The notion of a Paul Reed Smith hollowbody first crossed my path in the mid ’90s, before such a model existed, when British guitarist and early PRS adopter Brinsley Schwarz — a gifted guitar and amp tech in his own right — showed me an Artist model that he’d modified with f-holes and a chambered interior. Crazy, right? The results were enticing, and they were even more so just a couple years later, in 1998, when PRS released its Hollowbody model, later called the McCarty Hollowbody.
Since then, the McCarty Hollowbody has become a prized upper-echelon model of sorts, pushing Paul Reed Smith’s ethos of precision construction and high-quality components and adornments into the realms of traditional jazz, blues and fusion tone. It’s also proven to be a reliable and great-sounding alternative to more traditional ES-335-style guitars. This year’s Winter NAMM show saw PRS update the formula with the McCarty 594 Hollowbody II, marrying the further refinements found in the McCarty 594 solidbody’s evolution with hollow construction. The results are stunning, and they remain so from several angles.
Although PRS refers to the McCarty 594 as “a fully hollowbody guitar,” there is a substantial block of wood running from the point beneath the bridge to the end pin — otherwise, of course, no post-mounted Tune-o-matic-style bridge or stop-bar tailpiece would hold — while the neck block extends past the underside of the neck pickup. But let’s not split hairs. The significant air space between the carved, solid-maple top and back and the mahogany sides enhances a lively acoustic resonance and an all-body vibrational response more akin to the carved-top Gibson archtop electrics of the late ’50s and early ’60s than to the laminated-maple ES-335. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, and of course this PRS is entirely its