“What blew me away was that everyone wanted the curly maple top. People were calling, saying, ‘I’ve got to have the bird inlays’”: Paul Reed Smith on raising the Standard 24, finally cracking the noise-free guitar and why John Sykes is a tone hero

Paul Reed Smith performing earlier this year at PRS’s 40th Anniversary concert where he played a final prototype of the new Charcoal Phoenix. It’s all on YouTube!.

This year’s 40th anniversary marks the year, 1985, that the Paul Reed Smith company moved into its first factory in Virginia Avenue, Annapolis.

Paul had, in fact, made his first ‘real’ guitar in 1975, and as the decade progressed he went from repairman to a custom builder of some note, creating instruments for the likes of Ted Nugent and Peter Frampton (both in 1976 and the latter was the first with bird inlays), Al Di Meola, Roy Buchanan, Howard Leese (the first curly-maple-topped PRS in 1980) and culminating in Carlos Santana, which involved the beginnings of the PRS vibrato system, also in 1980.