The PRS Silver Sky is the result of a close collaboration between Grammy Award-winning musician John Mayer and Paul Reed Smith. More than two and half years in the making, the Silver Sky is a vintage-inspired instrument that is at once familiar but also newly PRS through and through. This model was based off of Mayer and Smith’s favorite elements from 1963 and 1964 vintage instruments, resulting, as company informs, in an idealized version of a vintage single-coil guitar.
“It’s been a dream of mine for years to design a guitar that includes some of my favorite vintage specifications but with a modern spirit and aesthetic. After two years of study and refinement, the Silver Sky is my vision of what a reboot of the electric guitar should look and feel like.” – John Mayer
The most distinctive elements of instrument are: PRS headstock, tuners, neck and fretboard, bridge, and pickups and electronics.
Characteristic shape of PRS headstock is remaining in this model, but it has been inverted to adjust Mayer playing style and also to keep a consistent length of string behind the nut, which makes staying in tune easier. Traditional vintage style tuners are equipped with PRS’s locking design. Neck shape was modeled in style of old, vintage instruments from ’60 (its named 635JM), and fretboard has a 7,25″ radius. Similar to tuners, steel tremolo bridge making up classical appearance, but incorporates PRS’s trem arm and Gen III knife-edge screws. The bridge on the Silver Sky is setup flush to the body in the neutral position so that the tremolo bridge only goes down in pitch. By keeping the bridge in contact with the body, the guitar itself is acoustically louder, which improves the signal to noise ratio of the single-coil pickups -in this case three 635JM ones.
The PRS Silver Sky features alder body, maple neck and rosewood fretboard, with common for PRS bird inlays, and 22 frets – bit smaller than in other PRS models. Other components are bone nut, molded jack plug, modern knobs and double-action truss rod. 635JM pickups are controlled by five-way switch and one volume plus two tone pots. Measure equals 25,5″.
The PRS Silver Sky has a John Mayer signature placed on backplate, and is available in four different color versions: Tungsten, Frost, Horizon and Onyx.