If you could listen in on a conversation between Carlos Santana, Warren Haynes, Derek Trucks, and Paul Reed Smith, what do you think you might learn? While Santana and the Allman Brothers were on a recent tour, Paul Reed Smith sat down with this group of highly-respected guitarists to have a casual conversation about tone, finding your voice, and being a musician.

Follow the conversation as these three world-renowned musicians discuss their musical roots and how their individuality and tone developed with Paul.  The candid conversation covers many topics, but all are of interest to any musician who is serious about their art and finding or refining their own musical “voice.”

Hi everyone. When I started working on the Rules of Tone, the goal was to build “magic” instruments, and the neck is definitely paramount to that. From the moment you pick up a guitar, the neck should feel very comfortable and strong. This has to do with many factors, including wood choice, wood drying, dimensions, ratios, and our attention to detail. Today, I’d like to focus specifically on neck shapes. We currently offer Pattern, Pattern Thin, and Pattern Regular neck shapes on our Core electric models. These came about through a new method we have to design, program, and cut our necks.

 

The first thing you notice when you pick up a guitar is how it feels in your hands. The guitar neck is paramount to that moment, and the feel and function of the frets plays a major role in this. If you boil it down, we’re basically talking about fret material and shape. If the material is too soft, metal flakes will fall off of the guitar as it’s played. If it’s too hard, the frets contour to the fretboard. We use the hardest, functional material we can to avoid unnecessary re-frets.

Here is a video about the beginnings of our theories and experiential understanding of nut materials. As we said in the Rules of Tone segment on our Phase III Tuners: every part of a guitar has an effect on its overall tone. The nut is no exception.

Every part of a guitar has an effect on its overall tone. Anything a string is attached to will drain energy away from it.

Let’s consider tuners. Tuning pegs are one of only a few parts that a string actually touches, so they’re very important. If we made the entire tuning peg out of silicone rubber, would the guitar sound better?

Paul wrote the Rules of Tone over many years after a conversation he had with his father about physics. Essentially, it is a list of 21 rules of instrument making that are particular to PRS and the way we build guitars. The document is now locked away, and serves as a private record of PRS trade secrets written down to ensure that Paul’s philosophies and discoveries are never lost or forgotten. Though its title may sound restrictive, the Rules support our quest for tone by encouraging us to constantly refine our craft as builders so that we can make better and better instruments as we learn.