the Mod squad
With the release of Prs’s Paul’s Guitar, evaluated elsewhere in this issue, Dave Burrluck wonders if Paul reed smith is actually the ultimate modder…
Maybe you’re lucky enough to have a bench in a shed, but more than likely when you want to set to work on your latest crazy modding project, like me, you clear the biggest table in your house, plug in the soldering iron and open your toolbox. The majority of the time, unless we’re perhaps swapping the body or neck of a bolt-on, we’re actually fine-tuning an already constructed guitar.
It might seem that Paul Reed Smith had sorted his construction by 1991 with the first Dragon guitar. This model introduced a shorter, fatter 22-fret neck and newdesign Stoptail bridge, which led directly to the Custom 22 and, via the considerable input of David Grissom, the thickerbodied, more vintage-aimed McCarty. In reality, he’d only just begun.
Via Paul’s 21 Rules Of Tone document, a manifesto was born that still informs the recipe of the PRS guitar today. Now, while some of that document details the
“Paul’s Guitar is a great example of exemplary modding. You can trace it back to that thicker-bodied McCarty model”
direct construction of the guitar itself, there’s a lot that puts focus on the guitar’s hardware to maximise its primary acoustic voice. When the final piece of the jigsaw was put in place with a new metal-infused nut material on the 408 (in 2012), Paul commented that, “It’s the last piece of the puzzle. It’s all done.”
So, it’s off to the golf course, then, or a spot of fly fishing? No. Paul dives into all sorts of music-related projects. Talk to him about amplifiers or acoustic guitars and within seconds you feel out of your depth. Vintage microphones? Complex digital algorithms for a new method of EQ? Trust someone who has interviewed him countless times: just when you think you have the measure of the man, he’s off somewhere else. Talk to him about any aspect of the guitar and you’d better do your homework. He certainly has.
Paul’s Guitar, however, is a great example of exemplary modding. You can trace it back to that thicker-bodied McCarty. Apply those 21 Rules Of Tone, tweak the bridge with those brass inserts, tweak the 408’s neck pickup, experiment with the wiring, even the ultra-thin nitro finish (which, as any maker will tell you, isn’t easy to achieve)… But each of those ‘baby steps’ has an effect. And to put this into perspective, Paul Reed Smith isn’t just modding his guitar to impress his mates at the local blues jam. His ideas have to be developed, prototyped, engineered – all at considerable cost – and then it’s all put into production, marketed and sold. If he gets it wrong, well, I think you get the picture.
But PRS doesn’t make parts for the aftermarket. Each new design – from the lampshade knobs to the Phase III tweaked tuners or the Gen III vibrato – all have a place on a guitar and Paul very much uses those to tune each model to the nth degree. It certainly helps that he has the ears of a bat. Something that Paul will hear would take a normal person a lot longer to identify, even if they can.
Yet, increasingly it seems, the exhaustive body of work isn’t enough for some. In the past decade or so we’re seen a ground-swell of opinion that likes to waggle a finger at the larger production companies: they’re out of touch, too expensive, don’t sound good, aren’t ‘handmade’, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the independent makers, especially the smaller, often one-man boutique brigade, must be ‘better’. We screw together and fettle our partscasters on our table and many of us think we’re guitar makers. PRS, now of considerable size as a high-end production maker, is obviously in the first camp, so we all know better, right?
Reality Check
Turn the clock back to the decade before Paul went into production and you’ll get an idea of the exhaustive research he was undertaking, even then.
“I was in Root Boy Slim’s band and I changed the bridge pickup on my guitar about 50 times – every gig I went to, Orkie [John Ingram, one of Paul’s early assistants] and I made a new pickup for my guitar and the final one was what became the prototype Deep Dish II. We’d take four Gibson bobbins, saw them in half and glue them back together with Super Glue to make two deeper bobbins so we could wind more wire on. That’s why they were Deep Dish like a deep dish pizza.”
That’s modding and then some, isn’t it? 40 years on, Paul is still experimenting with and developing new pickup designs. Of course, he can afford to buy original ‘holy grails’ – such as a few sets of PAF humbuckers, even vintage guitars – as his references. He now has the help of plenty of technology, computerised coil-winding machines, engineering and electrical specialists, not least the ears of many, many guitar players whose income relies on making music. He might think he’s cracked it, but when Carlos Santana, David Grissom or John Mayer say no, well, are you going to argue with the likes of them?
Occasionally, Paul will send over some prototype pickups to me and say, “Tell me what you think.” One set of 58/14s (yes, that’s what they were called before they were launched the following year as 58/15s) duly arrived in a jiffy bag. No note; no info. I’d been trying to get a then-new S2 Singlecut Semi-Hollow to sound – to my ears and compared to quite a few other semis – ‘right’. Along with a few other tweaks I’d made to the guitar, the 58/14s were the last piece of that personal puzzle and quite a number of gigs later that guitar still sounds really good. But have I done anywhere near as much testing and research as Paul and his extended team? No. Not close. Not a fraction of close. How many of us do?
A modding project is not dissimilar to a recording project. Inevitably, you listen back to demos you did or an album you released some years before and you might go, “What the heck was I thinking?” Or you might be very pleasantly surprised: “That sounded really good.” Whichever one it is, it’s just the same as a guitar you might have modded: it was a snapshot of where you were, your taste, your skills, your experience at a point in time.
What us modders can learn from the likes of Paul Reed Smith is that constant evaluation is everything. There’s no such thing as ‘the best’ or ‘the worst’ here; it’s all about learning from playing and listening (even if you don’t have Messrs Mayer and Santana on hand to give you some feedback). What is that pickup or piece of hardware doing? It might be the right or wrong choice for your current project, but further down the line, who knows? Evaluation and experience are kings.
“What us modders can learn from the likes of Paul Reed Smith is that constant evaluation is everything”