Show & Tell: Mayer on Tone
stellar american guitarist John Mayer on his new prs amp
We were lucky enough to catch up with the seven-time Grammy Award winner John Mayer at NAMM to talk about developing his brand-new PRS amp, the J-MOD100 head. The project began almost comically, when Mayer called PRS to enquire about having a Jerry Garcia-voiced guitar built for the Dead & Company tribute project. While trying to get ever closer to Garcia’s tone, Paul Reed Smith also put forward some prototype amps that were to become the starting point for the J-MOD100.
“We developed this amp because we needed a loud, clean amp that worked with the [PRS] Super Eagle guitar,” Mayer recalled. “But we never even thought about producing it initially. It was a case of ‘how do I get an amp to work for this gig’, because when you get into the Jerry Garcia world, where the tone is the instrument… But when I came off the tour, Paul and I talked again about what if this amp could [be developed to] replace all my other amps? What if we built one that lived in the sweet spot between everything I needed?
“So it was really fun to go through [various prototype] amps. We’d plug a PRS in, we’d plug a Strat in… and it was about
“[In developing this amp] we had it up against some really, really big amps like Dumble Steel String Singers – and we’re going, ‘This is actually tighter’”
how do we get that amp to really respond? Why are there some amps that you want to play something simple and beautiful on? And yet why are there other amps that when you go to a gig, you leave depressed? Because when you play a note that doesn’t bloom, you get discouraged and you start to get nervous and you begin to over-play…
“And so with [developing this amp] we had it up against some really, really big amps like Dumble Steel String Singers – and we’re going, ‘This is actually tighter.’ And we were running back and forth with [designer] Doug Sewell, soldering right there… until it had the Fender-like ‘bounce’ but it had that Dumble percussiveness. Because that’s the thing about Dumbles that people love and I actually think Stevie Ray Vaughan wrote some stuff around that [quality]. Also, amps like Dumble Steel String Singers and Overdrive Specials drive fantasy – but only a few people have access to them. So we were interested in opening the door to that kind of [sonic performance]. And that’s what I think was really interesting, to be the test-subject for an amp, so it wasn’t just about the spec but really playing over and over. It’s either there or it’s not – but we got it to be there.”
Fans will still need to dig deep for a J-MOD100, however, as there’s a very limited run of the 6L6-powered, singlechannel head and each costs £6,495. Happily, PRS says some of the R&D learnings were later applied to its new, keenly priced Sonzera amps (see p66).