When you are ready to pull the trigger on a guitar in the $3,000 CAD price range, there are some fine alternatives to select from. As a long time Stratocaster fan and owner, and also an even longer time PRS fan and owner, I thought it might be interesting to do a side by side of these two guitars, not to determine which one is “better” since that is highly subjective and smells annoyingly like clickbait, instead to see how they are similar and how they are different.

Let’s start there. While the guitars look very much alike other than the trademark headstocks of each, they are in practice very different critters. I used my own gold Silver Sky that I have owned for about nine months and arranged a short term evaluation of a 2020 build Fender Stratocaster Ultra through the kindness of The Arts Music Store. It should be noted, that the Ultra designation was a late 2019 to 2020 thing, and the current top of the line Stratocaster is called the Ultra Deluxe. This is how Fender works, with new model designations each year. The Ultra and Ultra Deluxe are marginally different, but due to the pandemic and shipping delays, the Ultra Deluxe model was much harder to source, so I went with the longer in market and therefore more proven Ultra.

What that out of the way, let’s get going.

Paul Reed Smith Silver Sky

If my understanding is correct, the guitar marketed as the Silver Sky is the commercial release of the very Strat like guitar built by PRS for John Mayer. Since Mayer’s name is on every Silver Sky, you could safely conclude that this is a “Signature” guitar. No issue with that, I have a number of “Signature” guitars, some of them are actually different from the general release models, and others have a different decal. Whether paying more for a Signature over a general release is worth it, that’s your decision. In the case of the Silver Sky, there is no non-John Mayer option. I understand that John Mayer is quite successful and very popular. I can honestly say I wouldn’t know a John Mayer tune if you asked me and do know that I have never gone seeking his music, thus his affiliation with this design has no impact on me.

The Build

My Silver Sky is painted gold with a white scratch plate, white plastic knobs and white pickup covers. It looks like a Strat mostly although there is a much more pronounced relief in the lower neck bout, which enhances ease of access to the higher frets for those with larger hands. You can get the guitar with either a rosewood or maple fingerboard over maple neck. The neck is a rather deep C cut, probably better suited to larger hands. I can play it fine, but I have to be careful about positioning as I will tend to get cramps after about 30 minutes in my left hand. The headstock is the classic PRS design but reversed from other PRS guitars.

The body wood is Alder and the gold finish is beautifully applied. PRS says that the top coat is nitro over cellulose. I admit that I do not know what that means as the word nitro is simply a contraction of nitro-cellulose. The strap buttons are the classic PRS buttons. A pain to get the strap on and off, but it’s never going to come off by accident. I am a fan.

The tuners are PRS locking tuners with a silver grey plastic button. The tuners are very precise, but the buttons feel cheap. I would personally prefer metal or something other than primer grey plastic. The nut is made of bone. PRS says that the rosewood board model has slightly more rounded shoulders than the maple board. I don’t have a maple board so can offer no comment.

As one would hope, you can adjust the truss rod without removing the neck. The scale length is 25.5 inches like a Strat and the fingerboard radius is 7.25 degrees, so a combination of the original Fender designs with some modern adjustments to enhance usability.

This is a three single coil pickup instrument in the traditional Stratocaster layout. All the pickups are PRS 635JM models with no differentiation by position. They are selected via a 5 way switch with the traditional 5 positional options available since Fender introduced the 5 way. There is a master volume and two tone controls. The near tone is for the neck and middle pickups, the far tone is for the bridge pickup, similar to all modern Stratocasters. Again a combination of the vintage with the more usable modern designs. The vibrato is a PRS implementation of their own vibrato system (just because Leo Fender called a Vibrato a Tremolo over 50 years ago, does not mean that I have to perpetuate this honest error) using a six screw bridge plate. The set up from the factory has the bridge plate flush to the body, so you can vibrato down but not up. The guitar shifts with four springs, with the centre slot vacant. I find the vibrato a bit stiff but have not removed a spring, preferring to keep things balanced and am concerned because the ground wire is soldered to the centre spring mount.

PRS makes note that the jack mount is curved for ease of cable insertion. Ok. Saw the curve, find no particular advantage or disadvantage to the design.

Playability

This is a finely built instrument and came out of its rather cheapskate gig bag (really PRS? $3000 CAD for a guitar and you provide a lousy gig bag? Shame on you!) ready to go. I do not know where PRS sources their strings, but they are the only high end manufacturer where my first task is not to cut off the strings and replace them with something better. The specs do not say but they are 10-46 gauge, a very usable and appropriate choice for this scale length.

There is something not quite right for me around the relationship between the vibrato arm and the volume control. I don’t know what it is, but the arm seems to be in the way more when I go for the volume control with my little finger that I don’t experience with my Strats. The pots are nice and have a good range and when you roll the tone pots down the sound doesn’t plop into mud halfway down.

I did raise my bridge a little bit as I was able to choke out the strings with aggressive bends up around the 18th fret. This is not a flaw in my perspective, merely an accurate representation of what can happen with a 7.25 degree radius board.

While I got used to the 635JM neck profile after a time and some stretching, it always feels like a bit of work. The neck finish on the back is nice enough but I found that it gets sticky over time. Perhaps it will play in nicely after a while, but I would prefer that it not get sticky at all. I have other maple neck PRS guitars (older CE models) and do not have this sticky issue with them.

The single coil pickups are quite nice, but I do not find that they have that Strat spank in positions 2 and 4. Not bad, just different. They are definitely hotter than the pickups on the Stratocaster Ultra, and I had to lower both the neck and the bridge pickups. The poles are of varying heights and follow a stagger very different from Fender pickups. Until I lowered the pickups, I found the G string which has the highest pickup pole to be brash and bitey once past the twelfth fret. A couple of turns with the screwdriver and all was resolved. The switching system is precise and quite quiet. You can make changes without looking and know where you are. Volume drop exists in positions 2 and 4 but it’s not a big change. The knobs feel cheap to me, but if they really irked me, I could change them.

I have played the Silver Sky through a number of amplifiers. It is fine through older Marshall tube heads and sounds decent through my Blackstar Club 40, the Victory The Viscount and the Koch Multitone. Until this weekend when I swapped one of my Hot Rod Deluxe Mk IVs for a ‘59 Bassman LTD, I had not found a Fender amp that worked well with the Silver Sky in my opinion. I am also not in love with the sound of the Silver Sky natively into the Boogie Mk V or the AC30 C2. I guess that I am not surprised to discover that the amp it pairs best with (to me) is my old PRS Dallas 50 which is warmer and less bright than my assortment of Fender amps. The exception being the ‘59 Bassman, where the Silver Sky sounds like liquid silk.

I use very thick V-Picks exclusively as they work very well for me. I find that I have to be a bit lighter in my pick attack on the Silver Sky otherwise I can more readily hear the pick hitting the string. I don’t hit hard, so this may just be an issue of me needing to work more on getting the pickup height where I need it to be.

The Silver Sky is a well built guitar, priced a bit high in my opinion, and despite being a nice instrument is not one of the instruments that I will grab first when I go to pick up a guitar.

Fender Stratocaster Ultra

At the time of starting writing, I did not own a Stratocaster Ultra. I do own a Fender Ultra Precision Bass (although it really is a PJ having both Precision and a Jazz bridge pickup). It’s a very easy bass to play and sounds great. But it’s not a Strat, so I had to arrange to borrow one for this article.

The Build

When I got the guitar home, I took it out of it’s well padded, hardshell plastic case, that includes TSA locks, not that you would ever want to check a guitar at an airport. Note, hardshell padded case. Not a cheap ass gig bag. Hello PRS, can you hear me?

Like my PJ, the build quality is outstanding. Everything feels precise, no wobbly bits, no sharp fret edges, positive movement in the vibrato arm, amazing feel to the knobs. Even the push/push S1 switch feels solid. The tuners are superb, especially compared to the Squier Affinity Strat I wrote about last week where the tuners seemed design to work like horseshoes or hand grenades where close was enough compared to on the money. My dear friend Archy who is a brilliant keyboardist noted the precision of the tuners and while he can play guitar, does not consider himself a guitarist.

The body is Alder and nice and light. The strap lugs on the version I received are the body side of what appear to be Schaller Strap-Locks. And in a small touch that I really appreciate, there is a felt ring between the strap lug and the body.

The body finish on my unit is White Pearl, which in the real world is quite beautiful. It really is pearlescent, almost to the quality of Lexus’ white pearl automotive paint. The top coat is polyurethane which will last well and always be shiny, although I would personally prefer a very thin nitro top coat. The body is a classic Strat shape with a generous belly cut. Where it differs is at the neck joint which is nicely relieved to make reaching the upper frets easier with a large hand. The heel on the PRS is not relieved but has the relief in the neck lower bout. If Fender did both, it would be killer.

The neck is maple with a rosewood board. The truss rod is completely adjustable without taking the neck off and there is the expected skunk stripe on the back of the neck. The finish is a satin polyurethane and stays slippery no matter how long you play. Scale length is 25.5 inches and the fingerboard has a compound radius going from 10 to 14 degrees. No choking out strings on this board, and one would never expect to do so. The profile is what Fender calls a D, but I would augment that to a shallow D because this neck is not as thick as the PRS Silver Sky neck. It’s narrower than either of my Eric Johnson Strat necks. If the player has slightly smaller hands, he or she may find this more comfortable.

The pickups are marked Noiseless and were mounted at a good starting height. The covers and the knobs are parchment coloured and contrast very nicely with the supplied tortoiseshell look scratch plate. The pots are super smooth and the “soft touch” knobs are really very pleasant. Switching is very precise with good notching so you are where you think you are without having to look.

Fender has come a long way with their noiseless pickups. They call these Fender Vintage Strat Noiseless in keeping with the company’s tendency to put a mcmarketing label on everything. All I know is that early releases of Vintage Noiseless were more aptly named Vintage Toneless. I have a set in a Mex Strat that I have had for about fifteen years and they are really quite horrible. The pickups in the Ultra are completely different. The pickups have great tone, and respond very well to picking dynamics. They are not super hot. which suits me just fine, and with the switch in position 2 or 4, this guitar sounds like what I think a Strat should sound like. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to change them out, as I might with other Stratocasters.

Playability

Have you ever picked up a guitar that just fit your hands perfectly? A guitar that right out of the case was three bears “just right”. Played through my wet / dry / wet rig, my Blackface Twin and through a wet dry rig using a Koch Multitone and a PRS Dallas, the tone is sublime. I don’t use pedals during evaluations because they colour the tone by design. A good pedal that works with one good guitar is most likely to work well with any guitar, and I’m not evaluating pedals, I’m comparing guitars.

As mentioned in the Build section, I love the tone of these pickups. The guitar sounds like I think that it should and there is a lot of flexibility in terms of what you can achieve via a very useful volume pot. The tone pot also doesn’t fall off into muck when you roll it off completely, so different from many Fender instruments. I don’t think that I would have this into the shop for a pot swap right away, something that happens more often than not. I did not disassemble the scratch plate but think that Fender went quite low on the capacitor. Usually I find them far too high, for my preference.

The fingerboard is not bound, and has a very gentle rolled edge, very much like a formerly sharp edge that has been gently worn after twenty years of playing, but without all the fakery coming from Road-Worn and other relic shite. The frets are really nice medium jumbo. About the only thing that I would prefer are the stainless steel frets that come with the Ultra Luxe version, but the finishes on that guitar are really ugly to my eye, and there’s nothing else there for $500 more. There is nothing wrong with these frets, I just prefer stainless steel if possible.

The strings are the regular Fender .009 - .42 strings as supplied across the board. No news there and they would be coming off first thing as I really dislike the stock Fender strings. I think a pair of my custom pack Balanced Tension Curt Mangan .0095 to .044 will be perfect. This pack is made to my specs (they will do this for anyone, I am not special) and on 25.5 scale necks, they sound great. I choose uncoated and choose the Monel alloy. It’s purely a personal preference.

The specs don’t say but I am pretty sure that the strap lugs would work with Schaller locking lugs. I use Fender rubber washers these days and that’s good enough for me. I do like the Schaller Straplocks and have them on a lot of my electrics because that used to be my standard new guitar kit, a set of strings, a set of Straplocks and a nice leather strap. As age requires me to change the angle of the guitar when playing I am starting to find the knob of the strap lock starting to dig into my leg when sitting and that’s why I went the rubber washer route.

The Ultra Stratocaster just feels “right” There’s nothing more that I can say. It achieved a favoured “first grab” position near immediately.

My Conclusions

The PRS Silver Sky and the Fender Stratocaster Ultra are both excellent instruments and are definitely different instruments. Since I could care less about the Silver Sky being a “John Mayer” signature, that has no impact whatsoever on my preference. While I think the serious play could be happy with either, for the $500 less, which includes a real case and a fit that produces no pain or strain, plus a tone that I personally like better, I would go with the Fender Ultra Stratocaster. So while I already own a Silver Sky, the Stratocaster Ultra pictured above is also now mine. It was simply too wonderful to go back.

My enormous thanks to Carl Fuller and the team at The Arts Music Store for facilitating the eval of the Fender and for turning it into a purchase transaction. I am not sponsored by anyone and so my reviews are always free of external influence.

Thanks for reading and until next time, peace.