: PRS Phase III locking tuners, PRS two-point vibrato
• Electrics: PRS Stylus bridge and neck humbuckers, 3-way pickup selector, Volume and push-pull Tone control (for coil split)
• Options: Fixed-bridge Tekton six-string, Tekton Floyd six-string, Tekton SVN seven-string
• Left-handed options: N/A 
• Finishes: Bloodstone Red (as reviewed), Slate Blue, Imperial Topaz, Black Tourmaline, Violet Tourmaline, Fuchsia Aura
• Case: PRS Premium gig bag (included)
• Contact: PRS Guitars

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★½

The Tekton shape is a slimmed-down, sharpened combination of the tried-and-tested Custom 24 and the offset Vela. It’s a really successful design; it still looks very much like a PRS, but modernised appropriately. Purposeful and elegant, it wouldn’t look out of place on a modern metal stage – but it needn't frighten away those with more classic tastes either.

The back and sides of the mahogany body are painted a glossy metallic grey - a slightly odd-looking choice against the deep red top and satin black neck, but this varies by color choice.

Either way, there’s abundant contouring and a slim, sculpted bolt-on neck joint - worlds away from the oversized heel of a Custom 24, more reminiscent of something like Ibanez’s All-Access Neck Joint. These are claimed to be the slimmest bodies and necks that PRS has ever put into production; the Tekton T is, indeed, wonderfully lightweight.

The ‘Shallow Violin’ carved top is mango wood, which PRS is liking currently; after the trees’ long and productive fruit-bearing lives are behind them, the mature wood is harvested as timber and it’s sustainable and high-quality – often beautifully figured too, as here.

The six-string Tektons move away from the trademark 25” PRS scale length – it’s a Fender-familiar 25.5” instead. All models have 24-fret ebony fingerboards, and they all feature stainless steel fretwire too - de rigueur for many a modern guitar, and you can bet that there'd have been complaints otherwise.

Hardware-wise, the solidity one expects from PRS is here in abundance. The Tekton T utilizes the company’s venerable two-point vibrato, and a set of its latest Phase III locking tuners; there's nothing to worry about whatsoever with any of that.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★½

The contoured back and subtly offset shape allows the Tekton T to balance well and sit very comfortably. If there’s anything wrong with the ergonomics, it would be that the carved top creates a hard edge to the body where it meets the picking arm; it’s not as comfortable as a more traditional Strat-style elbow contour.

However, the Tekton T’s neck profile is a shredder's delight. The maple is reinforced with hormigo, a dense hardwood, for extra stability, and PRS describes this neck design as ‘thin but substantial’, which does get the point across – fans of Jackson and Charvel should feel at home.

The D-shaped carve feels nicely supportive, whether your hand is positioned for wide bends and vibrato or for fast scale runs. As you’d hope for this price, the finishing and fretwork are perfect too.

The PRS two-point floating vibrato is a tried-and-tested piece of hardware, and brings its usual functionality here. It’s great for expressive phrasing but, if silly noises are your bag, it can gargle and shriek with the best of ‘em too.

If, like me, you’ve ever struggled to gel with the ergonomics of more traditional PRS models, you’ll likely find the Tekton range to be a dramatic improvement.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★★

The Tekton range debuts a new pickup for PRS, too. Each model employs two Alnico 5-powered, modern-voiced Stylus humbuckers. It was decreed during development that these pickups should sound just as good with a digital-amp modeling setup as with a valve amp. That means a balanced frequency response, and a little less output - in theory, giving clarity and punch without sacrificing too much character.

I fired up a contemporary digital rig (my small pedalboard designed to run direct, built around a Line 6 HX Stomp), and cycled through some varied settings - majoring on more modern sounds, as that's the idea.

Right away, these pickups are exceedingly well-judged – crisp, clear delivery that lets your carefully-dialed tones shine through. The output doesn’t overpower a clean signal, and helps to keep higher gain tight and defined, with great string separation.

It’s exactly what you’d want from a modern, two-humbucker guitar – sounding highly accomplished for anything from function-band sets to tracking modern metal riffs.

The split-coil sounds are excellent too – with more than enough punch and a useful change in character that opens up even more versatility – from tight, defined single-coil rock tones to glassy cleans.

Verdict

Price-wise, the Tekton range will sit near the other USA-built, bolt-on PRS range, the CE series – and it’s an ideal alternative, for those seeking a more overtly modern guitar.

The new Stylus pickups fit their brief admirably, with superbly balanced, defined tones, while the ergonomics are the best of any PRS model yet, by far. It's versatile, too – a guitar that truly will work for a multitude of styles.

This guitar truly does bring PRS's design philosophy right up to date, and it'll surely become a serious player in the high-end rock guitar market.

Guitar World verdict: Far from a mere phoned-in ‘modern’ rework of an existing model, the Tekton is all-new and feels it; it’s been put together with real care and attention to what today's guitarists need. If you've been waiting for a progressive, contemporary reimagining of the PRS blueprint, here it is.

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Hands-on videos

PRS

Guitarist

Riffs, Beards & Gear

• “There’s more ‘Fender’ to Fiore and more ‘Gibson’ to the SE DGT… Inspiring guitars from inspiring players”: PRS Fiore HH and SE DGT Standard review

PRS has made a major play in the metal guitar market by introducing the Tekton lineup.

Dubbed “a whole new family of guitars”, the Tektons fill a gap in the PRS catalog and look to go toe to toe with the heavyweights of the metal guitar world.

The Maryland brand is no stranger to heavy music. Mark Tremonti, Mark Holcomb, and Herman Li are all PRS artists who have signature guitars designed for hard rock, metal and shred.

Some of the specs rolled out here will be familiar, too. Floyd Rose tremolos and seven-string configurations are available in the PRS lineup.

But PRS says the Tekton family has been purpose-built from the ground-up to meet a very specific design brief: to be the most modern spec’d electric guitars they can be, “designed for the most technical of modern players”.

The company has therefore pulled no punches: radical body carves, ultra-thin neck profiles, longer scale lengths, and all-new Stylus pickups engineered to get the most out of digital rigs.

Four Tektons are available: the OG hardtail, ‘T’ two-point tremolo, “Floyd” Floyd Rose trem, and “SVN” seven-string. Each features a new Tekton body silhouette that is a halfway house between the Custom 24 and Vela designs.

But while the shape itself might not be too radical, PRS has compensated for that with the contouring. The belly carve is huge, and the neck heel is heavily sculpted. It is the thinnest body PRS has ever designed.

Elsewhere, the bolt-on maple necks – also the thinnest that PRS has ever made in standard production – feature a 16” radius ebony fingerboard with stainless steel frets. 16” is a new one for PRS, and this is the first time the company has used stainless steel frets, too.

Notably, the Tektons feature the same string spacing found on John Mayer’s Silver Sky and Mark Lettieri’s Fiore. Slightly wider than usual PRS guitars, it’s said to be better for sweeps, arpeggios and precise pick attack.

The Bird inlays have also been ditched for offset dots and Luminlay side dots. The necks feature hormigo strength rods for stability and resonance, taking cues from the carbon fiber rods found in Li’s Chleo signature.

As for tonewoods, the Tekton “Floyd” has an all-alder body, while the others have mahogany backs with highly flamed mango tops.

PRS has also debuted its new Stylus humbuckers. Complete with coil-splitting, they feature alnico 5 magnets and are voiced for “clarity, articulation and character”.

They promise to deliver “aggressive tones without sacrificing note definition”, and that improved definition is said to be present whether playing through an amp or a modern modeling rig.

Interestingly, they offer a flatter output than most humbuckers in a bid to cater to digital gear. Given that much of modern metal music is recorded using digital modelers, it makes sense, but this might be the first time we’ve seen a mainstream brand build a pickup with modelers in mind.

The flatter output offers some of its own character, but the aim of the game here is to keep your amp and modeler tones fully intact.

“These pickups are exceedingly well-judged – crisp, clear delivery that lets your carefully dialed tones shine through,” Guitar World's review of the Tekton T notes.

“The output doesn’t overpower a clean signal, and helps to keep higher gain tight and defined, with great string separation.”

It’s a big move from PRS. For a firm largely associated with classic builds, the Tektons represent a radical lane change.

“This is not just introducing a new model. We are planting a flag for a whole new family of guitars,” PRS Director of Sales Jim Cullen says. “Since day one, PRS has been built around a combination of player feedback and our experience as guitar makers.

“Listening to musicians while continually refining our craft has helped us create instruments that serve as tools for a wide range of players. Over the years, we have heard a growing call for more modern spec’d PRS guitars. The Tekton is our answer to that call.”

Price-wise, the Tekton and Tekton T will list for $2,899, while the Floyd and SVN variants will be priced at $2,999.

Read our full review of the Tekton T and Tekton SVN models, and head over to PRS Guitars to find out more.

John Mayer occupies a place of his own in the pantheon of 21st century popular music.

He’s a pop superstar who’s penned smash hits that’ve reigned supreme on supermarket playlists for two decades, but dig into what’s actually coming out of those always painfully blown-out speakers, and you’ll hear someone whose compositional and guitar skills shine as bright as his soulful vocals.

About those guitar skills. He’s an indisputable virtuoso who’s seamlessly jumped from propulsive, coffeehouse acoustic fare to washed jeans, early-aughts guitar-pop to folk, and even country. On the real guitar-heavy side, meanwhile, you can find his performances with the explosive, blues-rock-oriented John Mayer Trio, and his many expansive, Americana-tinged jams with the late Bob Weir in Dead & Company.

But even those who don’t fancy literally any of the above stand up and take note of his gear choices.

Dissatisfied with the limitations of the then-60+-year-old Stratocaster, Mayer teamed up with Paul Reed Smith a decade ago to create what he saw as an elevated version of it. Polarizing upon its release, the resulting model, the PRS Silver Sky, was the second best-selling electric guitar on Reverb last year, having topped those charts in 2022 and 2023.

The Richter Scale was also piqued when the analog loyalist revealed last year that Neural DSP had – with his endorsement and collaboration – created a digital plugin that so faithfully nailed the intricacies of his analog tone that even he couldn’t tell the difference between them.

So, with all that said of his stature and the ink spilled in his wake, how well do you know Mr. Mayer? The music, and those gear choices that leave our little word abuzz? Test your knowledge in our quiz below.

Having worked alongside some of the biggest names in music, including Prince, Jeff Beck and Beyoncé, Rhonda Smith has no shortage of bass guitars to choose from. But one stands apart from the rest – an instrument she originally borrowed and, as she puts it, “never gave back”.

“It wasn’t actually made for me,” says Smith. “The first one – my baby, Tequila Sunrise – was Gary Grainger’s personal bass. It was one of the first four-strings manufactured by PRS for the Gary Grainger Signature series.

“At the time, I went to Burbank because PRS had a showroom at Center Staging, and they didn’t have many of those basses around. They were custom-shop instruments, so you generally had to order one.

“Gary was gracious enough to let me borrow his bass to try it, and they let me have it for the weekend. I fell in love with it. I got to the point where I wasn’t willing to let her go. I didn’t want to go back to any of my other basses. So, you know, I found a way!

“I’ve had other ones made since then, and they’re great. I have another four-string that’s white, which is a backup, and it’s beautiful. But it’s not the same.

“That’s one of the things I love about PRS. I own 26 or 27 bass guitars – everything from Fenders to MTDs, 6-strings, and acoustics. But this one bass has a sound that none of my other basses have.”

Now, that unmistakable bass tone has played a key role in shaping the sound of The Power of 3, Smith’s new supergroup with Orianthi and Cindy Blackman Santana.

“You know, all good things start with good friends and good music, and this project contains all of that. We’ve already put out two singles, and our self-titled album is coming out December 11. We’re having a great time.”

The project first began taking shape when Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis encouraged Orianthi to assemble a Band of Gypsys-inspired power trio.

The Power of 3 is now gearing up to take its hard-hitting blend of guitar, bass and drums to audiences worldwide.

“A trio has always been powerful to me because you have to watch what you play and be conscious of what you’re playing, but it’s also nice to have that space. You have more space, but you also have more responsibility.”

How did you record in the studio?

We cut everything live – all three of us together – and did minimal overdubbing. That’s basically how we made the record. Orianthi was singing the leads at the same time, too, so everything was happening in focus. We’d just work things out until we were ready to lay down the basic tracks.

That’s kind of what we did, with the help of Eddie Kramer, who produced the record. He brought in a lot of vintage sounds, vintage equipment and vintage EQs, and all those wonderful things that are going on.

Was there a moment when you knew the chemistry was really working?

I think it was there from the very first song. The first song we wrote together was No Time for Love, and I think the second was Treat Me Like a Lady. It was pretty powerful from the start. We just knew it was right.

The album was recorded entirely in analog.

I think a lot of us have become used to the digital sound, especially with streaming. But old-school people know the difference. There’s just something about the sound. It’s thicker, deeper, and meaner. It’s becoming a bit of a rarity these days. We’re releasing the album on vinyl, too.

What can someone expect from the live experience?

Live, it’s powerful. I think it’s a one-of-a-kind thing to see. People follow by example, and I think we’re good examples for younger women.

There have always been female musicians, but I don’t think there are many groups like this, with the kind of experience we have in a trio and the power we have coming out and banging out rock ’n’ roll!

What else can you tell us about your studio rig?

I generally use Aguilar amps, and I had a pretty extensive pedalboard, with everything from wah and distortion to chorus. I don’t think I ever went direct – Eddie always wanted a live amp so he could get that feed.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Prince was a great teacher. He was a hard teacher, but he believed in perfection in a world where perfection doesn’t always exist. His lessons about ownership and owning your music, understanding the business and respecting the music have always stuck with me. They’ve been invaluable.

What advice would you give to aspiring players looking to make their mark in the industry?

You need to know how to respect the music. For me, as a bass player, when I come into a group, respecting the music means learning the song, knowing my parts, being on time, being there and being open to change.

You’d think those things were simple, but sometimes they can be challenging for people. The number one thing is learning the parts. A lot of people just don’t do the work, but they show up anyway. And then you let the whole team down. It’s really about knowing your role.

Has The Power of 3 changed what you look for in a collaboration?

I wouldn’t say it’s changed what I want from a collaboration, but it’s definitely enhanced my ideas about what I’d like to do. We’re all super-positive about it and we love the record. We’re looking forward to the December release and to reaching people who maybe don’t know who we are or don’t know the music. It’s unique and very cool.

There’s a long-running joke in the guitar industry that PRS guitars are for dentists and lawyers. The sentiment is that those who fork out $7,000+ for a PRS McCarty are rich hobbyists, rather than hard-working touring musicians.

In a recent fan-led Q&A with UK music store Andertons, firm owner Paul Reed Smith was asked about his firm’s reputation head on. “Hey Paul,” write Getthefunkout46, “why do you make guitars exclusively for dentists?”

It’s a pointed question, and one that Smith embraces with a smile. But he’s not in the mood to simply laugh it off. He wants to set the record straight, and actually insinuates that there are other firms more deserving of that affiliation.

“I didn’t know Carlos Santana and John Mayer were dentists,” he first chuckles. Then the laughter subsides.

“The question implies that only dentists and doctors buy the guitars. It's just not true anymore,” he says. “I mean, there was a time in the late ’80s [when] maybe that was true, but Sweetwater did a thing: the most expensive guitars. We weren’t in the first 10. We’ve done everything in our power to make the SEs affordable.”

He has a point. Coming from Cort's massive – and impressive – Indonesian factory, most SEs offer great value for money, such as the NF 53 SE, which was one of 2025’s best sub–$1k electric guitars. The Silver Sky SE has been selling like hot cakes, too. Herman Li’s signature SE, though, is something of an outlier at $1,999.

Still, Smith isn’t done pleading his case.

“These S2s are really affordable,” he continues. “Look, you can say that to some people, a Private Stock's not affordable [at $8,000 – $14,000], but that's an awful lot of time and energy and skill level for what we charge for them. So I'm okay with it.”

Elsewhere in the Q&A, Smith was quizzed on tonewoods, having previously offered an interesting take on the debate, and had his first Greggs sausage roll [a budget UK fast food staple]. So it was quite the day for him.

Smith has just been inducted into Guitar Center’s RockWalk of Fame, after a heartfelt speech from John Mayer.

John Mayer has made it pretty clear that he sees the Silver Sky as an elevated electric guitar built for the modern age. It shuns old-school finishes in favor of sleeker stylistic choices, which are largely inspired by the consumer tech we surround ourselves with today.

That may have been his intention for his signature guitar, but that hasn’t stopped people taking creative liberties with the Silver Sky. And we’ve seen some pretty hefty DIY mod jobs over the years.

We had Zach Myers’ insane relic’d pink model, which predated Mayer’s actual Roxy Pink example. There was also a sunburst Stevie Ray Vaughan tribute Silver Sky. Neal Schon stuck a Floyd Rose on his.

Mayer has seen all of these mod jobs, and while they may seem at odds with his curated vision for the Silver Sky platform, he is actually very fond of them. In fact, he’s highly encouraging of it.

When asked by Guitar World if he approved of these jobs, Mayer gave a strong vote of confidence.

“I love it,” he says. “Hack it all you want. I think it’s important – like, you’re supposed to. If you want to, you have my blessing to do whatever comes to mind with it.”

Mayer has gone on record before to say there will never be a sunburst Silver Sky, but he’s not against players taking matters into their own hands. For him, the sunburst ‘thing’ just wasn’t what he had in mind for his signature model.

“I use the sunburst as the brown M&M,” he notes. “The brown M&M checks the contract. No sunburst reinforces the contract with what the mission statement of the guitar is.

“If I started a guitar in 2018, why would I do sunburst? Because that’s how you do it? Well, I didn’t do it. That’s not part of my history. You know what I mean?

“But what is part of my life, which could be future history, is when I see colors. Mojave Brown [which was used on an earlier Silver Sky] comes from a thing, that when I saw it, I went, ‘I’ve got to use that color.’”

So, there you have it. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your Silver Sky. You’ve got Mayer’s approval.

Guitar World sat down with John Mayer earlier this month to talk about his new collaboration with Land Rover and the Defender Silver Sky models – which, the timeline confirms, is not a dig at Fender.

Last week, John Mayer and PRS announced a new collaboration with Land Rover, unveiling a host of limited Silver Sky signature guitars in Defender colorways.

The drop caused a stir online. Not because of the new colorways, or the fact that it debuted the black pickguard Silver Sky. Guitarists were too busy focusing on the name of the guitar.

Social media will have you believe that the Defender Silver Sky is a pointed, unsubtle barb at Fender over its ongoing Stratocaster copyright dispute. After all, the word ‘Defender’ literally contains ‘Fender’.

It seemed that everyone on the internet all thought the same thing. Fender had issued PRS a cease-and-desist letter over the Silver Sky. The De-Fender Silver Sky, therefore, was PRS hitting back at Fender in the best way possible: an S-style of its own with ‘Fender’ on it.

But is that really the case? Well, no. The timeline doesn’t add up. When we spoke to John Mayer about the collaboration earlier this month, he revealed that talks with Land Rover stretched back to the start of the year – before Fender scored the default EU ruling on which it’s based its entire legal strategy.

“We've been working on this since January or February, in terms of the loose conversation about it,” Mayer said. “Then, into March, we started getting into what colors they should be and how we make things work.”

If you needed any more evidence, Mayer’s passion for Defenders didn’t miraculously appear this year. That would’ve been one helluva coincidence. No, he’s been collecting the luxury 4x4s for years.

For the record, he bought his first Defender around 2007, in Arles Blue. Arles Blue is one of the colors included in the collaboration drop. The defense rests.

For Mayer, this wasn’t about getting back at his old endorser; it was pure wish fulfilment.

“It’s been a dream of mine for a long time to align with a brand that’s known so well for its colors and adapt those colors so that they live on the Silver Sky,” Mayer told us. “I’m a huge fan of Defenders and a collector of Defenders. This is marrying two things I love.”

Visit PRS Guitars to browse the full collection of Defender Silver Skys.

There’s been a flurry of activity around Guitar Center’s RockWalk of Fame in 2026, with a host of stars joining an established cast of inductees. Iconic luthier Paul Reed Smith is the latest name to be honored, and he’s been inducted by his good friend and signature artist, John Mayer.

After securing the loyalty of Carlos Santana and Al Di Meola early on, Mayer has gone on to be the poster boy for PRS guitars, with his signature model, the Silver Sky, going toe-to-toe with the Fender Strat for year-on-year sales.

Smith’s handprints will now be found on Guitar Center’s RockWalk of Fame in Hollywood, alongside the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and Black Sabbath. Mayer was on hand to deliver a heartfelt speech at the ceremony, which took place during Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival over the weekend.

“I speak on behalf of the artists that pre-date my 10-year relationship with Paul Reed Smith,” Mayer says. “I stand here, and I think I speak for artists like Santana, Mark Tremonti and David Grissom, John McLaughlin, and Neal Schon and I get to put some words to I think what is all of our feelings about Paul.

“There is a lot of love in this man's heart,” he adds. “We have that love for playing guitar. We all share it. Paul has it. I have it. We keep each other pushing with that love for the guitar. Paul Reed Smith, it is an honor to induct you into the Guitar Center RockWalk.”

“Every time you talk,” Smith responds, “I cry.”

“Paul is obsessive about building the perfect guitar – and I mean that as the highest compliment,” said Guitar Center CEO Gabe Dalporto.

“He has spent his life questioning every assumption about how a guitar should sound, feel and perform, and then doing the hard work to make it better. That obsession has materially moved the electric guitar forward and raised the bar for the entire industry.”

From the roaring success of the Silver Sky to budget belters like the SE NF 53, it’s hard to argue against that sentiment.

Back in June, one of rock’s great partnerships, Billy Idol and Steve Stevens, were inducted into the RockWalk, the first to get the nod since Gary Clark Jr. in 2024.

In the background, meanwhile, the store is looking for players to test its new in-house brand’s builds, but you’ll be sworn to secrecy if you sign up for it. Dalporto believes its new guitar designs will swerve away from copyists to be “revolutionary.”

John Mayer isn’t just a guitar player. Nor is he just a singer, or a songwriter. As he explains in an exclusive new interview with Guitar World, he’s also crazy about product design. The time he’s spent building and refining his signature guitar, the PRS Silver Sky, is testament to that fact.

“It’s probably my favorite thing next to making music,” Mayer tells us. “And when I say next to, I don’t mean below it. I mean parallel with it.”

That’s why the subject we’re sitting down with Mayer to talk about is particularly significant. Today, PRS and John Mayer have announced a milestone collaboration with Land Rover, resulting in a run of US and SE Silver Sky models with Defender finishes never before seen on guitars.

It’s a big deal for Mayer, who's an avid collector of Defenders. But for those who don’t have a garage filled with luxury 4x4s, or any interest in Land Rover at all, there’s a more universal talking point that will make you sit up and pay attention.

Besides those fresh new colorways, the collection introduces the first Silver Sky to come factory-fitted with a black pickguard. It might not be the place fans were expecting it to pop up, but it finally brings one of the most requested Silver Sky features to the masses.

Mayer has long spoken about his desire to elevate electric guitar design. He’s been influenced by movements outside of the music world, looking to lifestyle brands such as Tesla, Apple and Leica as inspiration for the Silver Sky.

It’s unconventional thinking for a guitar, resulting in a signature platform that has led by example when it comes to keeping modern guitar aesthetics fresh. That’s always been the goal.

“I knew from the very beginning of the Silver Sky launch that I wanted to have a new relationship with colors when it came to the guitar,” Mayer dissects. “I wanted to elevate the sense of what colors are on the guitars.

“Color communicates so much. It’s the same way, if you're at a restaurant, fonts on a menu can communicate things. When you see that Rolex Green, it's a hex code.”

This Land Rover link-up feels like a full circle moment, then. It has allowed Mayer to geek out about a brand he loves, while flexing his passion for product design and trying to keep the guitar landscape fresh.

“I thought, ‘This is the perfect opportunity to legitimize this concept that I’ve had for so long,’” Mayer explains of the collab. “Instead of pantone-matching someone else’s colors, we got to go to the brand and get involved in the heritage of these colors and tell a deeper story.

“We were given the actual paint samples from Defender, and the paint codes. Most people don’t have those paint codes. We were entrusted with them.”

Trust is at the heart of this partnership, and that’s not lost on Mayer.

“We’re using Land Rover paint. That’s the legitimacy that I feel like is a dream come true. It’s just trust. Trust that, when I create the Silver Sky in these colors, I’m going to be an extension of the Defender story.

“It’s been a dream of mine for a long time to align with a brand that’s known so well for its colors and adapt those colors so that they live on the Silver Sky,” Mayer says. “I’m a huge fan of Defenders and a collector of Defenders. This is marrying two things I love.”

Of course, car colors and guitars have always been intertwined. In the ’50s and ’60s, Gibson and Fender used custom car colors for their builds. Dakota Red. Lake Placid Blue. Candy Apple Red. The list goes on.

But this puts a different spin on the car color theme. For a start, no-one’s used actual Defender paint before. Plus, Defenders of this style were made no earlier than the 1980s. It’s a more contemporary – and, yes, more exclusive – approach that’s in keeping with the Silver Sky’s ethos on color.

And this new collection is all about color. Keeping the same specs as regular Silver Skys, the US model gets heritage colors no longer offered on the 4x4: Arles Blue, Willow Green, Portofino Red and Sandglow Yellow, with color-matched headstocks to boot.

Meanwhile, the SE gets contemporary finishes Petra Copper, Sedona Red, Carpathian Grey, and Woolstone Green. The SE models also get the honor of bringing that black pickguard to the lineup.

It’s one of the most anticipated new features for the Silver Sky. Many fans have taken it upon themselves to make similar mods with off-label parts in the past. Now PRS is leaning into it. And Mayer is giving back to the SE in the process.

“It’s almost like the first appearance of Wolverine. Everyone’s waiting for it,” Mayer acknowledges. “I think it’s interesting that it makes its appearance on the SE line as opposed to just having it trickle down from the Core line.

“I thought it was nice to give something to the SE. When I was growing up, the more accessible guitar got punished for being more accessible. I learned a lot from the SE.

“I originally had the idea like, ‘Oh, you tier it.’ Then guitar lovers of the world spoke to me. I learned that some people are going to have an SE forever. It doesn’t have to be a consolation and someday you’ll work your way up. That’s when I thought, ‘There should be a little bit to separate the lines.’”

Players have been waiting for this one since the Silver Sky first landed. To have it appear in a Land Rover collaboration might seem odd, but it all fits Mayer’s vision for his signature guitar. This is no ‘black pickguard Silver Sky’ for the sake of it. The Defender drop felt natural.

Mayer explains, “The US core model has a white pickguard, because the wagon version of the Defenders from the 1990s had a white top. The colorway on the modern edition of the Defender has a lot of black accents, which is how we arrived at a black pickguard on the SE.

“If the SE was grabbing from modern colors, then black is the roof and hood color of a new Defender.”

Granted, a formal collaboration with an actual car brand might seem indulgent. Mayer is certainly no stranger to luxury link-ups, having worked in the past with premium Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet.

But Mayer maintains that, despite the fact this limited-edition drop has one eye on attracting collectors as well as players, it never loses sight of what’s at the center of the partnership: his signature guitar.

“The greatest compliment on the instrument side of my life is when somebody says, ‘If he put his name on it, you know it’s right,’” Mayer stresses. “That means everything to me. I don’t want to break that chain. But in the meantime, you can play with the colors and play with the story it can tell.”

This whole venture goes back to Mayer’s obsession with design and color. This is a man who has looked to fashion and cosmetics as inspiration for his guitars. The Faded Black Tee Silver Sky was color-matched to a T-shirt he likes. Moc Sand came from a pair of shoes.

“If you like one of the colors, you’re not going to get weighed down by branding,” Mayer says of this new drop. “I made sure the whole time, and so did Land Rover, that this is not a guitar feeling like it has four wheels.

“It’s not meant to combine the design DNA of a Defender and a Silver Sky. It’s telling a color story, and that’s what I really love. That’s why I think it should be known as the Defender Color Collection.”

Only 500 of each of the US Silver Sky models will be made. The SE variants won't be limited editions, per se, but will only be available until mid-year 2027.

For more information, head over to PRS Guitars.

More from John Mayer’s interview with Guitar World will be published in the coming weeks.

Mention the words ‘signature guitar’ and you will usually provoke one of two distinct reactions.

Some see the ultimate expression of an artist’s vision, an instrument shaped by years of touring and real-world experience. Others see little more than a standard production guitar with an inflated price tag and a famous name slapped on the headstock.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, split between two design philosophies: instruments built as faithful replicas, and instruments engineered to refine and innovate.

The first approach treats the guitar as a historical artefact. Faithfully replicated models such as Gibson’s recent ‘Greeny’ Les Paul, cloned from the iconic 1959 ’Burst shared by Peter Green, Gary Moore and Kirk Hammett, aren’t trying to improve the original template.

Their purpose is to preserve a frozen moment of rock history for a new generation. Conversely, the second philosophy looks forward, asking a practical engineering question: how can we make this guitar better?

These instruments use an artist’s experience to refine ergonomics, hardware and electronics. Steve Vai’s groundbreaking Ibanez JEM is the ultimate example. Its structural innovations solved real performance roadblocks, eventually trickling down into the mass-market RG series and permanently changing how modern guitars are built.

Problem Solvers

The best signature guitars rarely begin as marketing ideas; they start with a player trying to solve a persistent problem. Fender chief product officer, Justin Norvell, explains that this collaborative spirit is part of the company’s original DNA.

“It’s an ongoing conversation we have with everybody,” Norvell notes. “Leo wasn’t a guitar player. It was Bill Carson, Freddie Tavares… all of these players that would just say, ‘I like this. I don’t like this. Can you put an extra pickup on there? Can you do this?’”

Artist-driven R&D existed long before formalised signature models did. Michael Schulz, Fender’s head of Signature Artists, says that same spirit drives modern projects, though artists now arrive with highly specific insights from heavy touring and recording.

“We’re getting more information from artists saying, ‘Hey, I’ve been doing this thing. I’ve been hearing this thing… let’s R&D it.’ So then, we’ll try to figure out how to make it work.”

In much the same way, the PRS DGT grew organically from a friendship starting in the mid-1980s between David Grissom and Paul Reed Smith. As they exchanged ideas, Grissom’s road and studio experiences led to requests for a thicker mahogany body, revised pickups and player-focused changes.

Those ideas first evolved into the PRS McCarty model, which Grissom initially declined to put his name on out of respect for Ted McCarty’s legacy.

Grissom explains: “I was really at the point where… nobody knows who I am and I don’t want my name on the guitar. A lot of the ideas that I was trying to translate into the PRS were really ideas that Ted McCarty had pioneered at Gibson, and I thought it was extremely fitting and appropriate to recognise Ted for all his contributions.”

Only after years of continued refinement did that platform become the DGT. As Grissom recalled: “We bounced ideas off each other for years and we would always come up with different stuff.”

As Grissom’s session work increased, the guitar had to cover more ground. “We changed the control layout so the bridge pickup volume knob was closer to my little finger because I worked that constantly,” he explains. “We worked on the neck profile quite a bit over several years with quite a few prototypes.”

Norvell witnessed a similar level of microscopic detail when collaborating with Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien, where tiny shifts in wood dimensions mattered.

“I remember we were messing with different necks,” Norvell recalled, “and Ed was feeling 10 thousandths of an inch on the back shape of neck. ‘Well, this one’s a little bigger.’ We’d get out the digital calipers and, sure enough, the neck was bigger.”

The Eric Johnson Signature Stratocaster illustrated how demanding an artist can be when every detail affects performance. Norvell recalls that “Eric wasn’t interested in changing a guitar simply for the sake of change; he was searching for a very specific feel and response. The project ultimately involved testing more than 60 pickup sets and developing Fender’s first compound back-shape neck.”

But the real takeaway was much bigger than any single component. It was about getting every element to vibe together perfectly. “We always reduce it to the components,” Norvell says. “But, really, it was about designing a guitar that’s optimised to be the best version of itself where all the components work together in harmony.”

This same holistic approach defined the development of the PRS DGT, where Grissom focused heavily on achieving a seamless dynamic response across the entire fretboard.

The pickups became a major focal point of the R&D process. Instead of settling for high-gain performance or sterile vintage replication, he pushed for a balanced pickup voiced to deliver rich output and musical warmth without losing an ounce of single-coil-like openness and clarity.

“I still felt like there was too much midrange, too much gain,” he says, “but I didn’t want it to be sterile. I’m trying to get that sweet spot, where you do have mids, but you don’t sacrifice the sweet top-end and the harmonic complexity.”

Factory manufacturing methods, like pickup potting, became part of the discussion. Grissom questioned whether soaking them too long in wax killed the sound.

“If you’re letting them soak in a tub of wax for 10 minutes,” he says, “you’re killing all that air around them.” The solution was subtle: “To this day, they just go in for a little bit, and we don’t do the vacuum where it pulls the wax through.”

That level of detail carried through the entire instrument, down to the fret bevels, spec’d for “maximum real estate, but with no sharp edges”. He sums up the philosophy simply: “Everything about that guitar is spec’d out. It’s not an accident. It’s not left to chance.”

Tried & Tested

Real-world testing is equally vital. Fender’s Michael Schulz recalls sending Mike McCready an early Road Worn Strat prototype to play on stage with Pearl Jam. McCready came back with direct operational notes: “Hey, this sounds great, but I need this changed a little bit – I need this neck thing fixed right here a little bit.”

For Schulz, that was definitive proofing: “How much more R&D truth can you get than having this be played during Yellow Ledbetter and Alive and Even Flow live with Pearl Jam?”

Grissom describes the exact same idea from the player’s side. His suggestions were “born out of thousands of gigs and hundreds of sessions”, but success required “the ability to take those suggestions, put them into a guitar, and then hit the road, or go make a couple of records to see if they worked”.

Jared James Nichols’ signature model evolved even more organically. Nichols took his own Les Paul, removed the neck pickup, stripped the controls and rewired it with a single bridge P-90 and one volume knob. The guitar became his main instrument long before a brand got involved. When Gibson approached him, Nichols says the development was remarkably collaborative.

“They let me pick whatever components I wanted,” he recalls. Crucially, Nichols chose to build the guitar as an Epiphone, rather than a Gibson Custom Shop model, wanting something working musicians could realistically afford.

Perhaps no model better illustrates the power of artist-driven R&D than Steve Vai’s collaboration with Ibanez. Rather than modifying an existing production model, Vai worked with engineers to build a guitar from scratch.

The resulting JEM introduced innovations such as the Monkey Grip, enhanced upper-fret access, advanced switching and the ‘Bear Claw’ tremolo rout – all practical solutions to Vai’s real playing challenges.

Meanwhile, Paul Reed Smith rejects the idea of a standard blueprint for signature guitars, noting every collaboration follows its own path.

“It’s all different,” Smith explains. “What I did with Herman Li, what I did with David Grissom, what I did with Carlos Santana – all completely different stories.” In fact, Herman Li’s model took nearly a decade because “he didn’t just want a guitar. He initially wanted a synthesizer controller that would do things that most guitars won’t do.”

By contrast, “David wanted a McCarty guitar with a tremolo, he wanted everything right”. Ultimately, Smith says, “it’s not a label-slapping moment where you just throw an artist’s name on the back of a headstock. It’s getting these people what they want and having their legacy and their pride involved.”

Together, these stories show that signature guitar R&D is multifaceted. Whether it is a long factory development cycle, a prototype tested on stage, or a guitarist stripping a Les Paul down to the essentials, the best examples all share one core idea: the artist brings the problem, the builder helps find the solution, and the guitar becomes stronger because both sides listen.

Back To Business

Behind every successful signature guitar is a massive investment of time, money and trust. Long before reaching a dealer’s wall, manufacturers spend years refining prototypes alongside an artist. It is a major risk, with no upfront guarantee that the instrument will appeal beyond a core fanbase.

For some players, royalties from a successful signature guitar can provide long-term financial stability while cementing an artist’s legacy. While David Grissom and Steve Vai both acknowledge the economic benefits, they insist that a guitar must ultimately stand on its own merits. Players buy an instrument because it performs, regardless of whose signature is on the headstock.

To make it all work, the guitar market has split into very distinct price points and tiers. At the ultra-premium end, limited Custom Shop micro-runs function less like tools and more like fine art or financial assets. The benchmark remains Gibson’s 2004 Jimmy Page Les Paul.

The 25 ‘Played and Signed’ models originally retailed for $25,000 and now routinely command over $80,000 at auctions. Fender’s 2006 clone of Eric Clapton’s ‘Blackie’ retailed for $24,000 and sold out in hours. These instruments generate immediate, high-margin cash flow and can elevate a brand’s entire catalogue.

This split highlights a brand-new approach to signature collaborations. As Fender’s Justin Norvell and Michael Schulz reveal, modern collaborations look far beyond traditional rock heroes.

High-profile releases like the Bruno Mars and H.E.R. Stratocasters are explicitly engineered to introduce the guitar to younger, more diverse demographics. When a partnership really clicks, it doesn’t just sell gear; it builds a lasting legacy for the company and creates a classic instrument that keeps inspiring players long after the artist is gone.

More Than A Name

The ultimate compliment a signature guitar can receive is when players forget it’s a signature model at all. The Gibson Les Paul is the absolute benchmark. While it carries the name of a true pioneer, most guitarists don’t buy a Les Paul to sound like Les Paul; they buy it because it is one of the greatest electric instruments ever built. Somewhere along the way, the design simply became bigger than the signature.

The same has happened with many of today’s most successful artist models. The PRS DGT has earned a loyal following among players who appreciate its feel and versatility, regardless of whether they’re familiar with David Grissom’s music. Martin’s 000-28EC followed a remarkably similar path.

The guitar’s initial spark came during Eric Clapton’s legendary 1992 MTV Unplugged performance, where his stripped-down acoustic set gripped a global audience and put the short-scale Martin 000 back on the modern map.

But while that landmark broadcast served as the ultimate launchpad for his 1996 signature model, 30 years later, it remains a cornerstone of Martin’s line-up because players discovered it is simply an outstanding, highly responsive acoustic instrument in its own right.

Even the Ibanez JEM tells a similar story. Steve Vai’s ideas helped reshape the instrument, but many of the innovations developed during the project eventually found their way into Ibanez’s hugely successful RG series, extending far beyond the people who originally set out to buy a Steve Vai model.

A signature opens the door in a showroom, but the guitar has to do the rest. That’s what separates the truly great signature models from the forgettable ones. The best ones endure because they became exceptional instruments in their own right.

The Game-Changers

Most signature guitars are designed to solve problems, introduce new ideas or celebrate an artist’s contribution. Every once in a while, a guitar does something much bigger. It changes the entire direction of the company.

Gretsch is one of the best examples. By the early 1980s, the company had all but disappeared from the conversation. Production had stopped, quality had suffered, and the brand had lost relevance.

Then Brian Setzer stepped into the spotlight with the Stray Cats, proudly playing his well-worn Gretsch 6120. Suddenly, a new generation of players rediscovered the brand, sparking renewed interest that eventually led to a successful line of signature models and playing a significant role in the company’s resurgence.

Gibson experienced a similar revival in the late 1980s. At a time when pointy ‘SuperStrats’ dominated the hard-rock market, Slash walked on stage with a late-’50s-style Les Paul and reminded an entire generation why the design had become a classic. Demand for Les Pauls surged, helping re-establish the model as Gibson’s flagship guitar and laying the foundation for one of the company’s most successful signature relationships.

Stories like these are rare, but they illustrate the extraordinary influence the right artist and the right guitar can have. The best signature models don’t just sell well; occasionally, they revive forgotten designs, reshape public perception and help rewrite a company’s future.

• With thanks to ATB Guitars in Melksham (www.atbguitars.com) and Gas Station Guitars in Taunton for providing the stunning vintage guitars photographed for this issue’s cover feature
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Jack Higginbotham’s life changed the night he met Paul Reed Smith eating a slice of pizza down on Main Street in 1983. He went home and told his girlfriend – now his wife – that the guy was going places.

When Smith set up PRS Guitars in 1985, Higginbotham got in at the ground floor, working minimum wage as an entry-level guitar builder.

“There was something driving that guy that I was fascinated by,” says Higginbotham from PRS’s HQ on Kent Island, Maryland. “I was going to go back to get my mechanical engineering degree, but I found myself absolutely falling in love with the art and the science of guitar building.”

41 years later, Higginbotham is now PRS’s first-ever CEO. He explains why the time is right for that position, and how the company’s guiding principles on quality are driving it forward – albeit at the expense of his playing.

“Oh, it’s made me a worse guitar player!” he laughs. “Hopefully I’ll get my chops back, but I’m an infinitely better guitar builder than I ever thought I would be, and that’s more important.”

Why has PRS Guitars appointed its first CEO?

It’s actually about where our company is headed right now. We have been doing business internationally since the year we opened. But I believe this is our time to become a global business, and I think [it’s important] having one consistent leadership point, one consistent path to follow, drawing all of our company objectives into one spot…

The last year and a half, I would say maybe 50 per cent of my time has been outside of the United States, traveling and understanding these markets a little bit better.

The birds inlay and the quilted maple catches the eye, but arguably the defining detail of PRS is the guitar’s critical infrastructure – nuts, tremolo units, tuners...

I do a series of trainings, and it’s dealer training for the most part. One chapter is called “The Devil in the Details”, and it’s exactly what you’re talking about. The bridge, the pickups, the nut, the tuners, drying wood, our thoughts on resonance and sustain as it applies to moisture content inside of wood, proper ways of drying wood so that you bring out the most in a guitar... The devil is in the details. It’s what we’re interested in.

A lot of this comes from Paul.

He’s a very singular human who can listen to a guitar and tell you what’s emanating from it – whether it’s the pickup, the soldering, if it’s the amount of potting in the pickup, or if it’s a truss rod that’s too tight or the action is too high. He’ll just listen and go, “Do this, this and this,” and then you do it and that guitar is better. He’s amazing in that regard.

Players can go into a store with $1,149 and take home an SE Special Semi-hollow. Is that what you mean by quality and value?

Whether it’s Private Stock and it’s $20,000, or it’s $649 for a CE Standard, it’s about value. We want the person to get twice their money’s worth, and we feel really good about the job we’ve done. If we’ve made a $600 guitar and you’re like, ‘Man, I would have paid $1,200 for this guitar,’ that’s a home run in my book.

In 2022 you talked about a five-year plan to turn the SE line into a $75 million business. How close are you?

We’re not too far. I don’t remember saying that, actually, so good on you! That portion of our business is about three times what it was then, which I would say is a great success – because the quality of the instruments has risen, not just stayed flat.

Do you have ambitions of seeing PRS guitars on the vintage market?

I guess it doesn’t really matter to me so much, not in the traditional sense of it as an investment. That doesn’t really interest me. What I do love is the fact that people care enough about us to care enough about our roots, that they value those things.

I saw a 1986 Custom Custom 24 on Reverb going for $23,000. That is technically a vintage guitar.

My 1986 Custom 24 has an interesting story. Two years ago, I’m writing a will. I’ve got a lot of musical instruments, and so my kids are like, “What do I get?” So we had a death party. My lawyer was like, “This is a very bad idea.” [Laughs]

So everybody came over, and I had everything around the house and different colour sticky pads. I was like, “I’m gonna count to 10, and everybody go claim your stuff!” My daughter put her sticky on my ’86 Custom.

I realised I hadn’t opened that case in a while, and it bummed me out, because it was the first guitar that I can say I completely built by myself. I didn’t use it anymore. As time went on and we learned more, the guitars just got better.

Then last year I said, “I am never gonna sell this guitar, so why don’t I just go back, rip it apart, and turn it into a guitar that I would love today?”

I put new pickups in it. I put new electronics on it; new tuning pegs, new bridge, new everything. I even went back and redid the fingerboard… The guitar is absolutely unbelievable.

My point being, people look back at guitars – vintage guitars, or early PRS guitars – and it’s like, “Oh, the magic of this.” And there’s magic because it’s history. But the real magic is in the performance, and what I loved was, I was able to take a guitar that I probably never would plug in and use, and I turned it into my other favorite guitar – along with my Silver Sky.”

Silly question to finish – but if you could put a PRS into the hands of any player, living or dead…

A Silver Sky in Stevie Ray Vaughan’s hands would be quite interesting. That would be nice.

When the DragonForce shredder launched his first-ever signature guitar collaboration with PRS in the summer of 2025, it caused quite the stir online. Its bold style was completely different from anything Paul Reed Smith had put out before, with an all-new body design, Fishman Fluence Signature pickups, and even ditched the birds-in-flight inlays for a brood of dragons. It doesn’t get more DragonForce than that!

Speaking of his new model, Herman Li said, “With the PRS SE Chleo, we set out to create the best affordable professional-quality guitar unlike anything out there. It delivers a unique combination of effortless playability, outstanding craftsmanship, and versatile tonal range.

“It combines modern innovations with classic style, giving players the tools they need to create everything from classic tones to cutting-edge, new sounds,” he continues. “The SE Chleo was tour-tested to withstand night after night of intense live shows, in any touring conditions.”

The model is currently available in a trio of eye-catching finish options, from the striking green and yellow Mantis Burst to the pink Orchid Dusk and the gothic Charcoal Purple Burst, all of which show off a fierce flame maple top – but today there’s a new finish option being added to the list.

Sweetwater has just announced an exclusive Black Satin colorway of the SE Chleo. As expected, all other specs remain the same, with only the color difference being the distinguishing factor. So you can expect figured maple-topped mahogany beneath that jet-black paint job, a bolt-on maple neck reinforced with carbon-fiber rods, and a 20-inch-radiused ebony fingerboard.

The pickups are also the same, with a duo of Fishman Fluence Omniforce humbuckers onboard. These unique active, multi-voice pickups feature a copper-free, layered PCB design and, along with a 5-way pickup selector with push-pull functionality, generate a wealth of tonal options. The guitar is available now at Sweetwater for $1,949, that’s $50 cheaper than the originals.

In other Sweetwater news, the company has just kicked off its Guitar Month sale, where customers can access limited-time discounts, special financing options, and some tasty six-string bargains. In case that wasn’t enough, there’s also a Labor Day sale running now, with up to 50% off selected items. So we highly recommend heading to the site to see what goodies you can grab while the offers last.

Guitar Center’s illustrious Rockwalk in Hollywood honors guitarists who changed the game. But manufacturers, and the people who make those brands iconic, often get the nod, too. Paul Reed Smith is the latest figure to be honored.

Smith, who founded PRS just over 40 years ago and has won over the hearts of everyone from Carlos Santana and Alex Lifeson to Ed Sheeran and Jeff Beck (apparently), is now being recognized for his contributions to the instrument’s legacy.

It’s his old pal and PRS artist John Mayer, with whom he crafted the best-selling Silver Sky, who’ll be inducting him. He’s giving back to a man who’s given him so much.

“The first time I saw a RockWalk induction, Ted McCarty was getting inducted, and Eddie Van Halen was one of the people in attendance to witness it,” Smith says.

“I was very pleased for Ted. That I’ll be in the middle of another induction is an honor and leaves me without words.”

Mayer will deliver a speech at the ceremony on September 26. It’s set to take place at the Dell West Plaza Rockwalk Stage at the Moody Center during the Crossroads Guitar Festival in Austin, Texas. The completed handprint will then be transported to Sunset Boulevard. Guitar Center CEO Gabe Dalporto will also attend.

“There are very few people in the history of the electric guitar who have pushed the design and perfection of the instrument forward more than Paul,” Dalporto says. “He has inspired generations of musicians and instrument makers and is a living legend in our industry.”

Smith will be in prestigious company alongside 2024 inductee Gary Clark Jr., and a host of heavy hitters, including Steve Vai, Robert Johnson and Les Paul.

It’s two inductions in quick succession after Billy Idol and his foil, Steve Stevens, dipped their hands into wet concrete in June.

Guitar Center has unveiled its Crossroads 2026 guitar collection, which includes exclusive Eric Clapton and John Mayer models.

As is tradition, Guitar Center has celebrated the annual Crossroads guitar festival with a capsule of limited-edition electric guitars and acoustic guitars. And there are some absolute stunners on the menu.

Like previous editions, Clapton’s guitars get the spotlight. The headline is a recreation of his Blind Faith Telecaster, the famed hybrid-esque model he played alongside Steve Winwood and Ginger Baker in the rock supergroup in 1969.

A regular sunburst Tele at first glance, the Blind Faith guitar famously combined a single-cut body with a Stratocaster neck for an oddball Fender mash-up. Along with the likes of The Fool SG, it’s one of Slowhand’s most visually distinct instruments.

To keep it as authentic as possible, there’s a 1956 “Brownie” Stratocaster neck replica and period-correct details, with an included “Woof Tone” wiring kit for more vintage Blind Faith sounds.

At $4,999 apiece, the Tele will be limited to 130 units worldwide, and was presented to Clapton in a launch video published by Guitar Center.

The other big inclusion is a PRS Silver Sky, finished in a one-off Incline Blue colorway and adorned with some never-before-used silhouetted Bird inlays, along with a custom Crossroads Sun design at the 12th fret.

Only 70 will be made, and Mayer himself will use the Incline Blue Silver Sky when he plays at the Crossroads Festival next month.

The two electrics are joined by a list of ultra-premium Martin acoustic guitars, the most expensive of which is the $25k 000-42 Eric Clapton Brazilian.

Inspired by his MTV Unplugged 000 model, it represents “the pinnacle of Eric Clapton’s relationship with Martin” – thanks in part to the rare Brazilian rosewood back and sides.

It’s joined by a Ziricote 000-42, which is available in Sunburst and Clear Natural and starts from $9,699, and the 000-13E, which is the most affordable guitar of the drop at $1,899.

“Music has always been my most reliable source of inspiration, or salvation,” says Clapton. “These guitars are sacred things to me.”

To cap off the launch, Ernie Ball has produced some special edition string sets. They are regular Slink 10-46 strings, but they come in a collectible tin – which is a rather nice touch.

The Crossroads 2026 collection will be available at Guitar Center stores and on the retailer’s website. They’ll also be available for purchase at The Guitar Center Experience during the festival.

Visit Guitar Center to find out more.

Crossroads Festival 2026 will take place on September 26 and 27, and the lineup features an all-star cast of guitar greats.

PRS has partnered with The Warning’s Dany Villarreal to release the riff rock guitar hero’s first signature guitar.

The Astryx is a stunning limited-edition take on the Custom 24 model, with a firm-first finish and custom inlays that replace the firm’s usual Bird fretboard markers.

The Warning, a power trio comprising three sisters from Monterrey, Mexico, have become one of the hottest new rock bands in recent years, with quirky alternate tunings a key ingredient in their success.

With their fifth album, Everything’s Falling, releasing this Friday (August 28), the Astryx’s arrival couldn’t be more timely.

PRS guitars, including an SE Mark Holcomb SVN, have been a valuable part of Villarreal’s arsenal, but this guitar has taken things down a more personal road.

First, there is that unique color fade finish, which is stunning. Then, there are Solecito (little sun) dot inlays across the fretboard, and a standout sun logo on the 12th fret that nods to her Mexican heritage.

Villarreal’s signature also appears on the truss rod wheel, and each of the 200 guitars that will be made will feature an autographed backplate.

Beneath the glitz, though, the Custom 24 formula remains unchanged. The mahogany body has a maple top, with a 25” scale length and Pattern Thin neck.

Hardware includes a no-nonsense PRS Patented Gen III Tremolo, while a pair of PRS’s DMO (Dynamic, Music, Open) humbuckers also feature. The Alnico 2 pickups debuted at NAMM 2025 and have since appeared across the PRS Core range.

Spec’d by Paul Reed Smith and the PRS New Products Engineering team, they arrived after extensive research into “coveted vintage pickup models and advancements in signal analysis”. Tonally, they’re voiced to sound wide open, with note definition and a vocal-like character.

“One of the most important things for me in a guitar is that it feels like an extension of my body and that I can trust it and just do my thing,” says Villareal. “Ever since I tried my first PRS guitar, it’s been an inseparable relationship. With PRS, I feel powerful and confident – and that’s a feeling that once you find, you don’t want to let go of.

“As the only guitar player in the band,” she adds, “I love how my PRS takes up a lot of space sonically. It does wonders for our three-piece band.”

Only 200 units will be available, so fans wanting a slice of the action better act fast.

See PRS for more.

In an interview with Guitar World last year, Villarreal broke down her unique alternate tuning approach.

When you think of movie directors, you probably think of a bullhorn-wielding figure, script in one hand, camera in the other. Now, add a guitar slung casually across their shoulder, and you’ve got Robert Rodriguez. The Texas-born filmmaker is the director behind cult classics like From Dusk Till Dawn and Planet Terror, as well as box-office smash hits like Sin City and the family-friendly Spy Kids franchise – and he’s just as passionate about guitars as he is about making movies.

While many film fans know him for his flicks, fewer may know him as a keen guitar player – although guitars are featured heavily in his works. Take his Mexico Trilogy – El Mariachi, Desperado, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico – where a wandering, guitar case-carrying musician named El Mariachi takes on the bad guys.

​We dial in with the director, and it seems he’s more than happy to get a chance to talk about his passion for the six-string.

“I was super-excited to get that call,” he says from his home in Texas. “I’m a huge fan of the magazine, obviously, since I was a kid. I was thinking, ‘Am I the first director to be on Guitar World?’” he quipped, and well, he very well may be the first we’ve featured.

Rodriguez grew up in a musical family, so it was inevitable he’d pick up an instrument, he tells us.

​“There was always music in the family. My mom used to take Spanish guitar lessons. She would have us all sing. As the family grew, she would learn guitar and sing Spanish songs – and she would have us sing for anybody who came over,” he recalls.

“I remember taking my first guitar lessons around 12 with my older brother. He was always a better guitar player. Around that age, a family friend was teaching us, just kind of simple chords,” says Rodriguez. “But there was a real romanticism towards the guitar in the family. I think probably because it was just so portable, too. We could all kind of go learn piano, but this one you could just pass around the house. I just found that I loved the iconography of it. I loved how it felt.”

​The guitar has become one of Rodriguez’s secret weapons, helping him unlock his creativity in other areas of his life, like filmmaking.

“I realize it’s instant meditation. So it really triggers a lot of ideas if you’re creative and kind of helps bring a lot of focus,” he says. “That’s why you’ll always see pictures of me with a guitar on a movie set. I’m probably the only director who always has a guitar on his set.

​“As soon as you’re done filming the shot, you put the camera aside, and you’re waiting for the next setup. Instead of pacing around or looking at my phone, I would pick up a guitar, and it would instantly keep me in creative mode. I’m not thinking about the guitar. I’m thinking about what the next shot is going to be, and inevitably, I would end up writing something.”

​These snippets of ideas would often lead to full-blown tracks that would go on to underpin iconic moments in his films, as Rodriguez explains.

“I remember I was on the set of Spy Kids 2, and my still photographer came over, and he goes, ‘What’s that thing you’ve been playing for the past few days?’ I went, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Do you like it?’ He goes, ‘You should record that.’ ‘I’ll go record it tonight. Maybe it’s the theme for this movie!’

​“It wasn’t the theme for Spy Kids 2,” he says. “It was the theme for the next movie I was doing, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, that I had already shot – it turned into the song. I recorded it that night, and Salma [Hayek] ended up singing it. It’s the end title song, and that theme is the theme of that movie.”

Rodriguez’s approach is a little left-field when compared to his peers, but it could be argued that his attitude to filmmaking, composing, and, of course, the guitar, is what makes his films unique. “I’m a better filmmaker by playing guitar. I’m a better storyteller by playing guitar,” he says with confidence.

And, as he tells us, music is just as important as the lines the characters are saying. “You have a soundtrack of dialogue to tell people about your movie. Well, the music’s like a soundtrack that tells them about your character.”

Rodriguez has amassed a pretty broad collection of guitars over the years. Some models he bought for movie projects, some were elaborate gifts from studios, and others are the tools he uses to perform live with his band, Robert Rodriguez’s Chingon Band, a music collective the director put together to perform popular songs from across his filmography with their signature Latin rock style.

“It’s kind of cinematic Latin rock, but for people who don’t even like Latin rock – it’s got its own, very cinematic quality to it,” he says.

To pull off this unique blend of “Mexican Spaghetti Western,” Rodriguez tells us that 24 frets are an absolute must, and that’s why, for a long time, he relied on a PRS Custom 24. However, his head has recently been turned by a striking custom build from Castedosa Guitars that got some serious action during a special Chingon performance in Los Angeles at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to celebrate the anniversary of From Dusk Till Dawn and Spy Kids earlier this year.

​“When I met the Del Castillo brothers that are now in my band, they were playing these Yamaha or Takamine 24-fret acoustics,” he says. “They would do these harmonized runs all the way up to the 24th fret. So when they joined my band, I thought, I like that sound, but I want to do it with electric. Not a lot of electric guitars are 24 frets, so I had to go with a PRS. So that’s why that became my main guitar,” he elaborates.

​“I’ve always had painters paint my guitars,” he tells us. “The famous Latin painter, George Yepes, painted this one. He’s the one who did the cover of our Mexican Spaghetti Western album and the famous Los Lobos album La Pistola y Corazón. I was a fan of his art and wanted playable fine art, something I could hang on my wall yet also pull down and play.”

As much as Rodriguez loves his personalized PRS, it is now playing second fiddle to his new Castedosa Maravilla.

​“I heard about Carlos Lopez starting his own company, [Castedosa Guitars], and I bought one of his baritones, which is an awesome freaking guitar. This baritone is so killer, but I had limited use for it in the band,” he says.

​“I told him three years ago, ‘If you ever do a 24-fret guitar, that would be my main guitar.’ Then I saw that he started making them, and I told him about the LA show. So he made that guitar and had Sergio Robleto do a painting on the back because he wanted to showcase Latin art on the back of some of his guitars,” says Rodriguez.

“I didn’t know he was going to throw that in. And I also thought he was just going to make me a guitar for that one show. But as soon as I played it, I was so blown away that I knew it would be my main guitar going forward!”

​“The PRS is great, but this is a custom,” he continues. “You can just tell these are magically hand-built guitars that sound great. So for my live stuff, that’s definitely my main guitar now.”

We shift focus to one of the director’s early guitars, and it just so happens to coincide with one of his early films, Road Racers. He tells us how he acquired an old Silvertone to use in the movie, and it could be argued that Rodriguez had more than a little hand in repopularizing the guitar stylings of Link Wray.

"I actually got Link Wray to sign it for me, because the whole reason his music came back is that I made this movie called Road Racers just before Pulp Fiction. It’s like a love letter to [Wray]. It was a movie after El Mariachi,” he explains. “I got this guitar to use in that movie, and a friend that co-wrote it with me owned a bunch of old Link Wray records. We’re like, ‘Let’s put all this music in.’ There are five or six Link Wray songs in Road Racers,” he elaborates.

“I was able to license the originals really inexpensively. So when Quentin [Tarantino] heard that I got the licensing for an actual Link Wray song for so little, he put two of the songs in Pulp Fiction – and that got Link Wray’s resurgence.

“So when I met Link, he’d come to Austin in ’97. I got him to sign the guitar and told him that I put his music in Road Racers, and that’s why it’s in Pulp Fiction – he was like, ‘Oh, you’re the reason I got back!’ He was so grateful.”

Now, the crown jewel in his collection once belonged to another guitar hero of his, none other than Stevie Ray Vaughan.

“Some of my best guitars were given to me,” he says. “I’ve got Stevie Ray Vaughan’s 12-string. The guitar is from Stevie’s Live Alive tour. He gave it to his friend Larry Warren back in June of 1989. Larry eventually put it up for auction in 1997,” he explains.

“I did a big favor for a friend of mine at a movie studio by helping them out with some extra filming on one of their movies and not charging them an arm and a leg. They were in a bind; in fact, I probably did it for free, and they were so grateful that they bought me that guitar at an auction. I was stunned! You know, that’s one of the best guitars in my collection.”

Being a proud Texan himself, Rodriguez is quick to point out how much love he had for Stevie from a very young age, getting into music in 1979. “I mean, talk about a blowout year. I was 10. We had Dire Straits’ first album – Mark Knopfler’s stuff blew our minds. Van Halen’s stuff blew our minds, and Andy Summers, what he was doing in The Police. That was all in one year,” he continues.

“So we were all about the guitar and trying to figure out, ‘How do you play that?’ Then Stevie Ray Vaughan came out, and there was no going back.”

Now, that isn’t the only guitar he has with an SRV connection. Rodriguez was also lucky enough to snag the famous “Family Guitar,” which Stevie would play alongside his brother.

“The Rockin Robin double neck is one that Jimmie Vaughan had donated to a big charity auction, and I didn’t think it should leave Texas, so I bought it. It’s a real piece of Texas history,” he says. “And having four brothers myself, I loved that he and Stevie used to play that guitar at the same time for the song Pipeline during shows like the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.”

The director has been gifted many instruments over the years, from the financiers of a movie presenting him with a 1964 Fender Stratocaster, to being handed a striking cherry Gibson Les Paul on the set of Grindhouse. He was even gifted a model from Metallica’s shredder-in-chief, Kirk Hammett.

“Kirk Hammett gave me his LTD Nosferatu,” he says. “He had come over to look at some paintings that I had from [Frank] Frazetta, and he was so grateful he gave me a guitar.”

The conversation shifts to nylon acoustic models, and a road-worn, battle-scared Cordoba catches our eye.

“My favorite one that I bought back then when we started the band was this old Cordoba FCE, which I’ve had for about 24 years. I love the thin body of it,” explains Rodriguez.

“I’ve always had this on a set. That’s why it’s all beat to hell. It’s something I bought specifically for recording the Once Upon a Time in Mexico score back in 2002. It’s used throughout that score and just about any other score later that has acoustic nylon in it, which is most of them. I also played it at our live Chingon concerts. It was not used on screen in any movies, but certainly looks like it should be!”

Rounding out our chat with the director, we ask what advice Rodriguez has for aspiring musicians and filmmakers.

“Learn it all,” he says confidently. “Never stop learning. Always be a student and try to live a creative life and actively apply creativity to everything you do. If you actively say, I’m being creative, you’ll see everything change. I found I was happiest, most successful, most prolific, and most fulfilled when I was being creative.

“If somebody asks you, ‘Why do you keep playing that guitar?’ You tell them, ‘It’s just part of my creative process. I’m actually unlocking the secrets to the universe while I’m playing it.’ And you wouldn’t be lying! It’s very much like meditation in that it’s all in the practice of it.”

Paul Reed Smith is always on the lookout for innovation, and that was his ethos from the very beginning.

After building a custom guitar for Peter Frampton in 1976 and knocking on doors to get noticed, a handful notable players, including Ted Nugent, Al Di Meola, and Carlos Santana, started to embrace what was to become Smith’s legacy: PRS Guitars.

In the ’80s, as the fresh-faced guitar builder sought to compete with the likes of Fender and Gibson, his next step was refining his initial designs.

Not only did he aim to make them stand out from the crowd, but, perhaps more importantly, he wanted to maximize each guitar’s performance. This is where overhauling the specs, specifically the scale length, came in.

“We changed the headstock. We changed the body shape,” Smith says on the zZounds podcast.

“We made the horn stick out farther. We changed it to a 25" scale, which was in between 24 13/16", which is what an old Gibson is [24 13/16" is within the range associated with vintage Gibson instruments, although 24 3/4" is the conventional nominal Gibson scale length], and 25 1/2" on a Fender, and I was putting it in the middle.”

Aside from crafting a model with a unique scale length to compete with the guitar giants, tuning stability and accuracy were front of mind.

“The problem with a set of .009s at the time, which was industry standard, [was] when you hit a .042 hard on a 24 1/2", [it] goes sharp [before settling in]. Whereas on a Fender guitar, it didn't go sharper. It just played the note,” he explains.

“So when I extended the scale a little bit to 25", that set of .009s going sharp on the low E ended. I did it for the tuning of the guitar. I didn't do it for the feel.”

Smith goes on to say that if someone was used to Fender and Gibson’s scale lengths, they could easily “play something in the middle,” which also helped attract more players. All these decades later, a 25" scale length is still the primary choice for PRS models – although other considerations were in the mix.

“The reason I didn’t go all the way to 25 1/2" is because Hendrix and SRV were tuning guitars down to Eb or D because the strings were too tight when tuned to pitch,” he detailed in an interview with Premier Guitar.

Smith went on to assert that it “was an experientially based decision, not a compromised guess,” and its continuing popularity continues to astound him to this day.

“I’ve always been surprised at how well it worked – especially when I saw other companies building 25" scale fret-slotting machines,” he said.

“Another problem with either the 24 3/4" or 25 1/2" scale-length instruments is that if somebody grew up on a short-scale guitar, they wouldn’t play a longer one and vice-versa.”

“With the 25", I was getting a simple ‘yes,’” the builder-turned-businessman concluded.

PRS has appointed its first-ever Chief Executive Officer, Jack Higginbotham.

Higginbotham has been a key part of the Maryland brand since it was founded in 1985. He started his career in the woodshop, and worked his way up to become the company’s Chief Operating Officer.

Now, he leaves his role as COO to become the first person to hold the title of CEO in PRS history.

“Jack Higginbotham has been a leader with PRS since the beginning. He is deeply deserving of this role,” Paul Reed Smith, the firm’s namesake and Managing General Partner, says. “I look forward to continuing our close relationship building and selling guitars and amps for the world.”

“PRS is an exciting place to be, now more than ever, and I’m thankful to be surrounded by talented, focused teams in the US, UK, Europe and Japan,” notes Higginbotham.

“As Paul is heard to say, ‘This is our time.’ As I navigate my fourth decade as a PRS employee, I’m looking forward to using my experiences as well as our collective experiences to position us well for the next 40 years. I am grateful for the opportunity and look forward to what is to come!”

It’s no surprise that Higginbotham was seen as the outstanding candidate for the role. In his 41 years at the company, he’s been at the forefront of many PRS developments, helping bring to life key products such as the Silver Sky and SE Series.

He was also instrumental in working with John Mayer on the SE Silver Sky line.

However, despite the milestone surrounding the appointment, it’s unlikely it will result in any extensive operational overhaul. Instead, it looks to be a natural structural evolution that will maintain, rather than reinvent, the wheel.

Indeed, PRS says “Higginbotham will continue to oversee the worldwide day-to-day business operations of the company”, and will travel the globe to “strengthen manufacturing processes, dealer relationships, vendor connections, and every aspect of PRS Guitars”.

Many of his responsibilities as CEO will therefore be carried on from his COO days. Likewise, the structure around Higginbotham remains unchanged, meaning the current setup – with Paul Reed Smith at the heart of guitar development – will be unaffected.

At a granular guitar level, expect business as usual. If anything, Higginbotham’s ascension to the CEO position has executive advantages that come with having a clear, identifiable Chief Executive at the helm of the company.

Head over to PRS to find out more.

What makes a signature guitar successful is not just the name on the headstock but what that name is looking for from the instrument, and how their preferences resonate with the guitar-playing public at large.

You can put an A-lister’s signature on your headstock, swap out the stock pickups for the artist’s own, maybe apply a custom finish, and it’s job done. There’s your marketable signature model, complete with the artist kudos that we have recently discovered makes guitars hold their value in the used market.

But one of the most successful signature models of all time – and one of Paul Reed Smith’s most popular builds – was not for a globally recognized superstar. It was for the Texan virtuoso David Grissom, the guitar player’s guitar player, solo artist and session ace who played with John Mellencamp – and a former Guitar World columnist to boot.

His PRS DGT is one of the great electric guitars of the modern era, long established as part of the Maryland’s US-made Core lineup and its Indonesian SE lineup. It came together out of Grissom and Smith’s long-standing friendship. And in a recent interview with Guitarist, Grissom and Smith reflected on the DGT’s evolution.

“David wanted a McCarty guitar with a tremolo, he wanted everything right,” says Smith. Grissom’s specs were put to work in prototypes that were rigorously tested each night. The DGT was “born out of thousands of gigs and hundreds of sessions”. Such was Grissom’s involvement that PRS even started changing the way it wax-potted its pickups. Grissom was worried that 10-minutes soaking in wax was killing something in their tone.

But the interview reveals something deeper – Grissom could have put his name on a PRS Guitar before. Smith had him onboard when he was testing out the specs for the guitar that would become the McCarty model, the guitar that Smith named in tribute to the former Gibson president and guitar designer extraordinaire Ted McCarty, who oversaw the Nashville brand’s golden era designs.

Grissom was PRS’s trusted test pilot and sounding board and his ideas brought in a raft of changes to the guitar, such as the thicker mahogany body and pickup design. He demurred when the prospect of his name being on the guitar came up.

“I was really at the point where nobody knows who I am and I don’t want my name on the guitar,” says Grissom. “A lot of the ideas that I was trying to translate into the PRS were really ideas that Ted McCarty had pioneered at Gibson, and I thought it was extremely fitting. We bounced ideas off each other for years and we would always come up with different stuff.”

But in Grissom’s hands, the PRS McCarty was about to change. He wanted an instrument that was designed exactly for how he played the guitar and Smith was going to make him it. When we talk about the success of the signature model, this is where it’s won and lost, in the details, in the physical geography of the instrument. The DGT became something grander than simply a next-gen McCarty – every single detail was gamed out, from the pickups and the search for the “sweet spot” of warmth and clarity, right down to the fret bevels.

“We changed the control layout so the bridge pickup volume knob was closer to my little finger because I worked that constantly,” says Grissom. “We worked on the neck profile quite a bit over several years with quite a few prototypes.”

You can read the full interview with David Grissom and Paul Reed Smith in a the latest issue of Guitarist, available now from Magazine’s direct – subscribe and you will save a heap of money… Which would be useful if you are in the market for a PRS DGT.

Your dream guitar can show up in your life in a myriad of ways, and for virtuoso Sophie Burrell, an early presence on social media – coupled with a Facebook group of PRS aficionados – led her to hers: a 2014 PRS Custom 24 Wood Library, which has since become her go-to instrument.

“The back story as to how I acquired this guitar is actually very special and quite unique,” Burrell tells Guitar World.

“I've been playing guitar for a very long time, since I was like nine years old, and I started creating content when I was about 14. I was a member of this group on Facebook called PRS Guitar Owners Worldwide, and I used to post little videos of me playing in there.”

Turns out, someone had spotted her videos and instantly saw her potential. “I was just playing an SE and [he] said, ‘I want to support you. You're great. I think you deserve to be playing on a USA model, not just an SE.’”

The guitarist-turned-patron, Al, gave her the choice of several models from his own collection before ultimately deciding to give her the very guitar she still owns today.

“I was like, ‘Whatever you want, I'll take it. It sounds good.’ I could not believe my eyes when it actually showed up. I'm endlessly grateful to Al, who gifted this guitar to me, and I believe I would not be the player I am today without that.”

Burrell notes that the PRS now feels like an “extension” of her – as soon as she picked it up for the first time, she “immediately clicked with it.

“I come up with my best ideas on this guitar,” she explains. “At this point, it kind of feels like it's part of my soul.”

“If [and] when I get a signature guitar, it would be this [one] in a different color.”

Controversially – or perhaps not so controversially – Burrell refuses to name her guitars. “I've never done that, and I probably never will. I'm just not much of a name-your-guitars type of person,” she admits.

“I name motorbikes, but not guitars.”

Simon McBride might have just sparked another footnote in the never-ending tone debate by sharing a rather novel hot take that you might not have heard before.

As Deep Purple prepares to release their second studio album with McBride, the guitarist has been fielding gear questions and has issued a red-hot take on the downside of truss rods.

McBride is the successor to Steve Morse’s decades-long tenure in the band and has brought a traditional blues approach back to their core, akin to Ritchie Blackmore’s legacy. As ever, everything goes through his trusted PRS 408 electric guitar.

“I played everything on this record with a prototype from PRS,” McBride tells Guitar World ahead of SPLAT!’s release on July 3.

“The idea is that there’s no truss rod,” he continues. “It goes back to the early days when guitars had no truss rods because I’m a firm believer that if you put a truss rod in a guitar, it sucks the tone and sustain out of it.”

Truss rods, typically made of metal or carbon fiber, run down the length of the neck of a guitar beneath the fretboard and work to reinforce the neck and counter the tension generated by the strings.

They are a necessary feature to prevent and remedy any nasty neck warps. For most, they’re a vital ingredient in guitar building. McBride disagrees.

“This guitar is like an animal,” McBride says of his PRS. “It’s hard to control because there’s so much natural sustain, and I don’t do high-output pickups.

“Acoustically, there’s such a difference without the truss rod,” he adds, alluding to the apparent increased sustain and resonance that comes with removing a chunk of metal from the guitar. “[The neck] must be the strongest piece of wood they could find because it doesn’t bend at all.”

Now, we aren’t expecting McBride to kickstart a trend of players yanking their truss rods out of their guitars – that really wouldn’t be advisable – but the thought that the truss rod actually harms a guitar’s sustain is certainly an interesting take.

Read McBride's full interview in the new issue of Guitarist, which includes a feature on the recent discovery of Eric Clapton's long-lost Summerburst. Pick up a copy over at Magazines Direct.

PRS is teaming up with Jon Jourdan – the touring guitarist of Wolfgang Van Halen’s Mammoth – on a single-pickup, single-control guitar, modeled after Jourdan’s main touring instrument.

While PRS has launched a few single-pickup models over the years – most notably the LP Junior-style PRS SE One, which developed a cult following – these are much rarer releases for the brand. In fact, Jourdan’s signature is a limited run, as just 200 guitars are up for grabs.

Featuring an all-mahogany guitar with a single PRS Metal pickup in the treble position, Jordan had the volume control moved to the tone pot's traditional location, as he typically plays with the volume wide open. This tweak ensures he won't accidentally hit it when going all out on stage.

When asked why he opted for scaled-back specs, Jourdan says, “At the end of the day, my guitar is a tool. I want it to do exactly what I need it to, so we took out all the ‘extra’ stuff I don’t need. This guitar sounds huge and is incredibly fun to play.

“There’s something about taking out any unnecessary wiring and removing the neck pickup so its magnets aren’t pulling on the strings that makes it feel alive. I can’t imagine anyone playing this guitar having a bad time.”

Other specs include a 22-fret Pattern Regular mahogany neck, ebony fretboard, and PRS adjustable stoptail bridge.

PRS’ quintessential bird inlays have been eliminated – as well as any other inlays, for that matter. However, the guitar does feature green Luminlay side dots so players can easily mark fret positions.

Priced at $4,200 (SE version, please!), there are two attractive finishes to choose from, Gunmetal Metallic and Platinum Metallic – which Mammoth fans can expect to see first-hand at the band’s ongoing The End Tour shows.

Head to PRS Guitars to find out more.

PRS is serving up a signature guitar with a twist by bringing to life the guitar played by an anime character.

Lilisa, of Rock is a Lady’s Modesty, becomes a surprise addition to PRS’s artist roster, joining John Mayer, Herman Li, and Ed Sheeran with a real-life electric guitar that recreates the pink six-string she wields in the TV show and manga series.

Created as a manga series by Hiroshi Fukuda, Rock is a Lady’s Modesty became a smash TV hit last year, and PRS has capitalized on its popularity by turning fiction into reality.

Consequently, the actual PRS SE Rock Lady is based on both Paul's Guitar and the signature that PRS made for BAND-MAID’s Kanami Tōno in 2024, maintaining the tried-and-tested mahogany body, maple neck, and rosewood fingerboard tonewood trio.

Beyond that, it boasts a Pink Pearl top, black headstock face, natural back, and purple-toned pickup bobbins. The inclusion of PRS’s trademark inlays is the biggest deviation from Lilisa’s guitar.

There’s a promise of “spanky tones and soapbar sounds” from its TCI “S” treble and bass pickups. They’re paired with a three-way toggle switch and dedicated mini-switches to coil-tap the two pickups, for a total of eight pickup combinations.

Elsewhere, its Stoptail bridge features specially curved slots with brass inserts, which are said to ensure optimal string contact and bolster resonance. See too vintage-style tuners and a lily decal on its truss rod cover.

“This project has been one of the most creative, out-of-the-box things we have done in a while,” says PRS COO, Jack Higginbotham. “Developing a guitar with a fictional artist is not something we do every day. It has been a lot of fun, but this is far more than a commemorative display piece – it’s a true player’s guitar, designed for performance and durability.”

Notably, Kanami wrote the TV show’s theme tune and performed it with her BAND-MAID bandmates. They also provided motion capture for the show to make performances look hyper-realistic.

The PRS SE Rock Lady is limited to 690 pieces and is available now for $999.

Check out PRS for more.

In related news, PRS recently dropped a second signature baritone guitar for Ed Sheeran.

John Mayer is one of the greatest Fender Stratocaster players of all time. Ironic really, considering he rarely actually play a Stratocaster. At least, not anymore.

Instead, he plays the Silver Sky, the signature guitar he developed with PRS, after he famously left Fender in 2014 and took his ideas for an elevated S-style to a company that he felt was willing to turn them into a reality.

It was a huge move. Mayer leaving Fender sent shockwaves through the industry that are still being felt today.

Not only did Fender lose one of its biggest endorsees, it also paved the way for the arrival of the Strat’s biggest rival – one that Fender appears to be seeking to remove from the picture after hitting PRS with a cease-and-desist, ordering the brand to halt production of the Silver Sky.

Mayer moving to PRS came as a shock to many, but for the man himself it was anything but. Before he left Fender, he began dreaming up an instrument that would put a new spin on the Strat – something he maintained that Fender wasn’t interested in executing.

“I tried to do something like this with Fender, but I couldn’t create enough enthusiasm within the company for my vision,” Mayer told Guitar World upon the Silver Sky’s release in 2018. “I’m not hurt by that. No- one is obligated to be enthused about an idea of mine.”

“I wanted to go somewhere where they would take my ideas,” he added in an interview with Jeff Ross. “It was like, ‘Hey, let’s freshen up the electric guitar,’ because the electric guitar is still always this vestige of 1950s and ’60s car and surf culture. 60 years later, you’re still putting out these tributes to the station wagon.”

Mayer’s frustrations with the static nature of Fender’s designs and his desires to take things in a new direction were compounded by the departure of Mike Eldred, the Custom Shop director with whom Mayer had established a strong working relationship.

His absence meant Mayer no longer had a direct contact to go to when he wanted to experiment with his guitars. That stifled Mayer’s ambitions.

“When Mike Eldred left Fender, that was the beginning of the end of that era where artists really had people to talk to at that company,” he told Ross. “One day you’ll call up and you’ll go, ‘Can I get one that’s got a rosewood neck?’

“They’ll go, ‘It says here you already got two this year, and our contract was for two.’ [Whereas] Mike would send me a thing and then we would do something together off of that.”

There were no hard feelings with Fender, but Mayer needed to find a new collaborator who could match his energy. Enter Paul Reed Smith.

At PRS, Mayer found the freedom to go beyond the usual ‘artist signature guitar’ model, working with Smith to develop something grander in its design.

“I wasn’t looking to create a signature model,” he explained to Guitar World. “I want to go a step deeper into the genetic code of things. I’m looking to create a series of instruments that represent my point of view – and have a little desk next to Paul where I can bring some of my ideas to life that, over the years, will tell a story.”

Having that little desk next to Paul’s was key to the whole project. Working closely with the man who started the company meant Mayer could dive headfirst into developing this instrument. It was a far cry from the situation he’d encountered at Fender.

“I'm not talking shit. It's just musical chairs,” Mayer expanded in an Instagram livestream explaining his move. “[At PRS] I get to call the guy whose name is on the guitar, and we get to build stuff together.”

Two years after starting the project, Mayer unveiled the Silver Sky, inspired partly by his 1963 and 1964 Strats. The internet was quick to ridicule the design, dismissing it as an expensive Stratocaster knock-off and slating it for a lack of originality.

But public opinion U-turned once guitarists got their hands on them. That changing tide was emphasized following the launch of the SE Silver Sky, which brought the once-controversial model to the masses at a more affordable price point.

“I knew the Silver Sky would take years to take its place in the world,” Mayer said to Guitar World in 2025, after we named the Silver Sky one of the most important pieces of gear of the 21st century. “And I say this cautiously, but it feels like it’s become pretty widely accepted.”

The sales figures would certainly back up Mayer’s observation. In its end-of-year round-ups, Reverb has continually identified the SE Silver Sky as one of the best-selling guitars of the past three or four years. Indeed, it topped the list in 2022 and 2023, and gave Fender Strats a run for their money in the following years.

Over time, it’s been updated with new finishes, offered in rosewood and maple fretboard configurations, and converted for southpaws. It’s no exaggeration to say it routinely rivals Fender for the best mainstream S-style on the market.

Indeed, there was no getting away from the Stratocaster comparisons – but Mayer wasn’t exactly running from them.

“If you ask someone to draw a guitar, nine out of 10 people are going to draw a Stratocaster,” he told Guitar World back in 2018 by way of explanation. “So, when it came time to work with Paul, it was like, I just thought it would be an easier path to get people to understand that this is a Strat-based body.

“This guitar is based off of the Strat,” he added in the Instagram livestream. “I'm admitting that. I have played a Strat for such a long time in my career that it didn’t make sense to me personally to look down and see a different shape.”

The S-style design, then, was a no-brainer, but it wasn’t all that simple. There are tweaks to the body shape. There’s a three-a-side headstock. Some of the finer details, such as the hardware, have been refined. There are bird inlays.

But overall, it is Mayer’s take on an idealized, elevated S-style – the very thing he was trying to achieve with Fender. Yet he wasn’t concerned with the Silver Sky out-Strat-ing the company.

“I want you to understand that I embrace the Fender thing,” Mayer said in that livestream. “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.”

Of course, that co-existence has come under strain recently, and with Fender serving PRS a cease-and-desist letter in May 2026, it seems Mayer’s sentiments aren’t shared by the Big F’s legal team (though they may well be taking note of them).

The butterfly effect of Mayer’s move is significant. If Eldred had stayed at Fender, and the company had accepted Mayer’s brief to build an updated Strat, would the Silver Sky have ever been made?

By extension, if such a monumentally successful S-type hadn’t emerged in the wake of the fallout, would Fender feel the need to assert its ownership of the Strat design so zealously?

It’s impossible to say. But whatever the legal outcome, the Silver Sky will continue to reshape the guitar market – and the modern-day history of the electric guitar itself.

What is it?

I can’t imagine many people had an Ed Sheeran baritone guitar on their bingo cards after he hooked up with PRS back in 2019, but that’s exactly what we’re looking at today with the PRS SE Ed Sheeran Hollowbody I Piezo Baritone. It’s Ed’s first signature electric guitar ever, never mind his first with PRS, and it has certainly taken the guitar community by surprise.

If you’re a racing fan, you may have spied Ed using a Rosso Corsa baritone in the video for his song ‘Drive’, a guitar which he had custom-built specifically for that song by PRS. It’s a pretty different instrument in terms of spec, but the interest in the guitar from that video is what led to the development of the SE model we see today.

The SE Ed Sheeran baritone features a hollow body design with a flat back composed of a maple top and a flame maple veneer, and a mahogany back and sides. It features a center block, and the top is a shallow violin carve with a cream binding, accompanied by dual f-holes that don’t feature the binding of the popular Hollowbody II models.

The neck is maple, shaped to the usual PRS Wide Fat profile. It’s got a rosewood fretboard with a 10-inch radius, cream binding that matches the body, and the classic PRS Bird inlays. It’s a set neck with a 27.7-inch scale length to ensure it can handle the lower tunings of a baritone.

The tuners are PRS-designed and feature ‘winged’ buttons that are wider than the usual ovals I’ve come across on PRS guitars. The bridge is a PRS adjustable stoptail with a PRS/LR Baggs piezo under the saddle, and the pickups come in the form of two 85/15 “S” humbuckers.

Separate volume controls for the piezo and magnetic pickups are combined with a master tone control and a 3-way toggle switch selector. There are two output jacks that offer a mix of piezo and magnetic pickups or magnetic pickups only.

Specs

• Launch price: $1,499 | £1,499 | €1,799
• Made: Indonesia
• Type: Six-string hollow body baritone guitar
• Body: Maple top with flame maple veneer, mahogany back
• Neck: Maple set neck / Wide Fat profile
• Fingerboard: Rosewood
• Scale length: 27.7", 703mm
• Nut/width: PRS synthetic / 43mm
• Frets: 22, PRS standard fret wire
• Hardware: PRS-designed tuners, PRS adjustable stop tail piezo bridge
• String spacing at bridge: 52mm
• Electrics: 2x 85/15 “S” humbuckers, magnetic volume, piezo volume, tone control & 3-way toggle pickup switch
• Weight: 6.6 lbs / 3 kg
• Left-handed options: N/A
• Finishes: Orange Tiger Smokeburst (as reviewed), Kaleidoscope, Pink Ombre
• Case: PRS gig bag
• Contact: PRS

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★½

As with every PRS SE guitar I’ve come across over the past few years, the build quality here is close to faultless. A close inspection reveals a very small spec of black in the binding on the bass side, where the neck meets the body, and on the treble side at the same point, there’s what looks like some paint bleeding over onto the binding. That aside, I can find nothing out of place in terms of the aesthetic.

It’s got a decent heft to it, even with the hollow body construction, coming in at 3kg on my scales. It all adds to the feeling of solidity, though. On the lower cutaway, there’s some sculpting to help you get at the upper frets more easily, while on the reverse of the guitar, a very slight belly cut aids the comfort factor. The knobs are well applied, and the toggle switch moves with a firm and satisfying click through its three positions.

Looking at the output jack, unusually, there are two outputs, with one marked ‘mix/piezo’ and the other marked ‘mag’. Both are marked so that when you look at them from the playing position, the writing is the right way up, which is a nice touch. There’s a compartment that houses a 9V battery which powers the preamp of the piezo system, although this is only engaged when plugged into the ‘mix/piezo’ jack, so you can use it as an entirely passive instrument with the other output jack.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★½

Sitting down to play the Ed Sheeran Hollowbody baritone on the sofa, the neck feels pretty hefty compared to the standard-scale guitar I’ve been playing before it. It’s not quite a baseball bat, but it’s not far off either, feeling very full in my hand as I strum some open chords. It’s certainly not giving me the ‘shredders’ part of the marketing material around this guitar as I try some legato and three-note-per-string runs.

Trying out some lead work, I can get around pretty quickly, but it’s not quite slinky enough for proper shred stuff. Jumbo frets might have helped here, allowing me to get around the fretboard a bit quicker, but as it is out of the box, I’d be hesitant to call this a shred guitar. Getting my ruler out to quantify that feeling, the action measures around 2mm, so there’s definitely potential for improvement here in that regard.

Bending isn’t as hard as on some of the baritones I’ve played. It’s pretty easy to get a full tone out of it with a supporting finger or two, and I don’t feel as though I have to really fight to eke those out. It does take a bit of adjustment to nail that 22nd fret bend, as my hand naturally hits the non-sculpted part of the cutaway. A little tilt as I reach for that fret solves this, however, and it doesn’t take me long to start accurately hitting it on a consistent basis.

Changing the tuning to drop A and pulling out some ‘Ashes of the Wake’-era Lamb of God riffs, it’s very satisfying indeed to play. The thicker neck profile makes for a nice anchor when alternate picking and digging in with palm muted riffs, and it’s super satisfying to chug along with. Although the scale is comparatively long compared to a normal PRS, it doesn’t feel ginormous, offering a nice balance between length and string tension with the 14-68 gauge strings that come on it from the factory.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

Keen to try the piezo pickup, I plug it straight into a Fender 64 Princeton reissue to see what the clean tones are like. Starting with just the piezo pickup engaged, it sounds great on the treble end of the fretboard, with very little of that ‘plink’ you might expect from this kind of pickup. The low stuff isn’t quite as nice though. It feels as though the piezo struggles to pick up the low string, which results in it getting drowned out when I pick some arpeggiated open chords.

Bringing in the magnetic pickup adds some more of the low end back in, giving it a fuller sound overall. When I switch to the neck humbucker with the piezo and both volume knobs on full, it’s an absolutely delightful tone blend of high-end from the piezo and warm tones from the neck humbucker, that leave me picking arpeggios for a long time. With some spring reverb and a gentle touch of tremolo from the amp, it’s clean tone heaven.

The tone control only affects the magnetic pickups, and rolling this off when combining with the piezo adds huge versatility to the guitar. Switching back to just the neck humbucker makes it feel almost dull in comparison, but that’s also partially because adding the piezo in also increases the overall volume of the guitar, and for the human ear, louder equals better.

Sticking my Joyo Klon clone in front of the amp and dialing up the volume, I find a very smooth lead tone from the humbuckers. Even with some drive applied to chords, they ring out very clearly, but that changes when I add in the piezo. Here, it feels a bit overwhelming, with the individual strings getting lost thanks to the extra high-end the piezo adds. It also makes itself a bit too present on lead work, with that piezo pluck enhanced by the addition of overdrive in the signal chain.

Turning up the gain on the amp and on my overdrive pedal, slow, doomy power chords sound really powerful, and here adding in the piezo gives them some more clank that really suits that particular type of sound. Excited to see if this thing can djent, in lieu of an actual high-gain, metal amp, I switch to my audio interface and Nolly’s Neural DSP plugin.

With the 5150 model selected and the bridge humbucker engaged, there’s a definite metal rhythm tone available here. The low tuning naturally helps some, but the mid-gain of the pickups means it stays pretty articulate. I have to mess with the settings a bit to get it as tight as I’d like, but it’s more than usable for tracking chugs. It works great for leads, too, maintaining that smooth sound and feel when I add some reverb and delay.

Dropping the low string all the way down to an octave below ‘E’ (like a standard bass), it stays surprisingly stable for some djent tones. With the humbuckers on their own, there just isn’t the definition for this type of riffing, though.

Adding the piezo in brings back some clarity, with that clankiness that marks the sound of a lot of down-tuned modern metal. While it can handle these tones, I don’t think it’s all that usable, as it doesn’t have the natural compression of a set of active pickups, making it very difficult to control any extraneous noise with a high-gain amp.

Verdict

I can see the PRS SE Ed Sheeran baritone finding fans across different genres, provided you can get past the name on the headstock. If you’re willing to look beyond your prejudices, you’ll find a very well-made guitar with a playable neck that’s capable of a wide variety of different tones.

While the marketing speak of singer-songwriter to metal head holds true to some degree, it’s not quite capable of proper djent tones and super shreddy stuff, thanks to the pickups and the neck profile. That said, for pretty much any style, you’ll find a sound here, and perhaps some truly unique ones once you start blending in that piezo pickup.

Guitar World verdict: It might be the guitar that no one expected, but the PRS SE Ed Sheeran Hollowbody I Piezo Baritone is a very capable machine indeed. From the typical quality PRS build to the added versatility of the piezo bridge, it’s a guitar that can indeed be a singer-songwriter’s tool, or a guitar for chugging metal. It may stop just short of being a shred machine or a true tool for djent riffing, but it still allows you to cover a lot of ground.

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Hands-on videos

John Nathan Cordy

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PRS has been confirmed as one of the firms that has received a cease-and-desist letter from Fender in its bid to enforce legal protection for the Stratocaster.

After it was revealed that Fender had launched a new legal campaign to protect the Strat design off the back of a default copyright ruling in Germany, speculation began to emerge over the identities of those affected.

Until now, LsL Instruments was the first and only company to go on record to confirm it had received such a letter, which called for the company to halt production of its S-style electric guitar, the Saticoy.

However, many commenters, including Phillip McKnight, hinted that multiple US builders had been issued a cease-and-desist letter, prompting widespread rumors concerning the specific models that might be in Fender’s crosshairs.

The PRS Silver Sky – John Mayer’s hugely popular, best-selling signature guitar, which was designed after the Continuum mastermind left Fender – was high up on the speculated list.

Now, it’s been confirmed via the Wall Street Journal that PRS has indeed received a letter from Fender.

In its own article, the WSJ wrote, “PRS Guitars, a company endorsed by the likes of John Mayer and Carlos Santana, confirmed that it is among the companies that received a letter. The company said it disagrees with Fender’s assessment and declined to comment further.”

In a statement issued to Guitar World before the news went public, PRS said of Fender’s legal campaign, “We are aware and investigating. No further comment at this time.”

The involvement of PRS and the targeting of the Silver Sky frames the entire conversation in a new light, and is a huge development in the S-style legal dispute.

In Fender’s response to the widespread backlash over its cease-and-desist strategy, the company strayed away from emphasizing the importance of the specific Strat body shape, stressing it wasn’t concerned with all double-cutaway/two-horned guitars and was instead going after close copies of the Stratocaster design.

However, both Fender and its attorney Bird & Bird failed to provide any characteristics of what they constitute to be a defining feature of the broader Stratocaster “design”, giving way to theories that aesthetic appointments – including the scratchplate shape and control layout – could be a greater consideration.

It now seems likely that this is the approach Fender is taking. The PRS Silver Sky has a different body shape to the Fender Stratocaster, with more refined contours and different proportions, including a scoop on the lower cutaway and longer upper horn.

Other differences included a slightly sloped-shouldered neck joint, and a sharper upper cutaway angle. Since Fender has stated it wouldn’t be going after all double-cutaway guitars, one would assume the proportions of the Silver Sky would render it safe.

As such, Fender is clearly banking on the similarities that can be drawn elsewhere, such as the pickguard – which mirrors the Strat’s a bit more closely – and other aesthetic considerations that gave way to the outpouring of Stratocaster comparisons when it was first released.

This has now become the highest profile case of the entire dispute, and could well be one of the most contested. Though many would no doubt concede the obvious similarities between the Silver Sky and Stratocaster, few would call it a ‘direct clone’ – the type of model Fender is supposedly going after.

To make matters more interesting, the Silver Sky has become a key player in the S-style market, wrestling over a huge portion of players into its ranks over the past few years. It is the Stratocaster’s closest competitor, the SE variant a direct rival to the Player range, the US model a rival to Fender’s more premium American-made Strats.

According to Reverb stats, the Silver Sky outsold the Strat in 2022 and 2023, and has consistently been among the best-selling guitars for the past three years.

Whatever the case, PRS has stated that it “disagrees with Fender’s assessment”, implying it fully intends to fight Fender and defend the Silver Sky.

It could very well define the entire legal dispute – and the outcome of Fender’s cease-and-desist strategy could rest on this case. We’ll bring you developments as they come in.

What is it?

PRS Guitars might have just celebrated its 40th anniversary, but you still can’t help but smile when you open one of the company’s now-moulded guitar cases.

One of the true classic designs of the modern era, the PRS is defined by its elegant double-cutaway outline, its carved and vividly curly maple top and, typically, those bird inlays that pepper the fingerboard.

This writer remembers falling for its charms in the late ’80s at a far-from-glorious period for the electric guitar. It seemed like a reminder of a bygone time, a beautifully made musical instrument, not just a garish plank to support a Floyd Rose and a hot humbucker.

Just over four decades on, little has changed outwardly, although – of course – every detail has evolved to improve function, playability and, most importantly, sound.

Plug in an early mid-’80s PRS Custom and compare it with one that’s rolled off the production line in 2026 and you’ll see, hear and feel a colossal difference. Battling fad, fashion and economic upheavals over these past decades, PRS has stuck to its guns: ‘good’ is not good enough, and there’s always a better way to eke out another micro-percentage of improvement to better serve the musician.

David Grissom is one such musician who knows that better than most. A PRS player since the late ’80s, David was instrumental in the development of the crucial, more vintage-aimed McCarty Model, launched in 1994, which subtly changed the original PRS flavour and recipe.

His own signature model (with its working title of ‘McCarty II’) launched in 2007, and the DGT (as in ‘David Grissom Tremolo’) has been in production ever since – a real player’s PRS that has spawned an all-mahogany Standard version and (after a 200-piece limited edition announced in late 2024) this new full-production DGT Semi-Hollow.

In its Charcoal gloss nitro finish – one of seven offered including a Gold-Top – our new single f-hole model is priced the same as the solidbody DGT. Either DGT is the lowest-ticket maple-topped Core model in the 2026 line-up if you go for the less opulent-looking moon inlays, while a bird-inlaid version adds $/£320 to the full retail price.

Note that the DGT is the only Core PRS model still offered with moon inlays, which date back to the very first mid-’80s guitars. The third option comes with bird inlays, a 10-Top maple cap and hybrid (gold and nickel) hardware and will cost you a cool $/£5,540.

Specs

• PRICE: From $/£4,420 (inc case)
• ORIGIN: USA
• TYPE: Double-cutaway, carved-top solidbody electric
• BODY: 1-piece mahogany with figured maple top
• NECK: 1-piece mahogany, DGT profile, glued-in 
• SCALE LENGTH: 635mm (25”)
• NUT/WIDTH: Brass-infused, friction-reducing material/42.4mm
• FINGERBOARD: Rosewood, moon inlays, 254mm (10”) radius
• FRETS: 22, jumbo
• HARDWARE: PRS Gen II vibrato, PRS Phase III locking tuners (w/brass posts and faux bone buttons)
• STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 52.5mm 
• ELECTRICS: PRS DGT Treble and Bass covered humbuckers, 3-way toggle pickup selector switch, individual volume controls and master tone (with coil-split pull-switch)
• WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3.12/6.86
• OPTIONS: The DGT starts at $/£4,420 w/ moon inlays. With bird inlays it’s $/£4,740; with bird inlays plus 10 Top/hybrid hardware it’s $/£5,540
• RANGE OPTIONS: The other semi-hollow 2026 Core model is the Special Semi-Hollow ($/£5,060)
• LEFT-HANDERS: No
• FINISHES: Charcoal (as reviewed), Dark Cherry Sunburst, Tiger Eye, Faded Blue Jean, McCarty Sunburst and McCarty Tobacco Sunburst 
• CONTACT: PRS Guitars

Build quality, usability and sounds

The DGT builds on the McCarty recipe that was noticeably different from the Custom on its launch in 1994. Always a 635mm (25-inch) 22-fret (not 24) guitar, its primary difference was a slightly thicker mahogany back, covered humbuckers (a first for PRS), and a toggle-switch pickup selector with master volume and tone (that later added a pull-switch coil-split for both pickups). Originally, the McCarty featured the then-new PRS Stoptail bridge, although a vibrato option followed.

David Grissom custom-ordered his first PRS in the style of what was to become the McCarty in around 1991, and his signature model was the result of playing his McCartys for some 15 years. It came with his own neck shape, “somewhere in between a Wide-Fat and an old Regular shape,” said David at the time. “We compared my ’93 McCarty and my ’87 Standard and shot for something in between those, as they were both my favourite ‘feeling’ guitars.”

Obviously, the DGT came with the PRS vibrato, while another difference remains the control setup: a volume for each pickup (the control closest is for the bridge) and a master tone with a pull-switch to engage coil-splits for both pickups simultaneously. Grissom’s model also introduced the partial coil-splits that have subsequently been used on many PRS guitars.

What else? Oh yes, bigger ‘jumbo’ frets based on the Dunlop 6100 gauge that Grissom preferred, and 0.011-gauge strings (with a plain third string, of course). Then, the stuff of legend, a signature DGT pickup-set originally voiced from listening to 40-plus prototypes – with the help of tech Ed Reynolds’ pickup-swapping test guitar.

That initial recipe is the basis of the current DGT, both solid and semi. Of course, plenty of tweaks have occurred since 2007, not least the full nitro-gloss finish – the original DGT introduced nitro to the PRS guitar but only the top coat over a thin acrylic basecoat.

Another change is that both 2026-spec models stick with the original-style Gen II vibrato (not the latest III version) that was briefly offered on the DGT, according to PRS specs, certainly from 2022. Also, instead of the previous bone nut, here we have the Core-standard brass-infused low-friction type.

As ever, the DGT doesn’t feature fingerboard binding like the current McCarty, or a headstock facing like most Core models. The DGT pickups and the control circuit have evolved, too (see Under The Hood, right).

As to the hollow bits of our subject here, it’s primarily the bass side that’s hollowed and behind the bridge, too; both the mahogany back and some of the underside of the maple top (around the f-hole area) are machined away. Like the solidbody, the thickness is 52mm in the centre of the body (the Custom is 49mm), just over 30mm at the rim, and you can expect a slightly lighter weight – ours was a nicely trim 3.12kg (6.86lb).

It’s rare to find a USA solidbody PRS that’s very much above 3.6kg (8lb), Singlecuts excepted; closer to 3.4kg (7.5lb) is a rough average in our experience.

The lighter weight here is very engaging from the off. PRS’s specs tell us that the DGT neck is slightly narrower at the nut than the Pattern profile, but the same as the Pattern Regular (42.06mm); ours is fractionally wider. It’s fractionally narrower than the others at the top fret, too (56.4mm), which is bang on what we measure.

Depth-wise, it feels pretty fulsome with the same 1st-fret depth as the Pattern and Pattern Regular (21.4mm), and by the 12th it’s the same as the Pattern (24.2mm); again, ours is fractionally deeper.

Comparing the neck with an older Pattern profile, well, they’re very close, although there does seem to be a little less shoulder in upper positions as it’s subtly more V’d.

But the most noticeable differences are the bigger and taller frets (measured at 2.74mm wide by 1.4mm high) and the bigger 0.011 gauge strings. There’s plenty of fight if you’re used to a lighter gauge, although David won’t hunt you down if you drop to PRS’s standard 10s.

Exactly what the semi-hollow construction brings to the table, sound-wise, is not easy to define. David believes it “has a bit warmer top-end, a little less bottom than the solidbody, and I can get more controlled feedback” – and he should know.

The guitar does have a very vibrant ring unplugged, though with quite defined highs, a lively ringing response and a little more volume than any of our solidbody references. It feels and sounds very alive.

Plugging into a clean amp, we were in coil-split mode and the voice we hear is rather like that unplugged character. Kick in a delay and it’s classic-era The Edge, but these splits are very good; musical with character and depth. Having been a little sidetracked, we headed back to humbucker mode and with some crunchy, rootsy light gain we’re right into that Grissom-style voicing and there’s plenty to enjoy.

Even without touching the controls, bridge to neck is really balanced with a nice bite to the former and a big plummy depth to the latter. It doesn’t sound over-hot, though, but there is a fullness to the voice that frankly makes our reference Patent Applied For-style solidbodies sound a little bright and thin.

Pulling back the volumes a little and the subtlety and versatility begins to come through, slightly smoothing the high-end but not losing any clarity, and sitting nicely for classic rockier rhythm duties.

In the mixed-pickup position, those controls seem almost interactive and take on a faster taper; a slight adjustment of either volume yields another nuance. It’s the way these controls work, not least with the coil-splits, that is the key to this guitar.

With little more than a couple of different, light drive pedals, the guitar just delivers, nodding to a good Les Paul but with seemingly more definition. In this sort of environment, the single-coil voices give a really valid texture: lighter with more present high-end that cleans for more strummy and arpeggiated rhythms, particularly with a slight volume reduction. Jangle? Oh yes.

In terms of the sounds we conjure and the playability, it’s really so responsive. Needless to say, this guitar is extremely stable and in tune, too, with or without the vibrato in play. It’s stellar craft but with a tremendous lived-in and vintage-y feel, and it’s very, very hard to put down. We don’t want to stop playing.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★★

We all know if you put in the hours you’ll become a better player. David Grissom has certainly done that, but those countless hours have really informed this guitar.

He’d already been a PRS player for more than 15 years before his signature model launched in 2007, and since that time he and PRS have continued to tweak and improve a guitar that – nearly 20 years ago – was already exceptional.

The DGT was always pitched as the workingman’s PRS, a more vintage-y, rootsy vision, and this semi-hollow version amplifies that reputation. It’s lighter in weight, ridiculously alive in our hands, does full-throttle with ease or, conversely, works effortlessly in cleaner environments where those coil-splits provide really usable single-coil textures to our ears.

Guitar World verdict: It certainly nods to the classics, the benchmark designs of our industry. And yet, especially in this semi-hollow guise, it manages to add another level that seems to enhance lower-volume cleaner styles or, by contrast, screaming musical feedback at stage volumes as you lean into your amp. No guitar does everything, but this comes dangerously close.

Hands-on videos

Guitarist

PRS Guitars

• “There’s more ‘Fender’ to Fiore and more ‘Gibson’ to the SE DGT… Inspiring guitars from inspiring players”: PRS Fiore HH and SE DGT Standard review
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Hello, and welcome to Guitar World’s weekly gear round-up, your one-stop-shop for keeping up to date with what’s been happening in the big wide world of guitar gear over the past seven days.

From new electric guitars to amp modeler updates, the guitar industry is never short of fresh releases, and it can sometimes be hard to stay in the loop with every new launch.

To make things a little easier, we’ve put together an essential must-read guide that will cover the major releases, the boutique drops, and everything in between.

Vote for your favorite new release in the poll below...

Jackson Misha Mansoor Pro Plus Series Juggernaut ET8

The Jackson Misha Mansoor signature guitars are coming in thick and fast. We had some new-look Juggernauts late last year. We had that Surfcaster a few months ago. Now, we have another long-awaited Mansoor model – the Juggernaut ET8.

This one has been a long time coming. Not only is it an eight-string, it’s a hardtail eight-string with an EverTune bridge. It is the first time this combo has been used on a Jackson guitar, and it’s one fans have been asking for for quite some time. It’s been worth the wait.

Ernie Ball Music Man John Petrucci Majesty Premium Select

Ernie Ball Music Man and John Petrucci have rekindled their ever-productive partnership for another addition to the hugely popular Majesty line: the Premium Select.

Premium by name, premium by nature, this new iteration has been shaped by decades of Petrucci’s playing expertise, leveraging the Dream Theater virtuoso’s preferred composition.

In other words, that means there’s a mahogany neck-through-body design with alder wings, as well as a thick maple top, a 24-fret ebony fingerboard with stainless steel frets and signature DiMarzio Rainmaker and Dreamcatcher pickups.

It’s available in six-, seven- and eight-string iterations, and lands in five otherworldly colorways. My favorite has to be Ka’anapali Dream.

Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Bass Mig Muff Pi 2

We’re starting to lose track of all the Big Muff pedals that have been flying online over the past few months – we’ve had the Big Muff 2, Big Muff 2 Pi, Bass Big Muff Pi 2 – and now we have another to add to that list: the Deluxe Bass Big Muff Pi 2.

Honestly, you can never have too many Big Muffs, and this one looks to be a great option for bassists. We called the Pi version the “best Big Muff there’s ever been for bass”. This could very well take that mantle.

Gretsch Jim Dandy Vintage White

Who doesn’t love a Jim Dandy? They are, by and large, Gretsch’s most beloved acoustic guitar. That short-scale parlor size is a dream to play, they sound awesome, they look killer, you can travel with them… there’s nothing not to like about it.

And Gretsch has just given us another reason to love the Jim Dandy with a new limited edition Vintage White model. Sure, it ain't quite up there with the sunburst finish in my mind, but it's very sleek nonetheless. The sunburst model gives campfire vibes. This is giving evening dinner sing-song.

Ibanez x Citizen Tsuno Chrono Custom Tube Screamer watch

Okay, not a piece of guitar gear strictly speaking, but we simply can’t ignore it: say hello to the Citizen x Ibanez Tube Screamer watch. Yes, that is a thing now.

It certainly caters to a specific clientele, and it’s quite subtle – it’s a darker shade of green used here – but we love it. No notes.

Donner HUSH X LIVE

Donner has expanded its HUSH series of silent guitars with the HUSH X LIVE and HUSH X LIVE PRO guitars – both of which feature an innovative new design that is characteristic of Donner’s quest to explore new avenues of guitar building.

The feature in question is a detachable speaker, which can be attached to the bottom of the HUSH X’s exo-skeleton frame. Pretty handy for a silent guitar, when you want it to be, ya know, not silent.

It’s not just a speaker, though. With the detachable module, it gives you access to amps, effects and Bluetooth connectivity for playing to backing tracks. Playability-wise, it also has a new neck profile, improved pickups and elevated amp models, all of which were refined with the help of Donner’s Creative Director, Miyavi.

Ibanez AZ Premium, Standard, Iron Label

The Ibanez AZ range has six new models to shout about, with the firm adding guitars to its Standard, Premium and Iron Label collections. Expect plenty of sweet colorways, some premium appointments, and a variety of hardware and pickup configurations.

Notably, the Iron Label catalog get its first hardtail guitar, the Premium line has a seven-string, and the Standard range gets two new finishes.

And, I'd be remiss not to say: S-styles? In this climate? Does Ibanez know what's going on over at Fender HQ? It's been a helluva week for the S-style market. The company probably couldn't believe its timing. Or maybe it could...

PRS Ed Sheeran SE Hollowbody I Piezo Baritone

Ed Sheeran is becoming an unlikely guitar hero and ambassador for PRS, with the loop-loving, chart-smashing singer-guitarist releasing yet more signature baritone guitars, designed in partnership with the Maryland brand.

Sheeran got his flagship SE Hollowbody I Piezo Baritone at NAMM this year, which was released as part of a limited run. This one is far more accessible, and comes in a smattering of eye-popping colorways – including Pink Ombre, Orange Tiger Smokeburst and Kaleidoscope.

Epiphone x Lee Seung Yoon LSY-200 Studio EC

Epiphone welcomed Lee Seung Yoon to its ranks this week, making the superstar singer-songwriter its first Korean signature artist.

The pair celebrated their new partnership in style with a signature guitar – the very nice LSY-200 Studio EC, based on the foundation of the J-200 Studio EC Studio Jumbo cutaway model.

Guitar Center Mitchell Silver Creek Folk Instruments

No, this isn’t the new Guitar Center in-house guitar brand that we’re all patiently waiting for. It is, instead, a collection of folk instruments from GC’s existing Mitchell brand. There’s a banjo, a mandolin, and a resonator. They’re all pretty affordable too – the resonator starts from $349.

Chaos Audio AI FX Builder

You can’t get away from AI in the gear world, and artificially intelligent effects creation is certainly a popular thing at the moment. We’ve seen Polyend put this tech in a pedal. Positive Grid has added it to a plugin. Now, Chaos Audio – the brains behind the Stratus pedal – has unveiled its own AI FX Builder.

It acts as you’d expect. Chuck in a prompt, get an effect. Refine it if you like. Use it in your recordings. It’s one of the most palatable and usable forms of AI in the gear world, and this writer had moderate success with the Polyend Endless, so it’s worth a look-in. The key will be whether it can do the AI effects creation better than the competition…

Boss PX-1 Model Pass May 2026 Update

When Boss launched the PX-1, it promised regular updates and improved access to a greater pool of effects. It’s making good on that promise with the May 2026 model pass pack, which adds the PW-2 Power Drive, XT-2 Xtortion and CS-2 Compression Sustainer. There are some nice lost classics in there that will no doubt please Boss aficionados…

Deputies at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) have recovered nearly $60,000 worth of stolen guitars following an interception in Lake Forest, California.

“On Friday night (May 15), someone tried to strike a chord with a burglary involving nearly $60,000 worth of guitars,” reads the statement on the official Lake Forest Police Service Facebook account, “but Deputies quickly changed their tune.”

Officials detail that Deputy Carillo and K9 Billy, with the department’s K9 unit, managed to locate the suspect’s vehicle, a Kia Forte, parked at the gas pumps. The deputies detained the suspect and recovered five high-value guitars from the open trunk before taking the vehicle into custody.

Judging by the price tags still attached to the guitars when they were recovered, the Fender Custom Shop 1952 Telecaster, vintage 1950 Gibson L7-C, PRS Private Stock McCarty 594, single-cut Gibson Les Paul Custom, and Gibson Eric Clapton “Crossroads” Custom Shop ’64 Reissue ES-335 were all stolen from a Guitar Center in Lake Forest.

Due to the commercial nature of the burglary, the unnamed suspect faces severe felony charges under California law, including grand theft and commercial burglary.

“No satisfaction for this suspect,” the statement continues. “Just a failed getaway, busted chords and a setlist that includes felony charges. Deputies hit all the right notes bringing this case to a close.”

A few weeks ago, a separate suspect was arrested in Washington state in connection with a series of high-value guitar thefts at multiple West Coast Guitar Center locations.

PRS Guitars has announced its second baritone guitar for Ed Sheeran, via the SE Ed Sheeran Hollowbody I Piezo Baritone.

The Maryland guitar makers collaborated with the loop pedal whizz on the limited edition 27.7” scale length SE Cosmic Splash earlier this year. While that was limited to just 1,000 pieces, this latest elongated six-string is far more readily available.

Ostensibly, this new guitar is the same as its cosmic predecessor, save for now being offered in “catalog colorways,” including Kaleidoscope, Pink Ombre, and Orange Tiger Smokeburst.

That means its hollow body also features a maple top and a mahogany back, and is complete with a center block for added resonance.

It is also saddled with PRS 85/15 ‘S’ pickups and a PRS/LR Baggs piezo system for plenty of tonal versatility. The pickups can be blended together or operate in isolation.

Meanwhile, PRS’s trademark bird inlays return to the fretboard after the SE Cosmic Splash nodded to Sheeran’s new Stereo series of albums.

“Metal guitarists will absolutely shred on this; jazz guitarists will love this, and it will be able to fit into so many great scenarios,” says Sheeran.

“For all the guitar people out there who look at me as not an electric player, don’t let the person behind the guitar fool you. This is an incredible instrument and will fit in many, many guitar players’ collections.”

After celebrating its 40th anniversary last year, 2026 sees PRS firing the confetti cannons for 25 years of its wallet-friendly SE Series, which includes last year’s platinum-rated SE NF 53.

“The relationships we have with new artists are one of the amazing, energizing, motivational, inspirational things that we get to do as a company,” says COO Jack Higginbotham.

“Developing this guitar with Ed Sheeran is a great example of what these types of relationships are, and how we can collaborate with a world-renowned artist to create something new. Further, it highlights how the SE Series in general is studio and stage ready for even the biggest artists.”

The PRS SE Ed Sheeran Hollowbody I Piezo Baritone is available now, priced $1,499.

For those who find the guitar’s extended scale daunting, a 25” scale model, the SE Hollowbody I Piezo is also available for $1,449.

See PRS Guitars for more.

Pre-relic’d guitars have seen a surge in popularity, but not all signs of wear and tear are welcome. So, when one player’s PRS guitar completely lost its finish, the firm stepped in.

Touring guitarist and YouTuber The Donut Doctor, who has just shy of 100,000 subscribers, is often seen playing his PRS Semi-Hollow II in his videos. However, he was surprised to see his guitar's “extremely blue” Blue Fade finish take the latter half of its name a little too seriously. Over time, the color has been drained from it, leaving a very pale, yet distinctive, look in its place.

“This has been my main guitar for a very long time,” he says in a new video. “I guess I didn't think that it would literally fade!”

Quick to counter potential responses from the guitar community as to whether he left the guitar in direct sunlight (the legendary ‘Red Eye’ Les Paul being an example of what that can do to a finish) he says he's taken “extraordinarily good care” of the guitar. In fact, it’s regularly lived in its case when not being played.

“In 2019, it started showing signs of the color changing,” he reports. “I get it, blue dyes have a tendency not to be as vivid over time,” but there's no denying the finish change has been dramatic. “It's not what I ordered,” he says.

After posting about it online, PRS immediately got in touch, inviting him to send the guitar its way for inspection. After shipping it off to Maryland, the guitar returned refinished, looking as vivid as it ever was just a few months later.

“It looks incredible,” he purrs after opening up the case to see his revived Blue Fade “baby.” PRS, he adds, “did an unreal job. It’s brought it back to life.”

But he also reveals they’ve gone the “extra 500 miles” removing its numerous scratches, and a rather gruesome-sounding gash on its bass-side horn after it fell off a guitar stand in Nashville.

“It’s literally a brand-new guitar, it’s absolutely stunning. It’s like getting old and then all of a sudden, your back problems go away” – just what the doctor ordered.

Guitar World reached out to PRS for comment, and PRS agreed that the finish shouldn’t have faded as much as it did, but reminded players that finishes can’t always stay the same forever.

“Guitars are living, breathing things, and they are prone to changes over time,” says PRS. “Finishes sometimes fade, no matter the manufacturer, due to UV exposure, high temperatures, natural factors of age, and other circumstances.

“We don’t see colors change like this often, but when something like this does come up, we take a close look at the instrument and work directly with the customer to find the right path forward. We’re glad we could help.”

PRS has introduced a range of six limited-edition electric guitars that showcase the latest unorthodox wood choice that the brand is currently championing.

Paul Reed Smith has a solid track record for pushing the boat out when it comes to experimenting with specs, and has in the past championed various appointment changes that have sought to elevate both sound and style.

This is, after all, the man who previously dabbled in chaltecoco – a wood traditionally used for fence posts in Guatemala. From the reinvention of its tuning machines to the development of its Narrowfield pickups, PRS has never rested on its laurels as far as innovation is concerned.

Now, it’s flying the flag for a new wood choice that will be used for a limited run across six of its models, Mangifera Indica – aka mango wood.

Mango wood is rooted in sustainability and traditional instrument woodworking, and has a history in ukulele and percussion instruments. In recent years, it’s become increasingly popular in the guitar, with Faith using it to produce a range of acoustic guitars.

But for electrics, mango wood is a rare sight. For this new run, PRS has elected to use mango tops for both their visual style – which offers a unique figure variety often referred to as ‘bee wing’ – and sustainability as a farmed tree.

As PRS explains, when a mango tree gets old and declines in fruit production, it is then harvested and its wood salvaged. It’s said to be similar to maple, but a bit lighter in weight and less dense.

The result is, in true PRS style, a collection of guitars that look rather stunning indeed. Six variants have been made available across the Core Series: Custom 24, Custom 24-08, Studio, Special Semi-Hollow, McCarty 594 and Paul’s Guitar. Each model is limited to just two colorways and 200 pieces.

It’s causing a bit of a buzz in the PRS factory. Not only is it already one of the firm’s favorite woods to work with, artists are taking note – and it’s already made its way onto a signature guitar.

“The exciting thing for me is to start to witness artists playing it,” says Bryan Ewald, PRS Product Specialist. “Mark Holcomb has adopted the mango wood for his signature model. So Mark will be out there, he's gonna be playing on stage on tour everywhere, and people are gonna be like, ‘What is that?!’”

“Right now we have a lot of these running through the shop,” adds Paul Miles, Director of Manufacturing, “and every day there's usually a crowd around one of them.”

Other specs include ziricote headstock fretboards and headstocks veneers, and assortment of PRS pickups and hardware that would come as standard on the respective models. An array of appropriately eye-catching colorways – from Faded Blue Whale to Cobalt Smokeburst – are available across the range.

Head over to PRS to find out more.

At NAMM 2025, PRS Guitars celebrated its 40th anniversary with a bumper live show that brought a score of its biggest players together, and Mark Lettieri was the impromptu glue that held it all together.

Paul Reed Smith founded the Maryland company in 1985 after unsuccessfully trying to sell his designs to Kramer and Yamaha. Despite Al Di Meola helping with his sales pitches, they all said no, and he decided to go solo.

Since then, John Mayer, Carlos Santana, Mark Tremonti, and Herman Li – amongst a dizzying slew of other virtuosos – have joined its ranks. But when it came to celebrating its ruby anniversary, there were a few teething issues that the Snarky Puppy maestro, Lettieri, was more than willing to solve.

“I got invited to perform with my band, the Mark Lettieri Group, but then we realized that John Mayer needed a rhythm section,” he recalls in a video with PRS. “And so I said, ‘Well, I know John, I'll volunteer my band.’ And so he said, ‘Great. That'll be a lot of fun.’”

Then the floodgates opened, with Lettieri soon realizing that two other esteemed guitarists, Randy Bowland and Philip Sayce, also needed a band for the show. Lettieri volunteered again. And again. But it wasn’t the first time he’d jammed with Mayer, the man behind one of PRS’s best-selling guitars, the Silver Sky.

“My good friend Bob Reynolds [saxophonist] and I were doing a gig at the Blue Whale in Los Angeles,” he explains. “Bob used to be a member of John's touring band. And back then, this was probably 2018 or so, he said, ‘I wonder if John would want to come and sit in.’

“Well, it turns out he was in town and wanted to come play,” he adds. “So, he rolled up with his guitar on his back, his Fender Deluxe in his right hand, plugged in, and we jammed out for the rest of the set. It was great: totally unexpected, but obviously totally musically fulfilling.”

The pair kept in touch, casually talking gear over Instagram, especially when Lettieri switched to playing PRS. So it’s no wonder he was so forthcoming when Mayer needed a band.

“I was kind of excited at the end. We got to do a dual guitar conversation,” the guitarist expands. “We didn't rehearse it, but we kind of fell into it in rehearsal, and we're like, ‘This is cool.’ We probably could have played for quite a bit longer, but there was a schedule.

“So, I went with more of a middle [pickup position] with the neck and the bridge, and John was position two. So, it was a nice little tonal contrast. We’ll have to do it again.”

In related news, Mayer recently reflected on “one of the strangest, most beautiful, serendipitous moments” of his career when he got to record with one of Prince's guitars (and we think we know which one). He also revealed his insecurities about becoming the foil to his guitar hero, the late Bob Weir, in Dead & Company.

Mastermind. Visionary. Trailblazer. Just a taste of the descriptions Opeth leader Mikael Åkerfeldt will see any time he Googles his name. It’s entirely warranted too, when you take into consideration the fearless ambition, ferocious intelligence and majestic flair at the heart of progressive metal landmark albums like Blackwater Park – which celebrates its 25th anniversary and silver certification this month.

With sprawling 10-minute-plus symphonies like The Leper Affinity, The Drapery Falls and its concluding title track, it’s the kind of record stacked with enough mold-shattering detours for most bands to happily make a career out of.

But the Stockholm-based singer-songwriter has no reason to be precious, given that he seemingly sits on a mountain of gold-standard concepts that uncover a common thread between the death metal brutality of Morbid Angel, the heavy prog of King Crimson and the folky brilliance of Nick Drake.

Perhaps what makes these labyrinthine and bewildering overtures even more astonishing is the fact that he made a lot of them up on the spot, having turned up to Studio Fredman in Gothenburg during the summer of 2000 armed with a handful of rough sketches.

“That’s how we did it in those days,” Åkerfeldt coolly shrugs, pulling up a chair next to the piano and acoustic guitars in his living room. “Mainly because I didn’t have any means to record at home. When I was writing Still Life, I would demo riffs on a four-track at [Katatonia founder] Anders Nyström’s house to help remember the ideas.

“Then just before Blackwater Park, I had another friend who had gotten an early version of Cubase, so I’d program some basic drums. I made demos of Harvest, The Drapery Falls, Bleak and the title track; but they were far from finished.”

He says the final recordings ended up sounding “completely different,” with many ideas and sections – and in some cases, entire tracks – casually made up on the spot. If it felt good enough, the band would move on. With no outside feedback until producer Steven Wilson got involved later down the line, they had no way of knowing whether they’d struck gold.

In the end, it worked out for the best, proving Åkerfeldt was right to stick to his guns. “I guess I’m lucky when it comes to the instincts I tend to follow, because more often than not they’re spot-on,” he says.

Is it true you were robbed at knifepoint just before heading into the studio?

We were rehearsing in a rough neighborhood. We didn’t even own amps at this point. Peter and I were getting the subway back early in the morning. This guy came up to us, sat down next to me and put a knife against my groin – down there.

“He was clearly on something and asking for money. He started going through our stuff. We could have tried taking him down, but with a knife to my groin I was petrified. When he got off the subway he went for my guitar, and I shouted, “Fuck, no!” There was a bit of a struggle.

Was it the black PRS CE24 that you ended up using on the album?

It must have been. That was my main guitar around then. Not an instrument you’d want stolen! The weirdest thing was he said he played the accordion and tried to be nice while he was robbing us – as if to say, “I’m a musician, too!”

You loaded almost every track on Blackwater Park with a wealth of ideas. The title song is watertight as far as world-beating extreme metal heaviness goes.

It has some cool riffs! It’s a bit droney, because it sticks to the same dropped D key. It’s quite punishing to play, even more so for the drummer because half the song has double bass drums. I got a bit lazy with the songwriting for the second half. I wish I’d experimented more to make it less predictable.

But lots of people love that track. Some of it’s a bit meat-and-potatoes metal compared to the other tracks, which ebb and flow. I’m proud of the spacey bit in the middle; it came out pretty cool and odd. I remember thinking of songs like Oh Well by Fleetwood Mac when I wrote the acoustic sections.

Speaking of acoustics, you unveiled your new Martin OM series signature acoustic last year.

I’m the first Swedish musician to have a Martin signature. I have number one right here next to me. I used to work in a guitar shop selling Martin guitars, so it was a huge full-circle moment, particularly for the younger me who had nothing going for him!

Fast-forward 30 years, I’m walking through the factory in Nazareth with the CEO asking me if I wanted a signature. I don’t deserve a signature model of anything, to be honest! But I’ve been doing this music for a long time and we have a fanbase that loves the odd type of shit we do, so I can understand why it made sense.

What made you choose the OM series in particular?

I prefer recording with smaller guitars. Jumbos and dreadnoughts can be harder because the bass is boomy. What I love about the orchestral models is that you can just stick a mic in front and nothing needs to be EQ’d. They have this top-mid that cuts through, which is helpful when you have shitloads going on, like in our music.

For that reason, I prefer how they ring. They also sit easier in your lap. I wanted something with a big sound if you’re sat around a campfire, which is the kind of thing I might do. I’m still happy to play larger acoustics at home, though.

You played some pretty legendary guitars at the Martin museum, including the haunted Grandpa 1953 Martin D-18 that belonged to Kurt Cobain.

There were guitars in glass cabinets, and any time I’d ask, “What’s that?” they’d ask me if I wanted to try it, and then hand over one of these priceless guitars. I’d be sat there saying, ‘Oh my God, take it away from me!’

Some of them belonged to important musicians like Kurt Cobain, Johnny Cash or Joan Baez. It was amazing to see all these artifacts. There was a ’40s D-18 that belonged to Hank Williams – It was so light, it felt like a helium balloon. It sounded so good. On the other hand, Kurt Cobain’s guitar didn’t sound good, feel good or look good!

Nirvana aren’t really a band people tend to associate you with.

I love Nirvana! I remember listening to the song Polly a lot because “I think I should get off her first” is a misheard lyric here in Sweden. You get these hardcore fans who say Nevermind was too polished. People can become a bit elitist when bands get big later on, saying stuff like “Bleach is so much better.” Maybe it’s human nature.

But I would say Nevermind is a great record. It’s the same with Metallica and the Black Album. Some older fans said it was shit because of the success that came with it, but I still love that record. The ’90s had some great music.

You covered Would? by Alice In Chains in 2008.

David Isberg, the guy who originally formed Opeth, came to my house in 1991 with three new albums: Nevermind, the Black Album and Facelift by Alice In Chains. We sat down drinking beer while listening to those pivotal records, and I fell in love with what I heard.

Nirvana became huge and influenced a new generation of guitar players. Yes, they were popular – but that doesn’t mean they weren’t great. And to this day, Alice In Chains are one of the groups I cherish the most out of all the bands in the fucking world. That’s why we covered that song.

Have you ever met them?

They had a dressing room next to us at a festival once, so I got talking to Jerry Cantrell and Mike Inez. I’m such a huge fan of their sound. I would say the world still isn’t ready for how good they actually are. Their music is so out there and weird; it’s almost futuristic, in a way.

They are completely on their own. I haven’t heard any other band that can do it like Alice In Chains. When you break their songs down, it leaves you wondering how they came with those vocal lines over those riffs. They’re easily one of my biggest inspirations from the ’90s.

As for prog guitar heroes, we’ve spoken about David Gilmour, Robert Fripp and Andy Latimer in the past. Is there anyone who you feel doesn’t get enough credit?

Jan Akkerman [ex-Focus] is very underrated. If you asked David Gilmour if he knew who Jan was, he’d probably say, “Yeah, – he’s my idol!” A lot of these well-known players were glancing at what Jan was doing back in the ’70s. I know for a fact that Andy Latimer looked up to him, not only as a guitarist but also as a member of Focus.

Jan is quite widdly on his Black Beauty Les Paul. But he’s also a great acoustic player with this right hand technique that resembles a flamenco player. I tried to do that myself and could never get it right!

He also knows when to sit back and play melodic lines nice and slow. He didn’t fight the other players in the band and shared the spotlight with their keyboard player Thijs Van Leer, who is another genius. Focus deserve more credit in general, I would say.

• Opeth’s Blackwater Park 25th anniversary reissue is out now via Music For Nations.

What is it?

Texas bluesman and session legend par excellence David Grissom has a firm and long-standing bond with PRS. Legend has it that company founder Paul Reed Smith attended a gig where David was whipping up a storm and soon snagged him as a tone-advisor for the brand as well as a signature artist.

And, after the completion of his signature guitar in 2007, David set about creating an amplifier in conjunction with PRS head designer, Doug Sewell, tuned to the guitarist’s exacting tastes.

Following David’s penchant for preamp simplicity and power amp saturation, a number of high-quality guitar amplifiers bearing his initials have reached the market with details tweaked to achieve consistent tone in different wattage packages.

Conjuring the characteristics and peculiarities of David’s four favourite classic amps, a magic blend was concocted – the aim was to achieve the top-end of his tweed Deluxe, the midrange of his Hiwatt, and the low-end courtesy of both his JTM45 and AC30.

This single 12-inch Celestion Vintage 30-equipped 15-watt version is the first combo in the DGT lineage and, as such, received a great deal of attention in order to achieve a tight but full bottom-end. With its two EL84 power valves and a valve rectifier, power-stage saturation is clearly a key feature as is needed to achieve the gutsy tones favoured by David.

It certainly looks the part, too, clad in a blond Tolex covering with a black front-panel and salt-and-pepper basket-weave grille cloth. It cuts the dash of a vintage classic without steering too close to any particular brand’s aesthetics, and it’s a reasonably lightweight cabinet that’s definitely not a back-breaker.

Under the hood we find a printed circuit board construction, which is no bar to great tone. As ever, we recommend a reasonable amount of care with board-mounted valves and pots, although this type of build is quite standard at the price point and PRS does back it with a five-year guarantee.

Alongside the amp is a heavy-duty black three-way, LED-illuminated footswitch for boost, reverb and tremolo deployment via the included 5.3-metre five-pin MIDI-style cable.

The front-panel mini-switches modify the footswitching options, allowing the master volume and Bright switch to be instigated via the Boost switch.

Specs

• PRICE: $1,449/£1,449
• ORIGIN: Indonesia
• TYPE: All-valve single-channel combo
• VALVES: 2x EL84, 3x 12AX7, 1x 12AT7
• OUTPUT: 15W
• DIMENSIONS: 622 (w) x 267 (d) x 470mm (h)
• WEIGHT (kg/lb): 19.05/42
• CABINET: Plywood
• LOUDSPEAKER: 1x12” Celestion Vintage 30
• CHANNELS: 1
• CONTROLS: Volume, Boost switch, Treble, Mid, Bass, Bright switch, Master, Master switch, Reverb, Top Cut, Presence, Speed, Tremolo switch, Depth 
• FOOTSWITCH: 3-button included
• ADDITIONAL FEATURES: Switching configurability options. Bias terminals
• RANGE OPTIONS: Head-only version $1,199/£945
• CONTACT: PRS Guitars

Usability and sounds

Having had the pleasure of spending some time with the DGT 15 head, setting these controls felt like familiar ground. Perhaps the best way to appreciate how this amp wants to work is to switch the master volume out of the circuit – using its mini-toggle – and set the input gain as if it is the sole volume control.

This gives the output valves priority in terms of supplying saturation and harmonics. While this may be the reverse to how master volume amps are often used, it affords a more muscular and physical experience.

Using the non-master mode described above and with the usual six-string suspects lined up, we opt to begin with our Telecaster. Sounding immediately detailed yet gutsy, it’s a full-bodied tone with an inherent low-end that fills any gaps in the sound of single-coil guitars.

With the input gain set low we still find an exceptional amount of sustain, alongside the bell-like clarity. Switching to the Tele’s infamous bridge pickup, we get a gnarly early break-up with teeth.

Alongside Bass and Mid controls, we are blessed with four ways to modify the top-end: Treble, Top Cut, Presence and the Bright switch – providing the maximum flexibility to dial the sound to perfection.

It’s worth mentioning the chosen Celestion Vintage 30 12-inch speaker in this combo amp is capable of a little extra detail perhaps than the more traditional Greenback. This is a great match for the size of cabinet and amp output and it will compress nicely at higher levels, especially once the speaker has become ‘broken in’.

Time for our Les Paul Custom with Patent Applied For-style humbuckers, and as we push the input gain to halfway, we soon hit an appreciable seam of rich sustain and sizzling chords. With a push of the Boost footswitch, lead fluidity and controlled feedback are accessed, building on the same core tonality but this time with increased gain and sensitivity.

The default nature of the DGT 15 combo is raw, honest and unaffected. It is not about a pristine clean sound or a highly overdriven lead tone; this is very much a ‘set and forget’ platform, where further changes only need come from its three-button footswitch or your favourite pedals.

Utilising the guitar’s volume controls, it’s possible to achieve a huge amount of dynamic and tonal variation for rhythms or solos in the classic manner employed by Grissom and many other legendary blues-oriented players.

The onboard reverb is well tuned to provide a long and transparent halo, though it doesn’t sound particularly springy, despite its classic three-spring format.

Switching in the tremolo effect and we’re met with wobbulations of the smooth and vibey kind. It has a wide range from slow to fast and from mild to deep, something not all tremolo-equipped amps can achieve.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★½

While for every player there is an amplifier, some amplifiers please more people than others. It’s important to judge this one on its intended function as a bold, classic tone-machine aimed at vintage-appreciating, feel-based players. In this light, armed with a bunch of your favourite tone-bending pedals, this amp really is a people-pleaser.

Matching its tonality and gain to a variety of instruments and styles was effortless, but it’s at its best reproducing the classic sound palette of the ’60s and ’70s, albeit with a more extended and defined low-end and modern construction.

It’s a happy marriage of tone, power and portability and resides at the higher end of the market before reaching the realm of boutique pricing. But its tonal quality is a match for the more boutique offerings from smaller high-end manufacturers by virtue of the extensive research and development it has received.

Guitar World verdict: For those with classic tastes and an ear for the magic that power-section saturation brings, we’d say that you owe yourself a date with the DGT.

Hands-on videos

PRS Guitars

American Musical Supply

• “There’s more ‘Fender’ to Fiore and more ‘Gibson’ to the SE DGT… Inspiring guitars from inspiring players”: PRS Fiore HH and SE DGT Standard review
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Okay, so this isn’t technically a Presidents’ Day sale, but with a massive 15% off almost all the Core models and killer amplifiers, this PRS sale is definitely worth shouting about. So, if you’ve been eyeing a seriously high-end axe or amp, now’s your chance to make it happen.

The Core range is the gold standard for PRS. Crafted in the USA with top-tier materials and attention to detail, these are the premium models, featuring icons like the Custom 24 and McCarty. Yes, they come with a serious price tag, but you get the best of the best. Within the Core lineup, you’ll find everything from vintage vibes to cutting-edge modern designs and specialty models.

A few highlights include a whopping $1,027.50 off the 40th Anniversary Custom 24 in icy Sub Zero, $765 off the jaw-dropping PRS Modern Eagle V in stunning Faded Whale Blue, and $723 off the fierce McCarty 594 in Red Tiger

Now, the discount applies to in-stock models, so you can walk out with your dream gear today. Just a heads up, though, a few models, like the DGT Semi-Hollow, Chleo Limited Edition, Archon Classic 50 Combo, are excluded, and special orders don’t count.

Thankfully, snagging this deal couldn’t be easier. All you need to do is hit up your local authorized PRS dealer and shop away. There are no promo codes, no paperwork, just instant savings. PRS doesn’t sell direct, but the offer is available at Guitar Center, Musician’s Friend, Sweetwater, and beyond.

Don’t sleep on this, deals like this don’t come around often, well, outside of Black Friday, anyway. You have until March 31 to get involved.

PRS Guitars have their trademark shape, but Paul Reed Smith’s brand isn’t opposed to T-types, as the highly lauded SE NF 53 and Myles Kennedy signature both attest. But Smith says there are a few flaws with the traditional Telecaster.

As such, when it came to designing his own take on the classic shape, he set out to address those perceived shortcomings.

“Teles are wonderful instruments, but they have a couple of problems,” Smith tells the Zak Kuhn Show (via Ultimate Guitar). “One is that they'll loosen up on the high E string. We worked really hard to stop that.

“The second thing is, the bass pickup is so weak, and it's got such a thick cover on it; the cover's stopping some of the signal from going through the bass pickup. To my ears, it’s not very usable.

“That's why, when people put humbuckers in the bass position... changing the bass pickup in Teles all the time was a normal thing to do” he adds. “I was trying to retain all the good stuff about it, and get rid of the bad stuff.”

The inclusion of PRS’s standout Narrowfield DD (Deep Dish) pickups in the PRS T-types substantiates Smith’s quest. Those pups, in essence, merge single-coil snap with the hum-free fatness of humbuckers, and are ‘stair-stepped’ so that the distance from the magnet to the string remains the same across the radius of the fretboard. That improves their balance.

Vitally, though, PRS’s tonal tweaks aren’t intended to undermine what makes a Tele great in the first place.

“I like Telecasters,” he confesses. “You can play anything from jazz to hard rock on a Telecaster. Guess what? You can play anything from jazz to hard rock on [our T-types]. I was trying to get rid of the problems and retain the character of the sound you're familiar with.”

But it didn’t stop there. Another trademark of the Tele, the ashtray bridge, was also in Smith’s crosshairs.

“The way the ashtray bridge works is that you have three screws that control the tilt and the height of the pickup,” Smith explains. “The ashtray bridge was a form of a pickup ring. I didn't want to copy that.

“I wanted something that did what the musician wanted it to do, and not lose it up on the high strings – have that spank, you know. Have the bass pickup sound better.”

As PRS celebrated 40 years of craftsmanship last year, resulting in new drops every month, Smith sat down with Guitar World to spill his brand-building secrets, which guitar heroes are PRS players in secret, and why the internet is wrong about tonewood.

This year, meanwhile, PRS has gotten off to a flier with John Mayer’s mystery Grateful Dead PRS Silver Sky finally getting a proper release, alongside a limited edition hollowbody baritone for Ed Sheeran.

NAMM 2026: PRS has launched a surprise new signature guitar for Ed Sheeran, and the SE Cosmic Splash is a tastily specced hollowbody baritone limited to just 1,000 pieces.

That’s right, we got an Ed Sheeran baritone before GTA6.

Following on from signatures with Martin and Lowden Guitars, the Shape of You songsmith has linked up with PRS for a rather striking six-string with an extended 27.7” scale length.

Even wilder, it’s the first time PRS has ever made a hollowbody baritone guitar, save for the one-off Drive guitar it made with Sheeran for the new F1: The Movie soundtrack.

The unique visage of the PRS SE Ed Sheeran “Cosmic Splash” Limited Edition is a replica of one of Sheeran’s Cosmic Carpark paintings from 2025. The series of artworks helped raise funds for the Ed Sheeran Foundation, which helps support music education across the UK.

Meanwhile, its fretboard inlays, featuring play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, and stop symbols, nod to the Englishman’s new Stereo series of albums, which kicked off with Play last year.

But it’s not just about the aesthetics. The guitar is saddled with a collaborative PRS/LR Baggs Piezo system, 85/15 “S” pickups, and the ability to blend those two voicings, or isolate one from the other. Onboard controls give players autonomy over Magnetic Volume, Piezo Volume, and Tone, with a three-way pickup switch also in play.

Beyond that, there's a PRS adjustable stoptail bridge with six saddles, and PRS-branded lightweight tuners – whilst a shallow violin carve merges with a flatback body, for the best of acoustic and electric guitar characteristics.

Tonewoods see a mahogany body paired with a maple top, a set maple neck with a “wide fat” shape, and a 22-fret rosewood fingerboard with a 10" radius.

“A PRS hollowbody baritone has never been done before,” says loop pedal whizz, Ed Sheeran. “It's super special. I've been using it all tour, and I love it.

“It's a limited edition, so it will go fast,” he adds, “but there's more to come, so stay tuned.”

It comes in Standard B tuning (B-E-A-D-F#-B) with a gig bag and a signed 8x8" print of the Cosmic Splash artwork, all to the tune of $1,599.

See PRS for more.

Alongside the arrival of John Mayer's Grateful Dead PRS Silver Sky, the launch sees Paul Reed Smith's company off to a promising start in 2026.

Hello, and welcome to Guitar World’s gear round-up, your one-stop-shop for keeping up to date with what’s been happening in the big wide world of guitar gear over the past seven days.

From new electric guitars to amp modeler updates, the guitar industry is never short of fresh releases, and it can sometimes be hard to stay abreast of every new launch that may be of interest to you.

To make things a little easier, we’ve put together an essential must-read guide that will cover the major releases, the boutique drops, and everything in between.

'Tis the eve before NAMM 2026 (has everyone put their stockings out ready?) so the gear launches are coming in thick and fast. You'll probably need a coffee for this one...

Gibson Keith Richards 1960 ES-355

Gibson's latest Collector's Edition guitar turned out to be a replica of Keith Richards' iconic 1960 ES-355. Though famed for his five-string Teles, Keef is a dab hand with six-strings, too, and his ebony-finished 355 was his pick of the bunch when it came to fully stacked guitars.

The meticulous recreations were built using advanced 3D scanning and Murphy Lab aging techniques, and recreate the exacting feel and vibe of the Rolling Stones' legends OG model. Gibson calls it the coolest guitar in rock 'n' roll We're inclined to agree.

For more: Gibson

Boss GX-1

Watch out Zoom, Valeton, Hotone and Mooer – Boss has set its sights on taking control of the entry level amp modeler market with the GX-1. With AIRD tech, Boss engineering and a fool-proof operation layout in its corner, the GX-1 looks like it has all the makings of a pedal that could blow the competition out the water.

We've already reviewed it and we loved it. GW's Matt McCracken thought it to be the ideal modeler for beginners, thanks to its button-heavy topography that makes dialing in tones a breeze. The $229 price tag doesn't hurt either.

For more: Boss

Electro-Harmonix Effects Interface

Electro-Harmonix has continued its experiments to bridge the digital and physical effects world an Effects Interface utility tool that turns pedals into plugins, and pedals into plugins. It can be used as a standalone pedal that brings your favorite plugins to your 'board, or as a studio tool to run your recorded audio through your favorite pedals.

It's a more versatile reamp box, in other words, but without the need for converters and complex cabling methods. It connects via USB-C, and away you go. A studio essential in the making? Probably.

For more: Electro-Harmonix

Ibanez Layer Delayer

Ibanez's pedal escapades are world famous because of the Tube Screamer, but the Japanese firm isn't exactly up their with some of the other boutique and effects specialists that are known for their boundary-bending builds.

Well, Ibanez might just be hoping to assert its credentials as a pedal maker to be reckoned with thanks to the Layer Delayer. It is its most ambitious pedal to date, hands down, and promises to give you all-new ways to sculpt and craft echo effects. 2026 could be the year of Ibanez pedals...

For more: Ibanez

Seymour Duncan Slash 3.0

Slash played a Gibson SG at Ozzy Osbourne's Back to the Beginning farewell show, but it wasn't any ol' SG – it came fitted with custom humbuckers that were designed to offer more output without compromising on tone.

Now, they've been released as the standalone Slash 3.0 set. They're the GN'R rocker's first Alnico V set (his previous pairs came with Alnico II magnets), and they were tailored by pickup-making legend Maricela "MJ" Juarez. Expect punch and aggression aplenty, as well as an enhanced output with a tighter low-end.

For more: Seymour Duncan

Donner HLX-500

Donner might just have launched the entry-level headless guitar to beat. No stranger to headless designs, the Chinese guitar maker has now launched what it is calling "the ultimate modern headless electric guitar", and while that might be a stretch, there's a lot to like here.

To start, it's just $330, which is an absurdly affordable price point for a headless guitar. Then, you have the specs. It is ergonomically sculpted in the vein of Strandberg guitars, and even has an asymmetrical neck profile to try and bring some of that 'progressive' design ethos to the HLX-500.

On paper, it looks like it could be the ideal instrument for those who are looking to test the waters of headless guitars without forking out big money for a specialist build.

For more: Donner

Poly Effects Kanso

When Poly Effects and Josh Smith put their brains together, the result is usually a boundary-pushing pedal unlike any other that can be used to conjure up any number of gnarly tones. The Kanso, while perhaps not quite as sophisticated as the Flat V overdrive, is certainly no exception.

It's tiny, and there's only one footswitch – dubbed the 'FKnob' – which can be used to engage effects, toggle between diodes, and switch between controlling bias and character. In other words, you get a helluva lot of grizzly gain tones from a very, very compact gadget. No wonder batch 1 has already sold out...

For more: Poly Effects

PRS Silver Sky New Finishes

If you caught John Mayer playing at the Grateful Dead's 60th Anniversary celebratory shows last year – or, indeed, if you saw any footage of him playing live in 2025 – you'll probably have seen him playing a mysterious brown-finished Silver Sky. People on social media have been asking about it for months.

Well, now its finally been launched as an official colorway for his PRS signature guitar, which is also now available in Black Plum Satin. They've been joined by a bunch of other new-for-2025 launches and updates, including a semi-hollow DGT, a new-look Zach Myers model, and the all-new S2 Vela HHT.

Last year was a busy one for PRS, which celebrated its 40th anniversary. It shows absolutely no signs of slowing down going into 2026.

For more: PRS

Vox VFZ-1

Vox has leafed through the history books and ramped up its pedal arsenal with the launch of the VFZ-1 and VTB-1. The first is a 1960s-inspired, Maestro Fuzz-Tone-esque fuzz pedal that looks to inject your rig with some classic high gain tones, while the other hopes to recreate the coveted Treble Booster tone favored by the likes of Rory Gallagher and Brian May in a compact package.

Both are easy to use, look pretty darn classy, and, judging by the demo, sound killer as well.

For more: Vox

Vox AC15 & AC30 Hand-Wired Greenback Combos

It's going to be a busy NAMM season for Vox. Along with the above pedals, the British firm has expanded its Hand-Wired series with a suite of Greenback combos and cabs. In the series, the new AC15 and AC30 amps – two of Vox's quintessential guitar amps – come packing with Celestion Greenback speakers for all the unparalleled character, touch sensitivity and harmonic depth you'd expect from a Vox amp.

They've been refined for modern times, though. Now, they offer a master volume for better control, a transparent FET-buffered effects loop, and a tube-driven spring reverb.

There's also a new Hand-Wired AC30 head, which is paired with a cab that offers wo 12" Celestion Alnico Blue speakers.

For more: Vox

Walrus Audio Mantle Bass Preamp

Meet the Mantle – a "first of its kind" analog bass preamp and DI box, created in collaboration with Ian Martin Allison of Scott's Bass Lessons. With two proprietary custom-wound Sapphire Transformers that have taken years to develop, the Mantle is a streamlined, no-nonsense preamp pedal that packs a serious punch.

With its Neve-inspired input transformer and API-esque output transformer, it promises studio-grade refined tones on stage, in the studio, and anywhere in between. I'm not a bass player, but even I can appreciate this one.

For more: Walrus Audio

Walrus Audio Canvas Volume Pedal

Is there a range of pedalboard utility tools out there that can match the Walrus Audio Canvas range? We're struggling to come up with anything. The lineup has previously featured screen-equipped tuners, DI boxes and pedalboard power supplies. Now, it has its first volume pedal.

The humble volume pedal is oft-misunderstood, and the Walrus Audio Canvas Volume pedal looks as feature-packed as an output-controlling tool could get. There are eight selectable tapers, including seven inspired by classic volume pedals, as well as mono, stereo and dual-mono routing options.

Not the sexiest pedal, admittedly, but as far as volume pedals go, this looks pretty beefed up.

For more: Walrus Audio

Marshall Lunar New Year

2025 was a pretty huge year for Marshall, which ended up stealing the show at NAMM exactly 12 months ago thanks to its city-like booth and the announcement of the much-anticipated Modified Series. Oh, and let's not forget those Spinal Tap Infinity amps.

It's been a quieter start to 2026, but the British amp icon still found time to produce some limited-edition combos to mark the Lunar New Year. Crafted in collaboration with Beijing artist FCCK, the amps flash some seriously cool artwork that celebrate the year of the Horse. So that's what all the horse-themed teasers were all about...

For more: Marshall

Silvertone 1446

Is the Silvertone 1478 the coolest offset ever made? I'd certainly put it up there, so you could imagine how happy I was when I heard just this morning that Silvertone would be reissuing the sick-as-heck electric with some new specs for 2026. At just $499, I am thoroughly tempted, and you can best be sure I'll be making a beeline for the Silvertone booth when the NAMM Show kicks off next week.

It's been joined by the revival of the 1446 – the semi-hollow favored by Elvis Costello, Hubert Sumlin, Chris Isaak and more – and the 1449, which was once played by Beck and Brad Shultz of Cage The Elephant. A hugely welcome return for the brand, this. Let's hope it sticks around.

For more: Silvertone

Squier Mini Strats

Okay, this might be the most practical guitar to play for most people, but just look at it. It's a Squier Strat. In a Sea Foam Green. And it is tiny. What's not to like?!

The Squier Mini Stratocaster is part of Fender's early 2026 roll-out, which also includes a huge update to the Mustang Micro Plus headphone amp, some new-look Squier Sonic models, and a 30th Anniversary Hot Rod Deluxe combo.

But, yes, for me, that teeny tiny Strat takes the cake. It's just a shame I'll have to wait until July for it to officially start shipping...

For more: Squier

NAMM 2026: PRS has issued its latest aesthetic expansion pack for John Mayer’s Silver Sky signature guitar, and it finally rolls out one of the model’s most sought-after finishes.

Ever since Mayer took to the stage last year with a mysteriously finished, Brown-colored version of his best-selling electric guitar, fans have been asking for a signature production run.

The muted-yet-striking version became one of Mayer’s go-to Silver Sky models late last year, when he joined the late Bob Weir and his Dead & Company bandmates for a run for shows celebrating the 60th anniversary of Grateful Dead music.

He would later use it elsewhere on stage, including during a private concert last September at Henson Studios in support of The Heart and Armor Foundation for Veterans Health (as per John Mayer Gear).

Mayer has a track record of producing Silver Sky prototypes with one-off finishes that never see the light of day, so many glass-half-empty fans had believed this particular model would be resigned to the same fate.

However, PRS has answered fans' widespread requests by rolling out the official Mojave Brown Satin Silver Sky. It’s been joined by a Black Plum Satin version, both of which stay true to the original template.

The new-look Silver Sky models headline PRS Class of 2026 guitar drop, which comprises fresh finishes, wholesale SE updates, and all-new drops.

Elsewhere in the lineup for this year, the Maryland brand has issued an Elderberry Burst color for the SE Zach Myers signature, and has introduced new launches such as the DGT semi-hollow Core model and all-new S2 Vela HHT.

The DGT semi-hollow is based on David Grissom’s luxurious Private Stock mode – which has also been launched in limited-edition batches in the past – boasting all the same specs of the original Core DGT with the added bonus of a thinline design with one f-hole.

The S2 Vela HHT, on the other hand, gives the offset double-cut dual DS-01 humbuckers, a coil-tapping push/pull tone pot and a tremolo bridge.

PRS has also introduced some comprehensive housekeeping updates to its SE range. Many in the lineup will now feature PRS' proprietary Wing Buttons tuners – deemed both an aesthetic and tonal upgrade – and sloped pickup rings for a more elevated look.

Head over to PRS to explore the drop in full.

What is it?

Satisfying artists has always been a prime objective of Paul Reed Smith, be it Ted Nugent, Howard Leese or Carlos Santana (back before his production company kicked off), or more contemporary players such as DragonForce’s Herman Li.

However, Herman’s Chleo – a very, very different PRS with its Floyd Rose vibrato Fishman Fluence active pickups and a very un-PRS shape – has been the only brand-new artist signature guitar during this 40th Anniversary year.

Other artists haven’t been totally forgotten, though, and just as the brand’s celebratory year draws to a close, long-running signature artist David Grissom gets a new ‘Standard’ version of his SE DGT, while Mark Lettieri gets an HH version of his Fiore, which was first introduced in 2021.

It’d been rude not to take a look…

Fiore HH Satin

For a guitarist with such impressive credentials, Mark Lettieri and the tools of his trade are anything but show-off. Pulling this new HH model from its gigbag, it may as well have ‘working guitar’ stamped on the headstock.

When we looked at Mark’s original Fiore HSS model, as impressed as we were, it did come in on the heavy side for the style, not least that it employs a typically light-in-weight swamp ash body. The good news here is that, at 3.2kg (7.04lb), it’s been to the gym, which just adds to the ‘pick up and go’ vibe.

Rather like how John Mayer’s famed Silver Sky was a retooling of the Stratocaster, the Fiore’s DNA comes from the good ol’ hot-rod super-S and replicates the longer Fender scale-length with 22 frets. It has sleek horns combined with PRS’s hallmark treble cutaway scoop and the usual body contouring of the style.

The satin nitro Sunflower finish is thin and doesn’t fill the ash’s identifying open-grain wavy streaks, but, those aside, it’s silky smooth to the touch. The actual central top colour looks a little faded; the yellow is less bright than the gloss versions we’ve seen, which adds to the unshowy, almost used-guitar style, and you can see it’s a two-piece centre-joined body.

Like PRS’s other bolt-on models, there is a headstock splice, but here it’s nearly invisible, the slab-sawn maple left quite white with no visible amber tinting.

Another change here is the switch from a maple fingerboard of the HSS model to this dark brown Indian rosewood; the open bird inlays are stylish and less in your face than the solid or posh-shell birds of so many PRS models.

The hardware follows the original Fiore model, though, and you’ll find vintage-style top-locking tuners and a two-post vibrato, which are seemingly the same as the ones used on the SE Silver Sky. The posts are 4.96mm bolts that thread into collars mounted in the body, rather than screws, while the pressed saddles are steel like the top plate and deep-drilled block.

Then there’s a push-in arm, here with a metal tip, plus swing tension adjustment. Unlike Mayer’s guitars, there’s an up-tilt to the vibrato, giving a semitone rise on the high E string, a minor 3rd on the G.

Along with the additional directly mounted Fiore humbucker at the neck, each individual pickup tone control is paired with a master volume and has a pull-switch that changes each pickup from standard series to parallel wiring. The previous model’s five-way pickup selector changes to a three way.

SE DGT Standard

The DGT (David Grissom Tremolo) has its own fanbase within the PRS fraternity and in essence is an evolution of the McCarty model, of which David had quite a hand in. His original signature model appeared in 2007, but it wasn’t until the end of 2022 that the much-anticipated SE version was launched, and this new 2025 addition simply changes the maple-topped body to all-mahogany, hence that Standard designation.

Both SEs are offered in McCarty Tobacco Sunburst, the maple-top level also gets a classic Gold Top, while the other option (as here) is a translucent Vintage Cherry. It gives us a chance to see the wood, of course, and the body is a three-piece spread – and, yes, you can see the slightly different grain patterns up close.

It also features the SE’s ‘shallow violin’ carve, which adds light dishing around the outer edges, although the main face remains flat. It really seems to suit this colour, and there’s no posh figured maple to show off. The glued-in neck is a three-piece longitudinal laminate of mahogany.

There’s no change to the non-locking tuners or the cast steel vibrato that’s used on plenty of SE, S2 and CE models. Over the years, and certainly on its USA models, PRS has moved to proprietary designed hardware from the vibrato, the locking tuners, even the Lampshade control knob and strap buttons.

While the lower-ticket SEs have historically stuck with more generic parts, they’re changing and here we have the new, really stylish proprietary-design humbucking rings as used on the SE Paul’s Guitar and more recently seen on the new-design SE Hollowbodies and the SE CE 24 Standard Stoptail Satin – more will undoubtedly follow. Yes, we get standard speed knobs, but they’re also used on the Core model. David must prefer them!

The DGT’s control setup continues to use a volume for each pickup (the bridge pickup control is closest to the bridge) with the lower control being the master tone, which has a standard pull-switch so you can split the DGT ‘S’ pickups simultaneously, not individually.

Specs

PRS Fiore HH Satin

• PRICE: $2,649/£2,599 (inc gigbag)
• ORIGIN: USA
• TYPE: Double-cutaway solidbody electric
• BODY: Swamp ash
• NECK: Maple (3-piece), Fiore profile, bolt-on
• SCALE LENGTH: 648mm (25.5”)
• NUT/WIDTH: Bone/42.34mm
• FINGERBOARD: Rosewood, outline bird inlays, 254mm (10”) radius
• FRETS: 22, medium
• HARDWARE: PRS-designed 2-post steel block vibrato, PRS-designed vintage-style locking tuners – nickel-plated
• STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 54mm
• ELECTRICS: 2x Fiore-H humbuckers, 3-way lever pickup selector switch, master volume, tone 1 (neck), tone 2 (bridge) each w/ series/parallel pull switch
• WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3.2/7.04
• LEFT-HANDERS: No
• FINISHES: Sunflower (as reviewed), Black Hyacinth, Metallic Midnight, Red Apple Metallic – satin nitro body and neck back 

PRS SE DGT Standard

• PRICE: $899/£779 (inc gigbag)
• ORIGIN: Indonesia
• TYPE: Double-cutaway, carved-top solidbody electric
• BODY: Mahogany with ‘shallow violin’ carved top
• NECK: Mahogany, DGT profile, glued-in
• SCALE LENGTH: 635mm (25”)
• NUT/WIDTH: Synthetic/42.6mm
• FINGERBOARD: Rosewood, ‘moon’ inlays, 254mm (10”) radius
• FRETS: 22, jumbo
• HARDWARE: PRS Patented vibrato (cast), PRS designed enclosed tuners – nickel-plated
• STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 52.5mm
• ELECTRICS: PRS DGT ‘S’ Treble and Bass covered humbuckers, 3-way toggle pickup selector switch, individual volume controls and master tone with simultaneous coil-split pull-switch
• WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3.37/7.4
• LEFT-HANDERS: No
• FINISHES: Vintage Cherry (as reviewed), McCarty Tobacco Burst – all high gloss
• CONTACT: PRS Guitars

Playability and sounds

While both models here are twin-humbucking guitars with vibratos, pretty much everything else is different: the scale length, neck join, neck profiles and fretwire.

The Fiore’s neck feels the slimmer of the pair: 42.34mm at the nut, 21.5mm deep at the 1st fret and 23.7mm by the 12th. The DGT is marginally wider at the nut (42.6mm) but only fractionally, with pretty much the same depth at the 1st fret of 21.2mm, but it fills out considerably to 24.7mm by the 12th – and that’s what your hand really feels.

But both necks are very well shaped with what feels like a very slight ‘V’ in lower positions, which rounds out as you move up towards the body. The DGT’s neck back is gloss; the Fiore’s is satin.

Rather oddly, despite being spec’d with 0.010-gauge strings, our DGT arrived with 11s, like the Core model, which adds to the bulk, despite the shorter 635mm (25-inch) scale. Another big difference is the fretwire: while the Fiore goes with the pretty standard PRS gauge (measured at 2.57mm wide by 1.14mm high), the DGT’s frets are much bigger in both width and height (2.81mm by 1.4mm).

To pigeonhole the builds, there’s obviously more ‘Fender’ to Fiore and more ‘Gibson’ to the SE DGT, from the percussive snap of the former to the more fundamental response of the DGT when played unplugged. That vague observation is not a million miles away from their inherent characters when we fire them up.

There’s not a lot of difference in output clout from either in humbucker mode, but the DGT piles on the creamy midrange, which is far from honky at the bridge; there’s gutsy Les Paul-like push with just enough clarity. The neck is perfectly balanced output-wise, thicker and chewier, and there’s a good sparkle with both on. Three impressive sounds.

Switching to the Fiore and it slightly pulls back the bluster and seems to clean up those lower-mids a little. And with this leaner sound, there’s a touch more clarity for those of us who prefer the slightly brighter side of the tone tracks.

Don’t be fooled, though; it still rocks out, and the neck pickup is pretty thick and actually does a superb Santana with just a little tone roll-off.

These different characters are enhanced by the secondary sounds of both. The DGT’s partial coil-splits certainly sound very single coil-y, hollowed with a percussive attack and plenty of high-end detail.

Pull up the individual tones on the Fiore and the parallel humbucker sounds are in the single-coil realm, too, but a little smoother, a little steelier but extremely usable, coming across rather like a well-behaved Telecaster.

These sounds really seem to love a pedalboard, too – the no-hum smooth clarity almost sounds post-produced. We might suggest that the DGT comes across as a really rootsy rock bar-room brawler, and the Fiore nods a little more to a smoother ‘LA studio’ tool – it’s just so classy.

We mentioned the up-tilt of the Fiore’s vibrato earlier on and, as ever, the DGT’s bridge sits parallel to the top, producing slightly less up-bend. The Fiore’s arm sits a little lower, too, while the DGT’s angles up a little more. Also, the DGT uses four springs and the Fiore three, so yet again – like virtually every other feature – the vibratos are subtly different.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★½

Once upon a time, the PRS guitar came in just one flavour with an additional topping of curly maple and a sprinkling of birds if you fancied. Today? Well, we’ve honestly lost count of the number of new models we’ve seen this year alone, and in terms of style and price point the PRS range has choice aplenty and then some.

Our two signature additions here illustrate that breadth: very different guitars with zero bling and very different price points. While the higher-tier Core guitars are now in what many of us would consider ‘Custom Shop’ territory in terms of cost, this Fiore is priced more like a USA-production Fender.

Guitar World verdict: The Fiore might be less classic PRS in style, but not so in build and detail: it’s superbly done with sounds and feel to match. The SE DGT Standard not only trims a fair bit off the maple-topped version, but plenty might prefer its earthier tones, and there’s nothing cut-price in the build. It’s also a guitar you could happily upgrade with some success as the ‘chassis’ here is so good. Inspiring guitars from inspiring players.

Hands-on videos

PRS Guitars

• “A supremely versatile platform that blurs the line between solidbody and semi”: The PRS 40th Anniversary Special Semi-Hollow Limited Edition
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

With new releases coming virtually every month, 2025 was a very busy celebratory year for PRS Guitars.

Alongside additions to the standard Core, Bolt-On, S2 and SE ranges, we’ve seen six specific 40th Anniversary Limited Editions of which we understand this latest Special Semi-Hollow is the seventh and final piece.

At the time of writing, it’s the ninth Semi-Hollow PRS offers (five of which are three-pickup Specials), alongside five full Hollowbody models. Clearly, there’s something in the air.

The Core-level Special Semi-Hollow is the base platform for this limited edition electric guitar of just 280 pieces. The primary difference is the wood choice. The mahogany back and neck of that model are swapped for black limba, the darker streaked wood we also know as korina or white limba.

Colour aside, it’s the same tree species, and PRS has already featured it on the CE 24-08 Black Limba Limited Edition this year. There’s no change in the top wood, but this figured maple is what PRS calls ‘Artist grade’, and the striping is quite fine and remarkably even, the contrast in the grain accentuated by the Yellow Tiger colour of the top (Whale Blue is the other option).

The fingerboard and headstock facing remains rosewood, but here’s it’s Honduran, which is becoming quite a well-used back and sides wood for many higher-end acoustic makers.

Visually, it’s quite different from the darker, more evenly coloured Indian rosewood used on the standard Core model, with a lighter mid-brown colouration and a vivid darker figure – a stormy ‘sky’ for the ‘old-school’ outlined bird inlays.

The McCarty III humbuckers are a 40th-year introduction (a long time coming but worth the wait), and the switching system and dual ‘coil tap’ switches provide 12 sounds.

But that’s underplaying what we have here: the volume and tone controls colour the voices we hear, and even ‘well-behaved Patent Applied For pickups’ doesn’t do the Alnico II ’buckers justice.

As with the standard model, the misnamed ‘coil tap’ switches engage PRS’s partial coil-splits, which primarily voice the slug coils of each humbucker with very little volume drop compared to the humbucking voice.

This model might be a relatively late addition in PRS’s 40 years, but it’s a supremely versatile platform that blurs the line between solidbody and semi.

• Find out more at PRS Guitars.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Carlos Santana was one of the earliest champions of Paul Reed Smith’s guitars, first playing custom electric guitars before agreeing to a collaboration that helped catapult PRS with a landmark signature guitar.

However, as Smith himself explains, Santana wasn’t immediately taken by the PRS design brief. Rather, he took some convincing. Not because PRS guitars were bad, though. On the contrary, it was because they were too good, and Santana thought them too good to be true.

Speaking to Guitar Center CEO Gabe Dalporto in an upcoming episode of Guitar Center’s new ‘Inside the Noise with Gabe Dalporto’ podcast, Smith looks back on the early days of PRS, and reveals how his partnership with the man who helped transform PRS fortunes first came about.

“Three years of making him guitars,” Smith says when asked how long it took to convince Santana. “The first guitar he said was an accident of God. The next one, he said it was an accident. Third one, he didn't say anything.

“By the fifth one, he called me up and says, ‘OK, you're a guitar maker.’ In other words, the first one was an accident, it was that good.

“It was almost like somebody written him a hit song, and he didn't trust the next song to be hit. But after the fifth, he goes, ‘Okay, you're in.’ He made me earn his trust. He didn't give his trust, which I thought was really grounded.”

Smith draws parallels between his early days working with Santana and his experiences working with John Mayer and other big-name players. Namely, they have a set idea on what they like, and they’re not afraid to fly in the face of convention to get it.

“The thing I like about Carlos and John Mayer and all these great musicians is, they don't decide they like something because somebody told them to like it,” Smith says. “They decided to like something because they decided that's what they liked.”

Santana became one of PRS’ earliest major endorsers and elevated the brand onto the global stage, helping the company on its way to becoming the major industry player it is today. Over the years, the flagship Santana I model from the mid 1990s has been rebooted and refreshed with a run of SE, Private Stock and standard signatures.

Smith’s full interview with Dalporto will be released in the near-future. Inside the Noise with Gabe Dalporto will feature a run of behind-the-scenes interviews with high-profile musicians and industry execs.

The first episode, which features current Fender CEO Andy Mooney, arrives today, and will be followed by interviews with Smith and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer, Chad Smith. Blu DeTiger, Kenny Aronoff, Martin CEO Thomas Ripsam and more will also feature on future episodes.

Visit the Guitar Center YouTube channel to watch the first interview. Season 1 episodes will drop weekly on Tuesdays at 3pm PST.

Last year, Paul Reed Smith sat down with John Mayer and Guitar World to discuss the making of the Silver Sky.

40 years ago, Maryland native Paul Reed Smith took a chance on starting his own guitar company with no idea how things would pan out. It’s a good thing he chose to roll the dice.

He’s since become one of the world’s most respected builders – someone whose creations encapsulate the very notion of a well-crafted and custom-made boutique instrument.

Early on, he’d made guitars for Peter Frampton, Al Di Meola and Carlos Santana, and having witnessed firsthand how well his innovations had been working out for them, he launched PRS Guitars at the 1985 NAMM Show, debuting the newly designed Custom 24.

It’d be fair to say a lot has happened over the four decades since then, with top-shelf musicians like John Mayer, Orianthi and John McLaughlin signing up to become signature artists, as well as the more metallic players from bands like Alter Bridge, Opeth and Periphery.

While it’d be fair to say Smith’s output has taken some degree of influence from the classic formulas pioneered in the ’50s, models like the Custom 24 are notable for having their own kind of identity – from the 25-inch scale length that sits right in between the original Gibson and Fender designs to the custom bird inlays, jaw-dropping flame finishes and highly dependable tremolo system.

With the U.S.-made Core line retailing for several thousands of dollars, there were many years where these guitars were generally regarded as instruments for doctors, dentists and lawyers. That all changed in 2001 with the launch of the overseas-produced SE Santana, which kick-started a whole line of models marrying quality with affordability.

Since then, the line has expanded with various semi-hollow, extended range and piezo options – building up a fierce reputation as the best guitars you can find within their price range. It’s been one hell of a journey, says Smith, whose company now stands as the world’s third best-selling brand.

If you could go back in time and talk to the young man just starting out, what would you say?

“Don’t stop – it’s going to take you longer to mature than you think, but you’ll survive, so don’t worry about it too much!” I had a dream once, and I’ve never told anyone this, but I heard this loud voice and woke up in a cold sweat. The words I heard were, “It’s 10 times more complicated than you ever imagined.”

And that’s been true, from finally getting the pickups right for John Mayer, getting our necks to remain stable and our finishes to not injure the tone. I decided not to be a hermit – like “Nobody gets to talk to Paul!” – and instead, be the kind of person who talks to everybody.

What do you think has helped separate you from every other brand?

Guitars are tools for a job. I remember watching Carlos Santana playing the Oscars, and all I wanted was for the guitars to stay in tune and do what he needed. I just want my guitars to do their job.

I don’t sit there and feel this sense of pride, like, “I made that.” I just hope the performance goes well. You only get one shot when you’re on the Oscars. You break a string? You’re dead. That’s it – sharp bridge saddle? Done. It only takes one thing to go wrong.

How’d you get into building?

There are two kinds of people. One will say, “I’ve got nothing to offer” and people will say, “No kid, you come with me.” Then you’ve got the other kind who keep shouting about what they have, and everybody is like, “You’ve got nothing. Shut up and go home!” I was in group two.

Some of the musicians I’ve worked with are in group one. They’d go to the studio and get told to sit in a chair and not move. Brent Mason is that way. He’d send in demos of himself singing, because he’s a great singer, and they’d ask, “Who is on guitar?”

When they found out it was him, the deal was done. I’d show people my guitars and everybody would say, “No, no, no!” But nice people like Carlos Santana would say, “What have you got?” He didn’t care about what anyone else thought.

You had to make your own luck, to some degree.

Well, I didn’t get invited to make Eric Clapton a guitar at 13. I started my journey because I wanted to play guitar, but like oil and water, it ran away from me. But if I opened a case on the counter of the biggest music shop in Washington, D.C., it would draw a crowd. The world was saying, “This is what you have to offer,” but it still wasn’t “Come with me.”

I was told my whole life that if you make something magical, the world will beat a path to your door. What a load of bullshit. If you make something magical, you might be able to get an appointment for 15 minutes.

Guitar makers come around once every 30 years, and I’ve studied them all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve put guitars in cases and said, “Go do your job.” I don’t need to be there when the case is opened.

I also realized you can be a nice guy and get no orders, or you could be a difficult human being and the world will give you tons. It’s nothing to do with how you are, it’s to do with the caliber of the art you make. Guitars will sound good and play well regardless of how nice the builder is.

You were a custom builder for high-profile artists before launching your own company.

I made a deal with all of them saying if they didn’t fall in love with the guitar, I’d give them their money back. Carlos would say, “You mean, if I don’t love it, I don’t have to buy it? Under that deal, I’ll take it!” At that time, asking $2,000 for a guitar was outrageous. I think $900 was the ceiling. When we came out with a guitar at $1,000, it was pretty out there.

I remember having a meeting with our reps and all of them telling me we can’t do this. It’s not that I wanted to charge more; it cost more to make because it took more time and the parts cost more money. That’s just the way it was – and is.

Ted McCarty was an early mentor. What do you remember about him?

He wasn’t famous when I met him. He was a forgotten man, and I love that he got put back on the map. The last time I took him to NAMM, I rolled him around in a wheelchair and everybody came out to say goodbye to him, knowing it was the last time. He was cool, a real champion.

He’d fall asleep and then I’d wake him up saying, “Ted, you’ve got an interview,” so he’d do that and go back to sleep. He was kinda like the grandfather I never had. He trusted me. He handed us the baton, like in a relay race.

The SE line felt like a long time coming. It’s incredible how close they can be to your Core models.

That was our goal. At one point, the SEs were going to go away; we were having trouble with sales. And all the guitar teachers in America made their students buy SEs because they couldn’t teach kids how to play guitars that wouldn’t stay in tune. The teachers saved the line and we were back at the races. But it was almost done. That happens a lot in the guitar business.

Your guitars are no longer just for doctors, dentists and lawyers. Did that perception ever bother you?

No. The reason people would say those things is because doctors and dentists would have enough money to buy early Private Stocks and 10 Tops. When the S2 and SEs came out, that was over. Did it bother me? No. What bothered me was that one time I saw a catalog that said, “Best fit and finish in the entire industry” on our page, but on the Gibson page it said, “The sound of rock and roll.” I thought to myself, “Wrong comment on the wrong page!”

Frankly, there’s a new sound we’ve come up with on our TCI guitars that doesn’t sound like a Gibson, Fender, Les Paul, SG, Strat, Tele, Ibanez or anything. It’s a humbucker that sounds like a single coil, and I couldn’t be happier.

There’s a lot of speculation out there about where tone comes from. You’ve always seemed to be on “team wood”.

According to the internet, the only thing that’s important when you play a Stradivari violin is the Neumann microphone hanging over the top of it. People say the same about guitars. I don’t buy it. That means dead strings mean nothing. I mean, really? Put Vaseline all over your strings, pluck it and tell me your guitar sounds the same. I just don’t buy it.

What I do buy is that the pickup is half of it, but it ain’t all of it, no way. For some people, if a guitar has no sustain, they buy a compressor. If it has no after-ring, they buy a reverb pedal. I understand that. I mean, Jimi Hendrix had a Uni-Vibe, a wah-wah, this and that, but I’m sorry, if you listen to the rhythms on The Wind Cries Mary, that’s just him playing a new guitar and amp and he sounds gorgeous.

I don’t buy the simplistic view. You can’t take one of the only pieces I have away from me, saying it makes no difference. Alright then, make a guitar out of balsa wood and rubber, then add your pickup. I just don’t buy it.

What’s the greatest sound you’ve ever heard from a PRS on an album?

Smooth by Santana. I went to Japan when that song was a hit and it was the sound of Tokyo. You walked down the street and every store with speakers outside would be playing that song. I was in a grocery store yesterday and that song is still playing. Out of all the PRS guitars I’ve made, the one used for that song had the most impact.

He got something like 10 Grammys for that song. He walked into my office after that, slammed the door and said, “I swear to God I haven’t changed,” basically telling me the fame hadn’t gone to his head. And he said thank you to every single person in my factory. In the Jewish world, we call him a mensch, the very highest level of human being. He was spectacular that day and has always been.

Who would you love to work with that you haven’t had the chance to yet?

Jimmy Page, except I did make a guitar for him. He used one of our guitars on the Outrider tour, and it was some of the best tremolo work I’d ever heard. I did make a guitar for Eddie Van Halen, but that’s a long story and he’s gone.

People don’t know this, but Jeff Beck had a PRS at home and he loved it. He told me I’d never see him with it but he used it to record. We’ve been trying to get it back; it wasn’t part of the auction this year, but I know he loved that guitar. Of course, he’s not with us anymore either – and the same goes for Stevie Ray Vaughan. I could say Eric Gales, but he’s played our guitars plenty of times.

Joe Bonamassa told me that the first guitar he bought with his lawnmower money as a kid was a PRS McCarty. I like Joe, but I don’t think we are in his destiny right now. There are an awful lot of people playing PRS guitars that you don’t know about, but I do know they do. So I’d have to say David Gilmour.

I’ve met him, he’s a sweetheart and was really nice to me. The way he plays guitar is very written and intentional. American players are more like wild Mustangs – they just go for it. English players look for more beautifully written parts.

Apparently, David spent two weeks on the Comfortably Numb solo. That’s the story. I don’t know if it’s true, I don’t even care if it’s not true, it’s just a good story.

What can we expect from PRS over the next couple of years?

I’d like to see the McCarty IIIs and TCIs accepted. It’s staggering, the amount of artists playing the Silver Sky, which came out of us retooling an old 1963 pickup. I played a Charcoal Phoenix at our 40th-anniversary party. That went well. The new John McLaughlin went well. I’d like to see this stuff establish itself.

You have to remember Les Pauls were out of business until Slash picked one up. Strats were out of business until Hendrix picked one up. Then people like Danny Gatton, Roy Buchanan and Bruce Springsteen brought Teles back.

The guitar market is slow to move. I want some of our new products to get their feet more grounded in the longterm evaluation. I would like to see more acceptance across the board.

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