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PRS ‘Dead Spec’ Silver Sky £3,495

1. As far as we’re aware, this is the first time a PRS production guitar has featured a brass nut. The string retainer bar emulates the one used on the low four strings of the Alligator, subtly increasing the back angle behind the nut

It might have ‘broken the internet’ on its release late in 2017, but PRS’s Silver Sky now seems very much a part of the high-end Stratocaster-inspired market and is now also offered in the more affordable Indonesian-made SE range. It’s PRS, so there have been some minor tweaks over the past few years, of course, not least the addition of a maple fretboard option and a couple of satin nitro finishes for this year. But the ‘Dead Spec’ version, released at the end of 2023, is the biggest change to the ’Sky’s blueprint so far.

It takes us back to the 70s, a time when many players would muck up perfectly good guitars with active circuits and brass parts. It's that era that Fender recently revisited with its recreation of Jerry Garcia’s modded ‘Alligator’ Stratocaster – based on an original 50s Stratocaster Jerry was gifted by Graham Nash – a mere snip at £18k. The ‘Dead Spec’, then, is a “significantly modded” Silver Sky that “pays homage” to that ‘Alligator’ and is an exact replica of the instrument that John Mayer has been using on his other day job: touring with Dead & Company. Considerably less expensive at just £3.5k, the ‘Dead Spec’ is a limited run of 1,000 (the earlier Fender was a run of just 100 pieces), but the demand has been huge: trying to get this one required some negotiation!

While that Fender guitar aims to be a facsimile of the ‘Alligator’, which Jerry started using in the summer of ’71, PRS’s take is less specific but zones in on its various mods: plenty of brass parts and a basic onboard boost that would become the Alembic Stratoblaster. The ‘Dead Spec’ also swaps its standard alder body to swamp ash in a very tactile thin satin nitro Moc Sand finish. It uses a PRS Gen III brass vibrato but mounted as a hardtail bridge, a brass nut and Floyd Rose-style string retainer bar, and that Stratoblaster circuit, now called the Blaster, which is still made by Alembic.

There’s a lot more to the ‘Dead Spec’ than simply copping Jerry Garcia’s short-lived Alligator tone (he retired the guitar on 1 August 1973, his 31st birthday). We’d wager there’s a firmer, almost more fundamental tone here that certainly doesn’t lack sustain or indeed very clear note separation; it requires an accurate touch. Adding in the Blaster, pre-set by PRS, there’s a small level boost that noticeably enhances the clarity and we’d say very slightly thickens the voice. But that’s only one way to use it: pull back the tone controls, for example, and engage the boost to produce a more humbucking-like thickness, plus you can experiment with the exact amount of boost that’s right for you. Loon pants and beads are optional.

4. One fundamental change to the ‘Dead Spec’ is the body wood: here it’s swamp ash, not alder, which contributes to an overall weight of 3.46kg (7.61lb). Aside from the other mods, the ‘Dead Spec’ has the same 184mm (7.25-inch) fingerboard radius with small width but high fretwire and, of course, the same 635 JM single coil pickups of the standard Silver Sky

5. “We made this nontremolo guitar with a lot of brass, which gave the guitar a beautiful warm midrange,” says Paul Reed Smith, “and the Alembic Blaster switch, which cleared everything up and gave the guitar some courage. The other thing I love is that the finish sinks into the wood. It’s part of the guitar, so the guitar feels alive in your hands. That’s really cool. The original guitar was made in a few days to make sure John was getting the sounds he wanted on that tour. Then he said he wanted to release it, we were like, ‘What?’ But I got my hands on one the other day. I wanted to own it, I really like it”