By: Matt Warnock
Paul Reed Smith hardly needs an introduction. He is the man behind one of the most successful guitar companies of all time, with an artist roster that already includes the likes of Carlos Santana, Orianthi, Howard Reese and Tim Mahoney, and that seems to be growing by the week. Millions of players around the world have come to know and love PRS guitars, and over the decades the company has developed an army of devoted dealers, distributors, fans and players.
Sensing this giant family that has formed around PRS, Paul recently began to open up the company’s factory in Stevensville, Maryland for three days each year to dealers, distributors and the press in a giant event that they have aptly titled Experience PRS. The weekend is growing in popularity every year, and with a long list of celebrity guests, the unveiling of new guitars and amps, as well as masterclasses, product demonstrations and tours, it’s no wonder that more and more people are making the trek to PRS’ home base each fall to gather in celebration of these fine guitars and the people who make them.
Guitar International sat down with Paul Reed Smith at Experience PRS to talk about Orianthi, the new PRS models this year and blurring the lines of sound and expectations.
Paul Reed Smith Performing at Experience PRS
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Matt Warnock: Congrats on the great event, this is excellent!
Paul Reed Smith: Yeah, the first one was 700, then 1300 people, the next one was 1700, and this is 2500 people.
Matt:Is this where you saw Experience PRS going when you started this, to be a big event like this, or did you want it small?
Paul Reed Smith: I was trying to figure out this morning what the message is. Why are we doing this? It’s clear, we think something magic’s going on here, with the amplifiers, with the acoustics, the guitars, the skill level of the employees, all that stuff. You can’t really say, “We think something magic’s going on here,” but in the end if you hear something beautiful, or you see something beautiful or you play something beautiful, or Martin Simpson does something beautiful on the slide that just sounds like Dark Side of the Moon with the reverb and echo. There was a lot of “What was that?” yesterday. [Laughs]
The recording thing downstairs, they’re getting stupid sounds with $300 Craigslist rigs, you’re not supposed to be able to do that! The truth is Paul Rodgers is singing into a [Shure SM]57 but it sounds like Paul Rodgers singing into a C12, so it’s still Paul Rodgers. A good sounding amp is a good sounding amp. I like the message. I like that we’re all proud that something special is going on here. All businesses have their troubles, but we’re good guitar makers. I think that’s the message that was coming across yesterday.
Why are we cutting up guitars in front of the stage and handing pieces out, to show you how thin it is, right? Why are we doing this? Why are we comparing brand new guitars to old guitars? Well if a guitar is a day old and it can compete with something that’s 50 years old in the beginning of its life, it’s like having a baby and putting it out with Tiger Woods. [Laughs]
Very interesting event. Some days I enjoy, some days I don’t, and yesterday I enjoyed because of the feeling that the audience and the artists were bringing to the table. I really liked it. In the rock business there’s kind of a rule that I’ve come up with: Bad soundcheck, good gig. Good soundcheck, be scared.
We had a horrible soundcheck. Everything was going wrong, but it was behind the scenes and the team wasn’t showing it. There’s a rule, right? “If you swim with sharks, don’t get bit. If you get bit, don’t bleed. If you bleed, don’t let anybody see it.” We were bleeding everywhere, but nobody saw it, there was no blood in the water. Nobody had any idea. Bev came to me and said, “If you had any idea all the things I’m hearing in my ear piece…” It was seamless to everybody. That was really cool.
Bev is our event coordinator. She’s the manager of this thing. I think it was her shining moment, in a way, to have so many things behind the scenes almost go wrong, but fix them. It was just people attacking things. We had a problem last night. There was a sub feeding bass into all the microphones, and we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from no matter how many sliders we turned down on the PA. The bass was thundering, but we finally figured it out. It didn’t stop the magic in the room.
Matt: I think that’s what makes this event unique. You’re giving back to your dealers and your players with the concerts and the masterclasses. There are the new products being launched and there’s excitement about that. It’s kind of like an Apple meeting like that, when Steve Jobs gets up there and he’s like “Here are all our new projects,” and he’s giving back.
Paul Reed Smith: I don’t know about comparing anything here to my hero. I mean, he’s fundamentally changed the experience of every kid in every school. My kid had to buy an iPod to be accepted in his class. I’m sorry, PRS can’t touch that. That’s huge. [Laughs]
But when you say “dealers”, it’s distributers, dealers, customers, artists, and press. It’s a complete blur of lines. The only thing that keeps us safe is that we’re wholesalers. We don’t do what a lot of other companies do and open a PRS store. If we blurred that line it would be a different ball game. That clarity keeps everything else OK.
Then it’s OK for us to talk to customers cause we’re not gonna sell to them. We can talk to anybody, pretty much. I don’t know if it’s a dealer, I don’t know if it’s a distributer. I don’t know if it’s the best dealer in Italy. I don’t know if it’s a customer. I don’t know. I can tell from the accent when I started talking to them.
Did you see the cell phone thing yesterday? Guy was complaining to 800 people that he couldn’t buy a guitar cause his wife wouldn’t let him. Put her on the cell phone. [Laughs] She was a good sport about it, the place was howling, she could hear the whole thing. It was just like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, let’s call a friend. [Laughs]
Which reminds me; Tom Johnston of the Doobie Brothers released a record the other day and sent he me a copy. He called me in the middle of a thing and I put him on the PA.
Paul Reed Smith and Martin Simpson Live
Matt: As a player and someone who owns a PRS, one of the really cool things about this event for me was seeing you play because…
Paul Reed Smith: I only played one tune.
Matt: You played a couple.
Paul Reed Smith: I played “Imagine,” that’s about it.
Matt: Yeah, but the other one you were playing on a little bit. But to see you up there and talk the talk, walk the walk… If you buy from other guitar makers, you don’t see them getting up there and playing the instruments and having good tone, saying, “You know what? Our guitars have good tone, and here it is.” I thought that for me as a player and someone who owns your guitars, that’s the reason these guitars sound good. He’s still connected to the instrument, connected to the music. Can you talk about that relationship to your guitars?
Paul Reed Smith: Sure, but I’m gonna preface it by saying you gotta remember that Ted McCarty and Leo Fender didn’t play guitar. I mean Larry Thomas is running Fender now, and he’s the first guitar player to ever run that company, and they’re an icon in the business. Let’s just make that clear. What they did was interview every artist constantly about what it is they wanted. That piece I got. I interview David Grissom or whoever constantly about what they want.
The piece of the puzzle that I think is there, and it’s a difficult piece for everybody here, is that because I’m a guitar player, sometimes I’ll pay attention to my own opinion more than I’ll pay attention to everybody else. And the problem is, and this has been stated from day one, if somebody brought me a guitar much better than one we’d made, I’d play it. And that’s a constant competitive thing that’s going on here. Some new greenhorn shows up with something special and I like it better than one we made, I got a problem on my hands because I’m a musician, too. You said something nice to me about my playing, but I’m not really a professional. I’m a hobbyist. I have to hire people to play with me. They do not pay me to play with them.
Although, Gary Grainger is playing in the band, it’s debatable where he is in the list, but he’s absolutely in the top 5. I saw him and Marcus Miller play next to each other the other night. There was no level change. So that part makes me feel good. I think it really helps that we play guitar, but you gotta remember our history is not that way.
Did Christian Martin play guitar? Chris plays piano. Bob Taylor plays guitar. Here’s one for you: Grover Jackson’s a very good guitar player. Most people don’t know that Grover plays. There are a lot of good players at Fender. I don’t know much about the stable guitar players at Gibson, cause I tried to get a tour once and I was told no. [Laughs] There are some very good guitar players in this industry. You know who’s a really good guitar player? Alexander Dumble. So he’s got that piece you’re talking about. He knows when he’s playing through the amps what’s going on.
For us, we’re accepted in the guitar market, I know that. We’re just now in this moment, getting accepted into the acoustic business. We’re just starting, and watching those guitars through the PA system just plugged in to the tail, not sounding like piezo-quack.
The amplifiers, we’re trying to get accepted into that market. It’s just the very little teeny beginnings of starting to happen. I thought that the amps in the recording thing last night… it should be filmed, it’s really cool. And that’s coming along, but to get accepted, you have to get artists much happier with that piece of gear than anything else they have. Not just a little happier even, they have to be much happier.
Orianthi at Experience PRS
Matt: I want to ask you about the new archtop that you have…
Paul Reed Smith: Did you play one?
Matt: Yes, I did.
Paul Reed Smith: And what was your experience.
Matt: I’m a jazz player and I really liked it. But I’m curious, because I play a jazz player but I play a McCarty. I play traditional bebop jazz on a solid body.
Paul Reed Smith: The line’s getting very blurred here, right?
Matt: It’s kind of advertised as a jazz guitar, but when you think of PRS you think of a guitar that’s versatile. I have friends who are bebop players that play Modern Eagles.
Paul Reed Smith: Look, Derek St. Holmes was the first person to play the JA15 on stage last night, and played it on a Meters tune through a recording amp. I hope the line gets blurred.
Emil Werstler plays tonight, who plays a hollow-body, and he’s a shredder. People are like “You can’t do that,” and he’s like “I am. Listen to this.” So maybe the JA15 will capture your heart, maybe it won’t. What was your experience? Was it, I really like it, it’s OK, it’s a bad one. What was your thought when you put it down.
Matt: My thought was that this is a good guitar. I didn’t think, “If I was going to go to play a bebop gig this is the guitar I’d use.” It was more, “If I was going to go to play a gig this is the guitar I’d use.” Is that what you envision when you design new models that the line should be blurred? Or like this is an archtop, so it’s for this specific kind of thing.
Paul Reed Smith: No, no, absolutely blurred, blurred, blurred. But Paul Jackson Jr. and I, it’s his model, decided that if we were gonna do this, we weren’t gonna build an archtop, we wanted to build the best one you could possibly buy. There was a lot of questioning about the size. Was it as big as a Super 400, the size of a New Yorker, the size of a George Benson… We went with 15”. Then how were we gonna brace it? Were we gonna glue the braces? We ended up carving them in, right? Spruce top. Are we gonna put a sound post in, which most archtops don’t have? We decided we wanted to put a really small one behind the bridge so the thing could be played loud.
It was OK for it to not have a whole lot of bass, because you can get bass from the pickup and the amps, but it needed to be reverberant. That was your experience when you played it.
Matt: That’s why I liked it. It didn’t sound like, I’ve played Gibson’s and after six months I trade them in, because it’s really hard to get that low end to sound clean. That guitar yesterday, I was walking basslines and comping and doing all the low stuff with the chords, and it never got to the point where I was like “I can’t play on this area of the guitar.”
Paul Reed Smith: That’s the soundpost, holding the top to the back, but it’s not doing it under the bridge, it’s behind the bridge. We moved it so it’s still vibrating, but the lockdown is a little bit back. The strength of something moves by the square, so you move it a little bit, and it really starts to let it go. It’s the physics of it. We moved it back just enough that the top was moving underneath the pickups and the bridge. I’m glad you liked it.
You know everybody had an opinion, but I had about six people come up to me about the Quatro last night. They were like “I plugged the Quatro in and I have to have one.” It’s like the silent ringer of the show. Cause it’s got the 5310 pickups in it and the rosewood neck and it’s just…
It’s interesting because there’s been no push on the Quatros at all. Nobody’s said a word except that they’re sitting there. It’s in the magazine, but we’re not pushing them. “That’s our Quatro,” and then we shut up and go onto the next one. Obviously we’re pushing the DC3’s because we think we’ve got something really special there. Howard Reese was like “I did not expect that.” He plugged a Quatro into a 25th Anniversary top, and he said it sounded like all the records he recorded years ago. That was a nice moment. I thought yesterday was fun. I thought it was good fun.
Did you catch us tossing the guitar?
PRS JA15
Matt: No we were in a different part of the factory then.
Paul Reed Smith: You missed us tossing the guitar!
Matt: I know! There’s too much going on! [Laughs]
Paul Reed Smith: We even practiced it. That’s an old Dice-Clay line “I see you’ve been practicin’!” We got to the point where we figured out how to launch a guitar all the way up into the top of the tent and not have it hit the ground. Turns out it’s much easier to catch something when it’s a fly ball than when it’s a line drive. A line drive’s like this, right, you don’t know how to judge it, but when something’s coming down, you got lots of time.
Matt: One of the highlights I’m sure for you was seeing Orianthi perform. You’ve known her since she’s been so young, you’ve seen her grow as an artist, and you’ve helped her out. I’m just curious, with your guitar building, you’re able to have a vision a guitar that’s ahead of its time, and you see all these artists when they’re young…
Paul Reed Smith: I’m not sure I wanted it to be ahead of its time. It’s about paying attention to the past and making the modifications so that people don’t have the same problems in the future. For example, on a ’57 Strat there was no tone control on the treble pickup. That Strat has a ridiculous amount of high end, so a lot of the guys would rewire their tone controls to get rid of those problems.
I didn’t see it as some sort of thing for the future, I saw it as a modification of all the things I’ve leaned on my repair bench. If you watch Eric Johnson‘s video on how to play, he’ll show you Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix and a bunch of other jazz musicians playing, and he’ll show you the four main influences and how he melded them together. To him he’s just melding four styles together and then trying to play his butt off. It’s the same thing with guitars. We’re melding a bunch of the stuff from the past and using what works. Should be that way for anything, whether it’s a piece of electronics or a car or a race car, or any art form. You really want to put 5 wheels on a race car? I think history says 4 works.
I didn’t see it as some sort of vision for the future. I saw it as a tool for musicians to use. At the time, when the whole thing was designed, people were picking Strats up for rhythm tracks and Les Pauls for lead tracks, that’s what was happening.
Matt: To finish up on Orianthi, was it a proud moment for you to see her with Michael Jackson on the movie?
Paul Reed Smith: That was cool! I saw the movie and I welled up. I welled up and went, “She returned the favor.” Cause I had brought her and brought her and brought her here, and with the Michael Jackson movie she absolutely handed it all back on a silver platter.
That was so cool when they were goin’ at it in the movie. That was really cool. What courage! What courage to be facing him, and she didn’t know they were filming a movie, I mean they were just filming it. They probably wouldn’t have released it if he hadn’t passed. That was very cool, I liked it.
The whole Orianthi thing… Did you ever see Iron Man? Remember when they coach him on what to say and at the end of the movie he goes, “Eh, I’m Iron Man.” I love that irreverent moment. Part of why she got that record deal was from “Lights of Manos” the first tune she played, which was spectacular last night. She doesn’t play it anymore. They’ve got her on this pop thing. Bless her heart, she’s got a hit record. I mean there are versions of that tune on the radio that are dance, without a guitar solo. These people know what they’re doing. It’s just ridiculous, right. I’m sorry. I think she should be doing that stuff, those big, open chords where she’s playing…
I basically said, “You’re playing ‘Lights of Manos’ tonight” and she went, “OK.” And then she played “Voodoo Chile”. She’s getting more aggressive and less timid. It wasn’t male energy that was coming out of her but it was strong stuff last night. She turned that crowd on, bless her heart. She turned the crowd on. That’s saying something all by itself. She’s supposed to play again tonight, so we’ll see what happens. It was nice that you bring her up.
Look. She goes on American Idol, stands on the thing behind the judges, and she’s the one that starts the Alice Cooper tune. She plays, debatably, the best solo on the Grammy’s that year. She’s really good in the Michael Jackson movie, and she’s just playing a solo. She’s really good in those short moments, too, where he’s going, “Whoa! What was that?” and it’s gone. She’s really good at that.
She’s got a look. She’s doing all right. She had a tail, did you see this shit? [Laughs] I’m glad she’s here. And by the way, do you know how many people try to hand her other makers’ guitars? Try to push them on her. I think she’s been deeply loyal. Wow. She grew up on a PRS. She’s not gonna do anything else. It’s just within her bones. I mean, Jimmy Page has been playing Les Pauls his whole life, it’s in his bones. Most people don’t know that the solo in “Whole Lotta Love” was a Telecaster that’s true, right, the amp was in the bathtub and he was sitting on the toilet. [Laughs]
