Paul Reed Smith Myles Kennedy Review
Last year, PRS released their first T style guitar. Actually two of them. The NF3 and the Myles Kennedy. While technically the same guitar, they have very different switching, different finishes, and the bridge pickup angle is different in the Myles Kennedy version. In addition to being T style, they also use the PRS Narrowfield Humbuckers. These are not new pickups as I have them in a 25th Anniversary Swamp Ash Special, but they may be different variants. This review is made possible by The Arts Music Store who arranged for the instrument for this review.
T Style Guitars
What we know as the Fender Telecaster started its life as the Fender Broadcaster and following a naming issue with Gretsch was renamed the Telecaster. There are many possible choices for the biggest event in electric guitars, but for me, it’s the Broadcaster. There were electric guitars prior, but the Broadcaster (now Telecaster) changed the world. So it’s not surprising that the Telecaster body style is copied nearly as much as the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul.
There have been many clones of the Telecaster from really awful crap to incredibly refined hand built instruments. I am fortunate to own two Tom Anderson T Style instruments and they are amazing. So are the Suhr creations. Even the Fender US Ultras are pretty nice so it was not a surprise following the Silver Sky that PRS Guitars would do their own T-Style instrument.
Overview and Specifications
The Myles Kennedy version is the one that I have for the review. It looks Telecaster-ish, but my opinion, is that it’s missing the simple elegance of the Telecaster. Telecasters are very simple. Blocks of wood with a neck. A Telecaster lets the player shine or not, there really is not much to it and that’s why some love the guitar and some hate it. There’s an ongoing misconception that Telecasters are only for country music. Not so. They are excellent for anything. Consider what Julian Lage does with a T style for jazz or what Roy Buchanan did for blues with one. I am not a follower of Myles Kennedy, but some research suggests that while he has a wide skill range, his forte is rock and perhaps heavier rock. That’s fine, Telecasters do that too.
The body shape of the Myles Kennedy (henceforth referred to as the MK) is similar but not identical to a Telecaster. It looks, to coin a phrase, “not quite right”. The front of the lower horn is relieved to allow better upper fret access, which is a good thing of course, but that modern advance detracts from the MK’s Tele-ness and the horn is wider. The colour of the instrument that I received is called Hunters Green. I would call it something else. Bland and tiresome leaps to mind. Fortunately for buyers there are other choices.
UPDATE : I did receive a comment that suggested I was equating the MK with the Telecaster. If that was interpreted, I apologize. The MK looks vaguely Telecaster-ish but is in no way trying to be a Telecaster. The similar looking but very different NF53 much more closely sounds and feels like a Telecaster. But as with the MK, I still think that the price is way too high. However, to accommodate the valid criticism, I have edited the post to remove any potential Telecaster comparisons.
If you’ve looked at the similar NF53 you will note that the butt-ugly dog hair options for that model are not available on this guitar. You may find as I do that the fishbelly white fretboard looks out of place on the darker colours. Your choice of course.
First Impressions and Playability
I am driven more by playability and tone than I am by aesthetics, which in this case is a good thing for the guitar, because I think it’s f-ugly. I’m not alone in that. At a price of $3839 CAD MAP, I am reminded of an old movie starring Kurt Russell called Used Cars, where the phrase “and a price that’s too f’ing high” is used liberally. For that kind of money, buy a Telecaster Ultra if you want a Telecaster. Or save up for a Suhr or Tom Anderson.
Swamp Ash is a decent wood and PRS is also quite particular. This is important because Swamp Ash is getting scarce and what we are finding labelled Swamp Ash in many cases is actually stump wood. Still Swamp Ash, but the least valuable and usable part of the tree. The maple neck is a very rounded C, nearly baseball bat like. It’s called the Myles Kennedy carve. Those with smaller hands may find it less comfortable. This is a bolt on neck, with the quality of the PRS CE series but at a significantly jacked up price tag. The fretwork is the usual PRS excellence and I found the neck very easy to play for an extended period without fatigue or arthritis pain. The tuners are rather basic units, but at least they are locking tuners. They are smooth, and without any lash. The nut is bone and the scale length is the Fender standard of 25 ½ inches. PRS says nothing about the frets, I would call them medium jumbo and they are definitely NOT stainless steel.
The guitar came strung with PRS 10-46 strings and I find these to be the best of all the no-name factory strings. I would change them out because I have moved away from tens but they are perfectly usable and past experience says that they last well. PRS does not make their own strings and let’s say I have knowledge from where their strings come, and no one is losing with PRS branded strings.
The body top coat is a gloss Nitro and the neck is finished in a satin nitro. The neck is very smooth and non-sticky. The body finish work is excellent but I would really encourage PRS to go pick up a Fender colour chart for their solid colour options. The stock colours are boring.
Given how excellent PRS is at designing bridges, this bridge is a disappointment to me. It’s a common Telecaster flat plate with three brass barrel saddles. The barrels have some intonation correction, but it would not have been difficult to go with individual saddles that would have made the instrument that much better. The folks at The Arts had validated the setup on the guitar and it was as good to go as this bridge design can allow for. Mind you, PRS also went with that “vintage” (aka old and surpassed) six screw bridge on the Silver Sky so maybe there’s a rule in their Fender clone guidebook to use only old and less functional bridges.
Like the Silver Sky, the MK comes with a really lousy cheap-ass gig bag. If you are going to gig with this instrument, plan on buying a real case or quality gig bag.
As noted, the guitar plays nicely. The tone from the Narrowfield MK pickups is decent and there are enough options to give one option paralysis. They sounded good in a Fender clean amp and in a Marshall amp that is pushed. As they are humbuckers they are very quiet and even when split they are still quiet. I personally would have preferred at true coil tap instead of the coil split although that could result in a higher noise floor. While I liked the sound of the pickups, I cannot say that at any time there a tone there that made me want them.
Pickup Switching
There are ten different sounds from these two pickups depending on where you choose on the five way switch and whether or not the coil split is active. The five way is easy to find and to use, but the pull up tone pot for the split is hard to activate, needing to get a fingernail under the rim of the knob to pull it up. Moving quickly between normal and coil split isn’t happening. PRS has used micro switches on other guitars to do this and it works better. I’m all in favour of tonal versatility but pull up knobs are a pain in many cases and definitely in this one. I’ve screen grabbed the controls section from the PRS website to explain the options, because I did not want to rewrite it here, and I was concerned that it would be more confusing and harder to remember.
Example Sounds
For the examples here, I plugged the MK directly into my Quad Cortex and used a Tone Junkie Super Reverb profile for recording. I like the Super Reverb amp a lot, and space is the only reason that I don’t have one myself. The Quad Cortex is connected directly to a UA Apollo and to provide as uncoloured a set of examples as possible, I did not use any plugins at all during recording or post production. In honesty, I would not work this way in the real world, but did so for clarity here.
The first section is each pickup selector played counting down through the five positions from neck to bridge, and then again with the tone pot pulled up. The treble rolloff that PRS notes is quite audible. The next section is just a chord progression using both pickups with the amp clean, and the final is a different chord progression with the overdrive in the Super Reverb profile engaged. The overdrive is a Neural capture of a Klon Centaur.
Wrapping Up
This is a nice playing guitar that sounds good and has great tonal versatility. However, its price is WAY too high for what it is and what it delivers. And unlike most all PRS Guitars that are beautiful to look at, this one is not. It’s a pain to activate the coil split, which as the documentation shows is not just a coil split, it also rolls off the high end when active. Why one would just not use the tone control to darken things up to user choice rather than some arbitrary selection is beyond me. From my perspective this pull up brings zero value.
It’s a very rare thing, given my love of PRS Guitars and the number of them that I have spent my own money on that my response is a clear no. But that’s it. While it plays well and sounds good, there is nothing compelling me to own one. An indicator for me is how reluctant I am to return the review instrument at the end of my allocated time. I used all the allocated time to try to find reasons why I would recommend it. I never found any and was relieved to get it back to the shop. However what works for me does not mean that it works the same for anyone else, so if you have the money and the guitar suits you, go for it. If you choose to do so, please support The Arts Music Store as they support the channel and that means that I can continue to provide reviews and other content to you.
If you like what I do here for you, please become a supporter on Patreon. Your monthly contribution makes an enormous difference and helps me keep things going. To become a Patreon Patron, just click the link or the button below. Thanks for your support of my work. I’m Ross Chevalier and I look forward to sharing with you again soon.
