The Journey Begins
The road from my workshop in a historic, haunted Annapolis
garret to a state-of-the-art factory was a tough one. Fact is, I always loved
working with my hands. Why else would a high school kid sign up for three or
four shop classes at a time? My first guitar was built as a challenge to my
college music professor for some credits. I got an “A” and decided to pursue my
dream of making guitars for a living.
There were a lot of late night
brainstorms. I was lucky if I finished a guitar a month. Once a guitar was
completed, I’d play it at a gig — field testing in the purest sense. Every
design change taught me something new. The next change was built on what I had
learned or on feedback from other players test driving the equipment. Over ten
years we went through three headstocks, several renditions of body shapes, many
tremolo designs, and many experiments with woods and construction methods to get
the right mix.
I remember hanging out at the local concert arenas for six
or seven hours before a show to make friends with the roadies. With a backstage
pass in hand, I’d peddle my guitars to the stars. One night in ten I’d make a
sale. Carlos Santana, Al Di Meola, Howard Leese, and other well known players
agreed to check one out. I made deals. If someone gave me an order, made a
deposit, and then didn’t love the finished guitar, I’d give them their deposit
back even if I couldn’t make my rent the next day.
After getting a small
following and orders for more than 50 guitars, we built two prototypes. I popped
them in the back seat of my truck and cranked it up, calling on guitar dealers
up and down the East Coast. After many days and many miles I came back with
enough orders to start a company. With the support of my wife, skilled
assistants, engineers, lawyers, top salesmen, artists, machinists, and friends
who emptied their bank accounts to help me get started, we developed a strong
team.
We’ve come a long way, with steady growth in factory capacity,
employees, distribution, and the number of prominent artists using our
instruments. We’re not stopping here. Every inch of your PRS guitar is based on
decades of testing, rethinking, and reinventing. We continue to push the curve
beyond what others would consider perfection. With experts to make sure the
technology is unsurpassed, and dedicated craftspeople who guarantee a finished
product you can’t keep your hands off of, we make no compromises. That’s the
story of the beginning of the journey. Not so short, but very sweet. The moral?
Believe in your dreams.
- Paul Reed Smith, 1992
The Journey Continues
If becoming the gold standard of quality in the guitar
business was a remarkable achievement for PRS, equally impressive has been its
maintaining that standard as the company has grown into a major industry
presence. While PRS’s continuing success in this regard demands a constant
re-evaluation of materials, tools, and procedures, the bottom-line goal hasn’t
changed since the days when Paul Smith hand-crafted his first instruments in an
upstairs loft: Build extraordinary guitars, guitars with magic.
National
Sales and Marketing Manager Larry Urie: “With every increase in factory size or
production output, we build in even tighter quality control to make sure our
standards remain extremely high. If anything, the quality control at PRS is
tighter than it’s ever been.”
Some companies see a public relations
benefit to invoking the romance of historic guitars from the ’50s and ’60s, but
Paul Smith knows that for the people who actually designed and built those
classic instruments (people like his mentor, Ted McCarty), PR and romance were
the furthest things from their minds. Their goal was to manufacture great
instruments, period. Build a guitar whose tone inspires you to be a better
player, whose durability will get you through a thousand gigs, whose elegance
makes it an artwork in its own right. Build a guitar that players can’t put
down, and the romance and the PR and all the rest will follow.
Paul
Smith: “We don’t do something just because that’s the traditional way. If the
best possible guitar results from using a robot for one procedure and a lot of
hand-sanding or hand-inlaying for another, then that’s how we do it. Our
tradition is a byproduct of our quality, so excellence is always the goal. We
never lose sight of that.”
Larry Urie adds: “The automation and the
individual craftsmanship go together at PRS. Using automation in one area where
it produces superior results allows us to do even more handwork and detail work
in those areas where there’s no substitute for the individual craftsman’s eye
and skill. People who tour the factory come away amazed at how much handwork
they see, and even with the machinery, it’s all dominated by the human element.
It’s all about the commitment and the judgment of a highly skilled
individual.”
In other words, even in the age of CNC machinery, the
essence of the PRS magic still comes down to a pair of hands.
Aside from
his family, friends, and business, one of the most important things in Paul
Smith’s life is his music — his songwriting, guitar playing, recording, and
performing. I mention it because Paul’s enthusiasm for killer tone and for
exhilarating music inspires a kind of top-down passion for craftsmanship that as
far as I can tell reaches to every workbench in the factory. He estimates that
80% of PRS workers are musicians; many of them gig regularly in bands. PRS
President Jack Higginbotham: “These builders have a special kind of pride, an
individual ownership of the instruments they’re making. Every one of them treats
each guitar as their own, because it is their own. It’s a very personal thing
for these builders.”
This passion for quality affects not only the work
habits of individuals but also the structure of the whole company. Paul Smith:
“We’re not organized like other companies. Every PRS craftsperson is a
self-contained quality control ‘department.’ They have a lot of authority over
their work, and if a guitar falls short in any way, they don’t pass it on to the
next stage, and they make that decision themselves. They hand guitars back and
forth all the time, and they inspect everything over and over. It’s like an old
European guild or a shop. There’s a constant ‘is this good enough?’ conversation
out there on the factory floor. So the quality control begins at the workbench.
It’s not something we overlay or tack on. It’s an integral, organic part of the
process, beginning with design and materials selection and going through every
single step in construction and testing.”
International Sales and
Marketing Manager Peter Wolf: “Another way the passion for quality drives
everything here is that although we do make our Private Stock guitars, we do not
have a custom shop the way other companies do. That’s because the whole PRS
factory is basically one big custom shop.”
I’ve had many conversations
with Paul Smith over the past 15 years or so, most of them beginning with his
asking “Guess what?” and continuing with an enthusiastic explanation of a new
discovery about tone. The latest improvement to PRS guitars could be something
as minor as the tonal effects of substituting a small part made of a different
material. Yes, Paul Smith can hear things most of us can’t hear, or can barely
hear, but what’s more remarkable is that the mechanical and engineering savvy of
Paul and his brilliant collaborators enables them to convert those observations
into improvements in PRS guitars — improvements you can hear and feel.
My
son Joe is a black belt in karate. I always assumed the black belt was the end
of the road, but he explained to me that it’s just the beginning of a new road.
I sense a similar philosophy from the people who build PRS guitars. While
players and magazine writers have been waxing eloquent for years about these
workers’ mastery of their craft, the builders see themselves as travelers only
midway on a journey of discovery. “We’re not there yet,” Paul explains. “It’s a
continuing thing. We’re never finished. It’s the quest, the challenge — that’s
what brings us to the factory every day.”
Back when he started crafting
instruments one at a time, Paul Smith was steeped in the traditions of the great
electric guitars of the ’50s and ’60s. Today he finds himself absorbed with the
traditions of another revered company — his own. While he fondly recalls the
early days of PRS, nostalgia is not a top priority. The best way he can honor
the traditions of his own past is to look forward. At PRS, yesterday always
takes a back seat to tomorrow. Paul Smith: “I am lucky to have an extremely
talented team — not just craftspeople and artists but marketers, salespeople,
programmers, administrators, and others — and everyone who works here feels the
same way: We want players to know that no matter how great that old PRS guitar
is, we’re pushing for the new one to be even better.”
- Tom Wheeler is the former editor-in-chief of Guitar Player and the author of The Guitar Book and American Guitars.