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PRS ‘Dead Spec’ Silver Sky £3,495
It might have ‘broken the internet’ on its release late in 2017, but PRS’s Silver Sky now seems very much a part of the high-end Stratocaster-inspired market and is now also offered in the more affordable Indonesian-made SE range. It’s PRS, so there have been some minor tweaks over the past few years, of course, not least the addition of a maple fretboard option and a couple of satin nitro finishes for this year. But the ‘Dead Spec’ version, released at the end of 2023, is the biggest change to the ’Sky’s blueprint so far.
It takes us back to the 70s, a time when many players would muck up perfectly good guitars with active circuits and brass parts. It's that era that Fender recently revisited with its recreation of Jerry Garcia’s modded ‘Alligator’ Stratocaster – based on an original 50s Stratocaster Jerry was gifted by Graham Nash – a mere snip at £18k. The ‘Dead Spec’, then, is a “significantly modded” Silver Sky that “pays homage” to that ‘Alligator’ and is an exact replica of the instrument that John Mayer has been using on his other day job: touring with Dead & Company. Considerably less expensive at just £3.5k, the ‘Dead Spec’ is a limited run of 1,000 (the earlier Fender was a run of just 100 pieces), but the demand has been huge: trying to get this one required some negotiation!
While that Fender guitar aims to be a facsimile of the ‘Alligator’, which Jerry started using in the summer of ’71, PRS’s take is less specific but zones in on its various mods: plenty of brass parts and a basic onboard boost that would become the Alembic Stratoblaster. The ‘Dead Spec’ also swaps its standard alder body to swamp ash in a very tactile thin satin nitro Moc Sand finish. It uses a PRS Gen III brass vibrato but mounted as a hardtail bridge, a brass nut and Floyd Rose-style string retainer bar, and that Stratoblaster circuit, now called the Blaster, which is sti
