“He said the first guitar was an accident of God. By the fifth one he said, ‘OK, you’re a guitar maker’”: Carlos Santana was one of Paul Reed Smith’s earliest champions – but he thought his first guitars were too good to be true

Santana concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Hollywood on Saturday night, 10/14/00. Carlos Santana performs before a full house.

Carlos Santana was one of the earliest champions of Paul Reed Smith’s guitars, first playing custom electric guitars before agreeing to a collaboration that helped catapult PRS with a landmark signature guitar.

However, as Smith himself explains, Santana wasn’t immediately taken by the PRS design brief. Rather, he took some convincing. Not because PRS guitars were bad, though. On the contrary, it was because they were too good, and Santana thought them too good to be true.