“You could argue that the pickups are the most important thing. But in the end, there’s nothing more important on the guitar than this”: Paul Reed Smith on a guitar's most crucial feature – and how it dictates your tone

Few topics can split the guitar community quite like the genesis of tone. Some will argue it comes from the hands, others the pickups, or the overdrive pedal that’s slapped in front of a tube amp.

After championing Guatemalan fence posts as viable tonewoods, Paul Reed Smith has now weighed in on which aspect of the guitar is most crucial to good tone, and it’s none of the above.

“You could argue that the pickups are the most important thing, or the weight,” he says on the PRS YouTube channel. “But in the end, when you're holding the guitar, how it feels, how you change the length of the strings, how it resonates – there’s nothing more important on the guitar than the neck.

“You have the body of the guitar, and then you have [the neck] sticking out, and it's a-weighted,” he expands. “It has tuning pegs at one end, and there are more frets at one end than the other. So, the strength of the neck has a huge impact on how it resonates.”

PRS’s approach to neck-making has been chiselled down to a fine art over the years. Its learning process is assisted by collaboration with its artists, with everyone from John Mayer to Periphery’s djent maestro Mark Holcomb putting their electric guitars through different tests.

“One of the things that is important from the rules of tone is not putting the neck under a huge amount of tension, unless it's from the strings,” says Smith. “When you have to tighten the truss rod too much, it adds a lack of sustained low mid-range to the instrument. If you're going to put really heavy gauge strings on it and tune it up, you're going to need a truss rod.

“The more guitars we make for artists, the more we learn that the stronger the neck is, the better the guitar sounds,” he continues.

Certainly, as far as the argument for tone coming from the hands is concerned, a player’s comfort is vital. If a player is feeling at home with a guitar, they’ll play at their best, and the tone that comes out of the feel is likely to be leagues above an axe that’s a burden to wield. The neck is quintessential there.

Guitar Tone Starts Here | Rules of Tone: Episode 2 | PRS Guitars - YouTube

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PRS is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary and releasing brand-new guitars each month to ensure 2025 is a bumper year. That's seen Herman Li rip up the firm's template with his signature guitar, and the NF 53 SE has staked its claim as 2025's best sub-$1k electric guitar among a score of other drops.