Paul Reed Smith

"Paul is as eccentric as all hell, but I love him as human being," says Mayer with genuine affection. "We talk all the time. I now know the more exacerbated and annoyed he sounds, the more fun he's having. I'll suggest something, and he'll grunt and groan, 'Aw, hmmm, errr, okay, just let me think about it.' I'll respond, don't worry, we don't have to do that. And he'll say, 'What, are you kidding, I love every second of this!' "

Q: What is the best decision you made on the Silver Sky and what would you change now?

Best decision: pickguard shape. I worked on that for a long time.

Okay let's real-talk this: if I knew the radius was gonna turn some people into a spec-wreck, I probably would have gone 9.5" radius? It seems to matter to them more than me?

DD: When you first went out you have that custom-made Paul Reed Smith and it had a tremolo, but you never use tremolo.

JM: But I use tremolo as like shocks in a car. So when you bend a note, it comes up the slightest bit. 

DD: Right. It’s softer. It pulls a little bit.

JM: It's like an air ride—but the Paul Reed Smith—so the guitars kind of follow my understanding of Jerry's playing. And I think it's one of the hardest to nail down sounds because it's so complex, and it gets misconstrued and mis—in it's replication. It's so broad and interesting and vast that if you start listening to other people play it, it loses something in translation immediately because it's impossible to clone it.  

DD: Right, like [Steve] Kimock doing his dead thing, Trey doing his—all the different guys. 

JM: If you asked me what I thought Jerry's playing was like listening to the same versions of songs I would have told you well it's "pling pling pling pling pling," and then as I got more into it I'm like, it's actually kind of a Gibson PAF and a lot of that. 

DD: Right.

JM: And a lot of times we thought he was playing the bridge because it was really bright sounding—nope, it was the neck. 

DD: That's wild. I've noticed on your first tour your guitar was pretty bright, and on this last tour you went—I talked to your tech. Not Rene [Martinez], but the other guy.

JM: Jeremy. 

DD: And he said you just grabbed this time a stock Paul Reed Smith at the shop—you went “this is the one," and that fucking guitar and that amp—it was the best tone I’ve heard in years. And let me tell you this—and not to blow smoke up your ass—I've been to thousands of shows, I've seen everyone, and I thought it was some of the best guitar playing I’ve ever seen. At the two Hollywood Bowl gigs [June 3-4, 2019].

JM: Those were special shows.

DD: The Citi Field [June 29, 2019] shows, and both Boulder shows [July 5-6 2019]—particularly the rain night. 

JM: Yes.

DD: And I was like, This tone and this playing, and the third—I guess we're in the third, fourth year.

JM: Yeah, we're in the fourth now.

DD: Fourth—so I was like, This could be some of the greatest music I've ever seen.

JM: Well thank you. And it's me figuring out what these notes really mean, what they really are. And on first pass you're like, oh I think I know how to do this. So a lot of the first few tours were out of phase positions. That's what I thought they were. Well okay, I thought he must be playing out of phase. So there was the two and the four positions, but that's actually too quacky. So a lot of those early Dead and Company shows I'm playing middle/bridge. So I’m playing between the middle and the bridge, and I've got a preamp on—cause I thought he had a preamp on. Well he's got a unity gain buffer, not really a preamp. Well we had to learn that. We had to figure that out. I'm also not trying to like copy it. But what I need to get is a tone enough so that I don't have to overplay and that I can play that much without people fatiguing.

JM: I battled it for half the night and I think by the end of the night I got it to move the way I wanted it to move. But it was tricky because I also have this PRS 594.

DD: That plays like a mother fucker.

JM: That plays like a Ferrari! [Laughs]

DD: Yeah right behind ya!

JM: So this thing plays like a Ferrari, I'm playing Wolf, which—it was a molecular honor, like down to the molecule it was an honor. I mean, this guitar was animated, it was anthropomorphized, you know. And I sort of played—it was the lead singer and I was the guitar.

PRS: But you know we pride ourselves in trying to take care of our artists, anyway so then—the way I tell the story—is that you needed a tool to do a job and you showed up several times to look at all the neck shapes, all the scale links, every different pickup we made, you tried everything in every position—you started to rearrange the legos until we started to hone it in and make prototypes. And what you needed was a tool to do that job and the first time I walked on the stage and you had that those two tops and those two 410 cabinets and that guitar, and it sounded exactly like you needed it to to get that whole ball rolling. I was—oh my god John thanks for giving us the nod and the chance to do it because I never had the chance with him.

JM: Yeah well yeah, and thank you for helping me kind of carry a thing forward without—I just didn't want to be holding a guitar that looked exactly like it, you know the one Jerry was playing. You know, I mean, that's been the whole puzzle is how do you pay respect to it without standing too squarely inside of the silhouette of the thing. And the really fun part of that for both of us was figuring out well what makes that sound what are the variables that contribute to that sound sounding like that: scale length, [...]

PRS: You don't know this—I called Jimmy Herring and we both went: “middle pickup."

JM: Middle pickup, that's right. In fact, on the middle pickup, when I played Wolf the only pickup that was really working was the middle pickup. And when I say working, I don't mean working for me, I mean like operational. So the neck pickup—how to shorten it—I think it was only one wire was because, you know, obviously nobody wants to sort of touch it and the bridge pickup was I think a little kind—of what you call well it was a little bright—you call it ice picky. And the middle pickup—now I'm not a middle guy. My entire life has been about taking out the mids and you actually turned me on to musical mid-range. And I had never experienced. 

To me—and I think a lot of guitar players—mid-range is kind of like this scientific kind of spike in a thing that you're supposed to need. Because I guess it like helps everything else around it move forward, and you turned me on to the idea of mid-range being a musical thing. And now with Dead & Co, at least, I spend most of my time on the middle pickup. And now I'm, you know, recording guitar on records where I could give me the middle pickup right because the middle—and help me with this on a scientific level because I'm not an engineer on this level—the middle pickup is like the truest pickup, is it not?

So let's just get right to it: ln the video for the first single from Sob Rock, "Last Train Home," you're playing your signature PRS Silver Sky model, but in a never-before-seen pink finish. Is that a real thing?

Well, it's a real thing in the sense that I have one. As to whether or not it's a real thing in terms of other people having one? It's definitely being talked about. The fun of having Silver Sky as a project that I can always be working on is that I can test colors out on myself. And in the last couple of years I've fallen in love with the L.A. session-guitar concept. Like, the old Valley Arts guitars, they're all sort of these great shades of pink. And I just think there's something really cool about a pink guitar. So I thought, Well, why don't I do a pink one for this record? Sort of to help tell a little more of a visual story of the music. It's really fun to just shoot a color on a guitar and go, 'How does this make me feel?' I had no idea people would gravitate to it like they have.

People dig it.

Actually, the pink guitar in the video is hot pink, and it's actually too hot. So we went with a cooler pink that I can use going forward. That seems to be the magic slipper, color-wise. I wouldn't have wanted to 'begin Silver Sky with a pink guitar, but we're enough years down the road that we can go a little "out there" on a couple colors while still keeping the identity of what this guitar is intact. And, of course, I'm nowhere near the first person to do a pink guitar. But I think it just aligns with this idea of making your own fun, and of having more fun than we've ever had before and taking advantage of the life that's been handed back to us, hopefully not provisionally.

Q: are you and prs working on anything new?

A: Always. I'd say there's about a running three-year outlook.

A super fun story to keep unfolding.