PRS History

		The connection with PRS Guitars began around 1980 when the brother of one of Pritchard's clients wanted to build a custom 8-string bass. He brought his collaborator, Paul Reed Smith, with him to discuss the construction of the bridge. At that time Paul Smith was working from a third-floor, single room, walk up shop at 33 West Street Annapolis, MD. Pritchard began helping Smith by building a three-dimensional manual tracer to copy his hand carved masters. Once Paul was funded and the modern PRS Guitars was born, Pritchard and his staff designed and built most of the specialized guitar making equipment.
"The employees" 33 West Street Annapolis, MD Photo Courtousy of PRS Guitars™

In 1987, the Virginia Avenue facility was augmented by a Pritchard designed and built a neck carver which cut the very important back sides of necks for about a decade when it was eventually replaced by computer controlled (CNC) milling machines.

    The CNC milling machines brought a new era of accuracy and production reliability to PRS Guitars. Just as Pritchard assisted in the original guitar production processes, he again helped in the redefinition of the production processes for computer controlled wood cutting. With an agreed concept of the processes, Pritchard designed all of the fixturing including the integration of the fixturing with the CNC controls.

		In the course of assisting Smith research his String-Suspension System patent, Pritchard and Smith ran across a string clamp by Kluson. At Smith's desire, Pritchard designed a string clamp that would not shear the strings. This design was not only patented but became signature component of PRS Guitars.     The 1987 trip to Japan that gave birth to the neck carver also produced the beginning of another project, the PRS amplifier. After building, designing, and modifying four prototype amplifiers, Pritchard built 20 prototypes of the fifth chassis.
33 West Street Annapolis, MD Photo Courtousy of PRS Guitars™

Although one of these amps was used in the recording of an album, most of them were used to study new circuits for the PRS production amplifier, the Harmonic Generator. The HG series amplifiers were built by Preferred Electronics in time for the winter NAMM show in January of 1991. Coincidentally, the United States started bombing Iraq at the beginning of that show. This severely suppressed buying activity and the PRS HG amplifiers were dropped only a short time later.

After PRS Guitars dropped the amplifier project, Pritchard remained convinced that a solid state amplifier could sound like the classic amplifiers. With this conviction, Deja Vu Audio was born which later developed into Pritchard Amps.

More history: History summary page Carver Stories Phil Zuckerman PRS History Deja Vu Audio Pritchard Amps	Have a PRS HG Amplifier? Need service or repair? Schematics?