"I made the 5150 pickup. I made the 5150 guitar. I'm the one who bolted it together and got it working at Kramer" Meet The Maker: Paul Reed Smith

Meet The Maker: Paul Reed Smith | Interview

In the mid-1970s, a young musician in Maryland was hacking away at a slab of dresser wood with a pocketknife—trying to build the guitar he desperately wanted but couldn't afford. He was talented. He was obsessed. He was, frankly, a little nuts.

He still is.

Today, Paul Reed Smith—and his eponymous PRS Guitars, celebrating their 40th anniversary this year—are industry icons, with instruments wielded by everyone from Carlos Santana to John Mayer. And while the company has grown into one of the biggest names in the business, it's never lost what made it special from the start: a drive to innovate and evolve—respecting the sounds of the past while always chasing the unique tones that live in Paul's imagination.

In this edition's Meet the Maker, we sit down with Mr. PRS himself—the man behind the legend.

"I wanted really nice instruments, but I didn't have the money," Smith explains, thinking back to junior high. "So the only way I could get the gear was to make it myself—guitars, speaker cabinets, amplifiers, everything."

Smith's first builds were impressive, but forget fancy workshops—this was art school basements, salvaged dresser drawers, and repairs done for little more than the price of a pepperoni pizza.

"My first guitar? If you count putting a guitar together from existing parts, it was a bass I made in high school," he remembers. "But if you're talking about making the neck too—which is real guitar making—that happened in college, as an independent study project. My first one was rough—I made it with a pocketknife! It was a single-cutaway, single-pickup guitar."

Right from the start, he was getting attention—building rock and roll guitars next to the jewellery class.

"I think everyone was interested, even if they didn't totally get it. My art teacher, Earl Hoffman, was a big help—he guided me, lent me tools, and encouraged me."

With tonewood hardly in abundance for Smith at this point, he got creative—turning to whatever materials he could find, including a salvaged dresser drawer.

"I took a piece of a dresser. That dresser guitar was at the 40th anniversary show at NAMM. The drawer front from the underwear drawer is where it came from."

While his peers were chasing gigs, Smith was fixing headstocks for a hundred bucks a pop, just to keep the lights on.

"There was a thing at the time called a Hamilton—it was a guitar stand that folded up. If the guitar was on there and it fell off the stand, the headstock would snap off, and I had to repair it. That was a hundred-dollar repair. When I see a guitar stand, I want nothing to do with it. I'd much rather be laying the guitar on a gig bag on the drum riser or something—or just put it in the case."

The late '70s and early '80s were a wild time for guitar design: superstrats, hair metal, Floyd Rose trems everywhere. But Paul Reed Smith wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel—he just wanted to build a guitar "that could do everything."

"I loved old Les Pauls and just hoped to come close to them," Smith says. "At the time, most players would switch between a humbucker and a single-coil guitar for different tones. I thought it would be great to have a guitar that could do both. So, I designed my guitars with scale length, body shape, and pickups that sat in the middle of those two worlds—territory that hadn't been explored yet."

He chased after woods that had fallen out of favour, like curly maple—mostly spotted in violin builders' booths at NAMM, not on guitars.

"Steinberger guitars were hot, Jackson guitars were hot, Kramer guitars were hot, Aquanet hairspray was hot," Smith says with a grin. "But I always thought curly maple was cool."

Paul studied everyone—Stradivari, Leo Fender, Christian Martin, Ted McCarty, etc. He'd have the opportunity to ask former Gibson president Ted McCarty—mentor, hero, and a man Paul was proud to call a friend—about Gibson's somewhat covert use of that prized material back in the 1950s.

"I asked Ted, 'What's the deal with hiding the curly maple top on the early Les Pauls?' He said, 'We knew Leo didn't have a carving machine, and we had tested everything. A curly maple top over mahogany sounded better, and we wanted to hide the maple top. It wasn't curly at the time—the maple top from Leo—so we painted it gold so he couldn't see it at the trade show.' I said, 'But Ted, you could see the curly maple inside where the binding was.' And he goes, 'Shut up.'"

It stuck. So did the designs. But success was never a sure thing—especially without respected names bringing these instruments to life onstage. With that in mind, Paul was the guy hustling backstage at the Capital Center—sometimes dodging security, sometimes catching a break. He knew what he had was great; he just needed to get his guitars into the right hands.

"Before I gave Peter Frampton his guitar, there was about a week where I had it finished and showed it to every band that came through town—Little Feat, Nils Lofgren, Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd. I made the rounds and showed everyone. Ted Nugent was playing the Capital Center, and I managed to get backstage, showed his roadies the guitars, and eventually got introduced to Ted himself. That helped me get my foot in the door.

Frampton said he'd like me to make him a guitar, too. We discussed what he wanted, but he never called me back. I built the guitar anyway, and when he came through town again, I showed it to him. He loved it, paid me for it, and things took off from there. That was right when Peter's career was exploding."

Not every "meeting" went exactly to plan, however. "There was a time at Cole Field House at the University of Maryland where security was about to kick me out," Smith says. "Just then, I ran into Brian May, showed him the guitar, and he was interested. That kind of saved me from getting thrown out!"

Smith even made a guitar for Eddie Van Halen—although that was a few years removed from these early builds. Paul's "almost" with Eddie is the stuff of guitar lore, especially considering his history with the music icon.

"I made the 5150 pickup. I made the 5150 guitar. I'm the one who bolted it together and got it working at Kramer," Smith recalls. But a signature PRS? "Not close at all. No. I did make one for him... He was a sweetheart. He was so nice to me... It just wasn't meant to be."

Custom orders from famous friends are all well and good; however, for PRS to really grow, it needed to be in stores. Early instruments helped PRS find its feet: the original non-serial Custom and the first PRS, prototypes that would later become the core mainstays—the Standard and Custom 24. Built from necessity, they'd set the template for a new kind of guitar—aesthetic, ergonomic, and extremely versatile.

Soon, opportunity would come knocking on Paul's door (if he hadn't already sawn through it to build a guitar, of course), but it demanded a business plan.

"We needed rent, we needed to hire people, order the tooling, order the parts, order the wood, get brochures made—everything. I got the orders in November, and by about April 3rd of the next year, we got the money in the door from the investors, and we were off to the races."

The real thrill wasn't the first store sale, though—it was the first reorder. "That was the relieving moment—the reorder moment. I've seen products go out the door, dealers sell them just like that, and then not want another one."

Surprisingly, one of those PRS legends was almost lost forever. "That original Custom got stolen and returned. The person said, 'As long as I don't go to jail, I'll get you the guitar.' Which I thought was really decent, in the end. That it went away was NOT decent, but we got it back. I'm really glad we got it back."

After reorder after reorder, by the late '80s, PRS Guitars was no longer just a workshop in Annapolis—it was a full-blown factory, with the meticulous climate control and obsessive quality standards of a wine cellar.

"We have a 5,500-square-foot factory—air-conditioned, heated, and humidity-controlled—so our necks stay stable all year. If you run mahogany from 30% to 50% humidity, it'll warp, so we keep everything at about 40%."

Things scaled up fast. Early on, PRS made about 200 guitars in a good month. Then 1,000 a month. Today, with the S2 line and the hugely popular Silver Sky—which saw the brand face some controversy on launch, but also backlogs of orders the likes of which the company had never seen before—production has more than doubled, plus around another couple of thousand SE guitars a month made overseas but checked in Maryland.

What sets the best guitar brands apart is that, as their popularity and production numbers grow, quality doesn't suffer—in fact, it improves. PRS is a perfect example: today's guitars are the benchmark where high-tech precision meets hand-built craftsmanship.

"We use machines for consistency—carving tops, rounding fingerboards, carving necks, cutting out inlays. It reduces human error and speeds things up, but there's still a lot of hands-on work. I wouldn't call them handmade guitars, but I'm aiming to improve quality even further."

Long gone are the days of Paul Reed Smith sneaking backstage, hoping to spot a famous face willing to try one of his custom builds. These days, you can't walk into a festival or arena without spotting a PRS front and centre in the hands of music's biggest names—many with their own signature model. Santana, John Mayer, Mark Tremonti, Orianthi, David Grissom, Tim Pierce, Al Di Meola, Myles Kennedy, Mark Holcomb—the list goes on.

Of course, PRS has never needed an anniversary year as an excuse to unveil new and improved additions to their core lineup—but 2025 is shaping up to be a bumper year. Standout new releases like the Standard 24 Satin and the Swamp Ash Special (plus a maple-fingerboard variant) were announced at this January's NAMM show, alongside spec upgrades to the Maryland-made lineup—including the new PRS DMO pickup, EQ mini-toggles, and expanded colour options. PRS is going all out for their 40th anniversary celebration, with even more to come throughout the year.

What's the secret to PRS's success when so many builders have failed? Maybe it's Paul's refusal to settle, his knack for surrounding himself with visionaries, or just that stubborn teenage spark that never went out.

What began as Smith's small-town dream is now the ultimate dream guitar for so many players worldwide. Yet PRS's story isn't just about one guy—it's about what happens when obsession meets opportunity and inspires a team as tight as a family that refuses to compromise. From the early days of friends and mentors in Maryland to the master builders, finishers, and innovators shaping every instrument today, PRS is living proof that the best guitars don't come from factories or formulas alone—they come from people who live and breathe music.

In 2025, forty years in, Paul Reed Smith is still chasing tone, still dreaming big, and still—somehow—the most curious guy in the room.

For more information on PRS Guitars, please visit: prsguitars.com