Back in 2022, Shinedown's Zach Myers turned heads when he showed off perhaps the most eye-catching PRS Silver Sky ever created – a pink variant that predated John Mayer’s official Roxy Pink signature guitar, and that had been given a crazy relic job.
For whatever reason, it proved to be controversial, most likely because it flipped the Silver Sky’s sleek design ethos completely on its head, merging together the worlds of vintage Stratocasters and pristine PRS guitars.
It went against everything that the Silver Sky was seemingly conceived to be, and the fact it got the jump on the firm’s official Roxy Pink version merely stirred the pot further. In fact, his custom Silver Sky ruffled so many feathers that Myers is tempted to throw it into a fire and “let it burn to death”.
Speaking to MusicRadar, Myers looked back on why his Silver Sky sparked such outrage at the time, and traced it back to the unfortunate fact that both he and PRS had decided to build a pink six-string at the same time.
“The thing is, as John was making a pink guitar, I did not know that,” he explains. “I was unaware. And I made that guitar pink. It was white.
“There are pictures of me playing it from 2018 to whenever I relic’d it. It was just a white guitar, and I painted it pink, and I didn’t know John had a pink one coming out, so it looked like John had given me a pink guitar and I’d relic’d it. I don’t know who was mad. But people were mad.”
Though Myers’ own model seemingly stole the Roxy Pink’s thunder – and threw in a wild relic treatment to boot – Paul Reed Smith himself was seemingly unmoved by the whole episode.
“He didn’t say anything! He notoriously doesn’t like relics,” Myers adds when asked if Smith had an opinion on his custom guitar. “It’s well documented, his hatred of relics, and it’s fine. Hey, I would never relic a flame-top guitar – I just felt the Silver Sky lent itself to that kind of cool thing.”
Whatever the case, the pink six-string has been more trouble than it’s worth, and Myers suspects it will eventually meet a fiery end for all the issues it has caused over the years.
“I’ve got to be careful what I say,” he says with a chuckle. “Dude, I told Drew [Foppe, guitar tech] one day, I was like, ‘One night I’m just going to throw that thing in the fire and let it burn to death because I’ve had more drama around this guitar…”
When Myers first relic’d his pink Silver Sky, he revealed he’d taken inspiration from another John Mayer guitar for the experiment.
