PRS

Paul Reed Smith built his first guitar as an extra-credit project at St. Mary's College in the mid-1970s. By the early 1980s he was hand-selling prototypes to touring guitarists backstage at East Coast arenas — Carlos Santana, Al Di Meola, Howard Leese, and others gave him the early orders that bootstrapped the company. PRS opened in Annapolis in 1985 with fewer than fifteen employees and unserialized inventory; today it's headquartered on Kent Island, Maryland, employs around 420 people, and is the third-largest electric guitar maker in the United States. Paul still works on the floor. The acoustic line is younger. PRS launched the Angelus Cutaway and Tonare Grand in 2009, alongside their amplifier division, and the Tonare Parlor and SE acoustic series followed in the years after. The engineering thesis is unusual for a steel-string shop. Paul came at the design from speaker theory, treating the back and sides as a locked-down enclosure and the top as the only intended radiating surface. To accomplish that, PRS uses a hybrid X/classical bracing pattern — the X-brace to counteract steel-string tension, fan bracing under the bridge to free up the top, both ideas borrowed from a Torres nylon-string that impressed Paul enough to redesign from. The acoustics also share PRS's broader engineering tics: bone nuts and saddles ("anything that touches the string is God"), double-action truss rods, and PRS-voiced Fishman pickups EQ'd in Paul's home studio. PRS acoustics aren't cottage-shop instruments and aren't trying to be. They are a real, engineered alternative — loud, articulate, balanced flat-tops that project the way PRS believes a guitar should. The Private Stock program, founded in 1996, lets the team build customs in exotic woods with collaborative spec work; the US-made Angelus and Tonare lines fill the production-acoustic slot. Seventeen years in, the line continues to evolve — the SE acoustics got a proprietary PRS-voiced Fishman pickup in 2022 — and Paul still leads guitar-building classes on the factory floor for employees, which is probably the truest read on what kind of company PRS still is.