PRS Johnny Hiland Review
| Posted in Guitar
The PRS Johnny Hiland, introduced in 2006, has proved to be a successful collaboration between artist and manufacturer cemented by the fact that the guitar is still in production and selling well. So often, artist models are limited editions which sell out quickly and are never seen again.
Johnny Hiland is not only a top Nashville session guitarist who gets called for country sessions by Ricky Skaggs and Toby Keith, he can play in all styles – rock, jazz, bluegrass, and even metal. He dazzles audiences with his fluid technique and fretboard mastery and it’s so refreshing to hear someone who can meld styles together – he’ll be shredding away like some rock monster and suddenly throw in a country or jazzy lick. Whatever he does, it’s never predictable.
The challenge for PRS was to come up with a guitar that was going to do it all for him. He specified single coil twang, jazzy smooth and metal raunch on a guitar based on his favourite PRS, a Custom 24. He also wanted a bolt-on maple neck and maple fingerboard, not a typical PRS design by any stretch. The area around the truss rod cover has been lowered to facilitate ‘behind the nut’ bends, a feature of country guitar technique emulating the pedal steel.
The pickups have also been specially wound for him and are simply called, ‘JH Treble’ and ‘JH Bass’ for the bridge and neck humbuckers respectively. The neck pickup gives him the ‘country spank’ he needs while the bridge gives him a ‘clean, glassy blues’ tone. He describes the combined pickup tone as simply ‘funky’, because at this point the front pickup is working as a single coil.
The extra sounds available are by pulling up the tone knob – the middle position with both pickups in humbucking mode is described as a ‘country shuffle’ tone. The front pickup is described as ‘hollow body jazz tone’. Armed with all this information newly stored in the memory bank, there was only one course of action to follow, so I sat down with the guitar fresh out of the carton, hooked it up to a Fender Blues Junior and attempted to find out whether all of JH’s claims about the different sounds were true.
At first, the maple neck on a PRS is a little odd looking but this prejudice is soon overcome. The neck itself, obviously sculpted to Hiland’s spec, is comfortable and doesn’t hold any surprises. However, it’s the sheer variety of tones available that’s the impressive feature of this guitar, and the switching is so simple. The ability to change between a convincing Tele twang to humbucker raunch is a real treat.
PRS have made a great guitar here, and Johnny Hiland got exactlywhat he wanted – a win-win situation in my book.
Tags: johnny hiland, Paul Reed Smith, PRS