[...]
Jeff Ross: You designed a guitar?
John Mayer: Yeah.
JR: This is wild because you always had this one kind of guitar, as long as I can remember. And then one day, I saw, PB—
JM: PRS. You can say I redesigned a guitar, right? I've been a Fender guy my whole life. And—
JR: Was this your idea?
JM: Yeah, yeah, year. For years—I had like a Fender signature series Stratocaster. We love Mike Eldred. Which, I think, for me, when Mike Eldred left that was the beginning of the end of that era, where artists really had people to talk to at that company.
JR: Oh, I found the part you're going to be mad about on your ride home.
JM: This part right here? Oh, I don't have a problem with that.
And I would talk to Fender and go like, Hey I have this idea for more than a signature model. And they never really bit. And by the way, I never was like, Well how dare you not take my idea. I never had an issue with that whatsoever. But I wanted to go somewhere they'd take my ideas. I was like, Hey let's freshen up the electric guitar. It's still ridiculously tied to vintage car and surf culture. And there's absolutely a place for it. But sixty years later you're still putting out these tributes to the station wagon, you know, when it comes to the design language of the guitar.
And so basically, like, I took those ideas to PRS, because Paul Reed Smith is the guy who started the company and he's still there. And I talked to him daily. And it's like the relationship I used to have with Mike over at Fender which is like, you call someone up and you have ideas and you share them and they're not afraid to turn the CNC machine on and build you the thing you're talking about.
And this is always a difference between someone working at a company who loves what they do and then like a venture capital company coming in and buying the thing. Cause one day you'll call up and you'll go like, Hey can I get one that's got a whole rosewood neck, and they'll go, Yeah, it says here you already got two this year, and our contract was for two. So I'm gonna have to charge you.
It's like, No, don't line item this. Mike would send me a thing and then we would do something together off of that that would make you guys really happy at the end of the year.
So now I do it over at Paul Reed Smith and it's not really like thumbing my nose at Fender. I mean, how are you going to get mad at the company. You'd be like, No more JimI Hendrix I can't [go], I'm boycotting. Mute JimI Hendrix because he played a Stratocaster.
JR: It's gotta be fun to play something you thought up
JM: Well so now I'm playing this thing that's a hundred percent mine and—
JR: It doesn't affect your playing or your mood or it's affected my overthinking because it's like you you'll cook for yourself all day and night it doesn't matter how it tastes, but as soon as you're cooking for other people you start getting paranoid about every variable of the meal.
But I've gotten to a point where it feels so good now that I'll never again have a number one guitar. It's like a basketball player just changing in and out of shoes. I could play a show, I could hand someone my guitar I played that night at the end of the show and then just get another one and play just the same way on that guitar because it's bespoke for me. So for the first time I could go to a Guitar Center and pull a guitar off the wall and it would feel just like the one I had for 20 years. Which is super cool.
It's called the Silver Sky.
JR: It comes in many colors. PRS guitars. Vomit yellow. Chicken parmesan. [Laughter]
JM: Wouldn't that be a cool color? [Laughing] Chicken parmesan metallic.
JR: And there's one that has the ceiling from Cantor's.
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