About Paul Reed Smith

Guitarist, PRS Founder

Paul Reed Smith says the road to his workshop in a historic, haunted Annapolis garret to a state-of-the-art factory was a tough one. The fact is, he always loved working with his hands. Why else would a high school kid sign up for three or four shop classes at a time?

Building the concept, there were a lot of late-night brainstorms. He was lucky if he finished a guitar in a month. Once a guitar was completed, he would play it at a gig — field testing in the purest sense. Every design change taught Paul something new. The next change was to build on what he had learned from other players test driving the equipment. Over ten years the company 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.

Paul also remembers 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, he would peddle his guitars to the stars. One night in ten I would have make a sale. Carlos Santana, Al Di Meola, Howard Leese, and other well-known players agreed to check one out. It was slow, but he made deals. If someone gave him an order, made a deposit, and then didn’t love the finished guitar, he would 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, the team built two prototypes. Paul popped them in the back seat of his truck and cranked it up, calling on guitar dealers up and down the East Coast. After many days and many miles, he came back with enough orders to start a company. With the support of his wife, skilled assistants, engineers, lawyers, top salesmen, artists, machinists, and friends who emptied their bank accounts to help him get started, they developed a strong team.

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.

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.