Paul Reed Smith says there’s “nothing more important” to guitar making than this
Paul Reed Smith, PRS founder and tonewood connoisseur, thinks there’s nothing more important when it comes to making guitars than the neck.
While some may argue that pickups, body shape, or weight matter more, Reed Smith thinks that how the neck feels and how its wood resonates is far more key: after all, that’s where most of the action happens in-play.
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In a new video on the PRS Guitars YouTube channel for the brand’s Rules Of Tone series, Reed Smith explains, “Neck making in my mind is fundamental to guitar making. You’re a guitar maker, you’re a neck maker – there’s nothing more important on the guitar.
“You could argue that the pickups are the most important thing or the weight of it, but in the end, how it feels, how you change the length of the strings, how it resonates [prevails]. There’s this sound that the neck makes as a raw blank that makes a big difference,” he adds.
“You have the body of the guitar and then you have this [part] sticking out and it’s a-weighted. It has tuning pegs at one end, there’s more frets at one end than the other; it’s not evenly weighted like a tuning fork is. So, the strength of the neck has a huge impact on how it rings. One of the things that is important from the rules of tone is not putting the neck under a huge amount of tension, unless it’s from the strings.”
Reed Smith goes on to give an analogy of a bell to better explain his argument, stating that if you were to drill a hole in a bell, put a piece of thread through it and start to tighten down the nuts on each side, the sound of it would be far more flat and dull, and it would lose its crystal clear ring.
“When you have to tighten the truss rod too much, it adds that kind of lack of sustain load mid-range to the instrument. The truss rod’s there as a safety. If you’re going to put really heavy gauge strings on it and tune it up, you’re going to need a truss rod. That’s just the way it is. But the more guitars we make for artists, the more we learn that the stronger the neck is, the better the guitar sounds,” he states.
You can watch the full episode below:
PRS, famous for its bird-decorated fretboards, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Reed Smith often shares his passionate views on guitar craft, with his opinions on topics like tonewood and his unique business practices often garnering a lot of attention.
In a column shared last year, he expressed why wood is another key part to building a great-sounding axe: “A magic guitar can be made of many different types of wood, but those woods need to have certain qualities and need to be handled correctly throughout the manufacturing process. So to me, woods matter.”
He added, “To me, if wood doesn’t matter, then logically it follows that the material the bridge is made of doesn’t matter and the material the nut is made of doesn’t matter. What I believe, because of scores of experiences, is that if we make two identical guitars out of different woods, the guitars will sound different from each other.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
