PRS John Mayer Silver Sky Electric Guitar
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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 favourite elements from 1963 and 1964 vintage instruments, resulting in an idealized version of a vintage single-coil guitar. The attention that was paid to every detail sets this guitar apart. Some of the more distinctive specifications include, the headstock shape, tuners, neck and fretboard, bridge, and pickups and electronics.
The headstock design came about because with Mayer’s style of playing, he needed some extra clearance on the underside just past the nut. What he discovered was by flipping the trademark PRS shape, he got that clearance and an exclusive look for his signature model. The added benefit of this design is that it maintains a good length of string behind the nut, which helps the guitar stay in tune.
The tuners are a traditional vintage-style, closed-back tuner, but with all the PRS “tweaks” used on their proprietary tuners. These have PRS buttons, brass washers, and the PRS locking mechanism. Sometimes vintage tuners don’t work very well – they have trouble staying in tune and the design to hold the tension was not consistent (therefore the sustain suffered). The tweaks made by PRS address these issues.
The neck is a 22-fret bolt-on maple neck with a slab East Indian rosewood fretboard, 7.25” radius and small bird inlays. Modelled after 1963/1964 vintage instruments, the moment your hand grabs this neck, it just feels right.
Like the tuners, the steel tremolo takes a classic design and incorporates PRS’s trem arm and Gen III knife-edge screws. The arm is PRS’s design, so it is unthreaded and features a small set screw that allows the player to customize the feel of the arm and find a comfortable playing position. It also does not break off in the bridge like some older tremolo designs
At John Mayer’s request, the Silver Sky tremolo bridges are setup differently than PRS normally sets up tremolo guitars. PRS’s standard set-up allows for the tremolo to go up in pitch a little bit and down in pitch a lot. This instrument is set-up so that the back edge of the tremolo plate rests on the body in the neutral position and the tremolo bridge only goes down in pitch. The reason for this type of tremolo set-up is so that the bridge plate is in contact with the body in the at-rest position. This helps with how loud the guitar is acoustically and improves the signal to noise ratio of the single coil pickups.
PRS has a long history of naming pickups after the year that inspired their tone. For these, like the neck shape, it was a mix of 1963 and 1964, so the 635 (“six thirty-five”) name came from thinking of that as 1963 ½. The 635JM pickups were designed to sound like vintage pickups but use everything PRS has learned to make them the best they could be. This means that the sometimes “ice-picky” sound that vintage single coils can have has been addressed beautifully, so these pickups maintain a musical high end.
Other high-quality specifications include a bone nut, a moulded metal jack plate that is curved and makes plugging and unplugging a guitar cable hassle-free, retooled knobs, fretwire that is slightly smaller than what you’d find on most PRS electric guitars, and PRS’s double action truss rod (accessible from the front of the headstock for ease of use). The Silver Sky comes in four colours with distinctive accents on PRS’s trademark lower horn scoop.
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