Gibson! Fender! Ibanez! BC Rich! Everyone loves, or likes, at least one of these makes of guitar. O.K that’s a bit of an overstatement, but you get my drift. Certainly Fender and Gibson, the two leading manufacturers in solid body electric guitars since 1951, will probably go down on peoples 'like’ list, or at least one of them. But in the mid 1980’s a man named Paul Reed Smith was making guitars hand made, about once a month. He would make a sale about once every ten nights, each guitar was field tested at gigs. He made deals, and now has his masterpieces produced in factories in the U.S. and Korea.
Why this article then? Well when you ask a 14-year-old boy who is twiddling about on his Jap-o-caster in the school music room- smashing out
Teen Spirit and
Smoke On The Water incorrectly (a few of my friends come to mind)- what guitar do you want when you get some money, they will say that one; pointing at picture of a
Les Paul, a
Strat, an
SG, or a
Telecaster, because
Page or
Hendrix or
Young or
John 5 plays one. And no one points at a
Custom 22 or 24. By just looking at the specifications of these guitars we can see that the
PRS surely reigns supreme, and when you play a
Custom 22, as I have, the contest is no longer existent. The
PRS beats the
Gibson or
Fender hands down on sound in the case of
Fender and playability in the case of
Gibson.
O.K. so the incredible price tag of a Custom 22 might put you off a bit, about £2000, compared to the grand you will pay for a Strat or a Les Paul, and not many teenage kids are fans of Santana (PRS user), but you get so much more in sound, features, build quality and variety. Also, whilst the now common place Tele or SG will go down in value, a PRS can only go up if kept in good condition. PRS have been known to chuck unsatisfactory guitars away after production.
Still scared of the price tag? Well after you have learnt some scales and now play Smoke On The Water with double stops in G minor and not power chords in A, including the solo, a now 15-16 year old will be fed up of his Strat copy. He/she (don’t want to be sexist) will look for a better quality, pricier guitar that they can gig with. A Custom 22 is out of the question, unless you are child to Bill Gates, but the SE range from PRS offers possibly the best value for money I have seen in guitars (apart from a story I heard about a man who got a second hand ’53 Strat for £80). The SE EG, Soapbar, Santana, Tremonti and Billy Martin all retail for about £500, half the price of a Les Paul or Strat, and are so much better than the Epiphone Les Paul or most Ibanezes at this price. The mahogany neck and body, rosewood fret board, immaculate sound, and the only real reason that they are priced so low is because of the place of manufacture. So they may not have the build quality of U.S. made guitars, but it’s more than satisfactory. I have a Soapbar and it hasn’t failed me, and doesn’t show any signs of doing so.
Sadly the Soapbar and Tremonti were removed from production and front line sales because Gibson sued PRS on account that the single cut bodies of the two guitars were rip offs of the Les Paul. They had a point. Luckily PRS have re-released the Soapbar with a double cutaway body to play it safe.
So in conclusion, this article was just trying to impress on you how PRS is so much overlooked by people who want a new guitar. In my opinion they offer so much more than a Gibson or Fender, and hopefully Paul Reed Smith guitars are here to stay.
PS. Sorry about the English in this article if it’s bad, I only really try to make my English good in English lessons.
