ARTISTIC LICENCE

Rob Carhart is director of new products engineering at PRS. Here, he explains how the Fiore’s spec got settled

Why did you end up choosing swamp ash for the body of Mark’s guitar?

“I think that came from Mark, with his familiarity with that wood and guitars that he had played in the past – it was one of his choices. Any time there’s a request for a specific material, we want to accommodate the artist, but we also have to take a look at long-term availability and manufacturability. So, obviously, we’ve worked with swamp ash before and we still do on various Wood Library instruments, Private Stocks, limited runs, and, of course, the run of swamp-ash specials that we’ve had over the years. Mark liked the qualities of that wood and the kind of response and snappiness that’s associated with guitars that have been produced in the past using that material. So that was relatively quickly decided as a platform for us to go forward with.”

It seems as though PRS is taking more interest in single-coil, bolt-on electrics. Are these types of guitar a growing priority for the company?

“That’s an excellent question. The Fiore is a wonderful instrument, so I think it’s going to be a very popular guitar as we build more of these and get them out there. And the John Mayer Silver Sky has been a great product for us as well. Personally, I’m happy that we have opened the door to these types of designs. It may have been a different story if we were in, say, the first 10 years of our history [as a company] versus being 30-plus years into the process… I feel that one of the main goals of this place, if not the main goal, is to really manufacture the best guitars that we possibly can. “So I think whatever that platform it is going to be based on – whether it was a humbucking guitar or three-single-coil guitar or, in this case with Mark’s, the single-single-hum’ – we wanted to do the best possible version we could. For us to go into a new realm that we really hadn’t been in heavily before makes me very happy because I think we get to offer people who are interested in that type of guitar a PRS version that has all our quality and manufacturing processes built into it.”