Line up the PRS Tekton against the Custom 24 spec by spec and you get 14 rows of comparison. Andertons built exactly that table for its launch coverage, and the two guitars agree on one line: a mahogany back. And on the Tekton “Floyd,” they don’t even agree on that.
That is the real story of the family PRS announced on October 20. Not “PRS makes a metal guitar” (Mark Tremonti, Mark Holcomb and Herman Li have been playing PRS guitars in heavy bands for years), but that the company spent four decades teaching players what a PRS looks and feels like, then built four guitars that ignore most of it on purpose. Jim Cullen, PRS’s Director of Sales, put it bluntly in the Premier Guitar announcement: “This is not just introducing a new model. We are planting a flag for a whole new family of guitars.”
The lineup and the prices
Four USA-made, bolt-on models share one body, one neck carve and one new pickup set. Prices below are U.S. street, per Premier Guitar; The Guitar Plugged reports the UK figures as the same numbers in pounds.
| Model | Strings | Bridge | Body | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tekton | 6 | PRS hardtail | Figured mango top, mahogany back | $2,899 |
| Tekton T | 6 | PRS two-point tremolo | Figured mango top, mahogany back | $2,899 |
| Tekton “Floyd” | 6 | Floyd Rose 1000 Series | Solid alder | $2,999 |
| Tekton SVN | 7 | PRS 7-string hardtail | Figured mango top, mahogany back | $2,999 |
Shared across the family: 25.5″ scale (26.5″ on the SVN), scarfed maple bolt-on neck, Indian ebony fingerboard with a 16″ radius, 24 jumbo stainless steel frets, offset dot inlays, blue Luminlay side dots, Phase III tuners (locking on everything except the Floyd), smoked black hardware, gloss nitro body, satin nitro neck, and a gig bag rather than a hardshell case. Controls are one volume, one push/pull tone for coil splitting, and a 3-way blade.
There is no artist name on any of them. That matters more than it sounds, and I’ll come back to it.
What PRS gave up
Here is the short version of how far the Tekton sits from the guitar that started the company. The Custom 24 arrived in 1985 as PRS’s first production model: 25″ scale, set mahogany neck, figured maple top, birds, rotary pickup selector, PRS tremolo. Compared with today’s Custom 24, per the Andertons spec table:
- Scale: 25″ becomes 25.5″. This is the single biggest feel change. More string tension, tighter low end when you tune down, and the reason the SVN needs 26.5″ to keep a low B from flopping.
- Neck joint: set becomes bolt-on, with a maple neck instead of mahogany.
- Radius: 10″ becomes 16″. PRS reportedly argued over going all the way to 20″ before artist feedback settled it at 16″.
- Frets: nickel silver becomes stainless jumbo. PRS had to retool its fret production to do it.
- Inlays: birds become offset dots. Early prototypes had no inlays at all; the dots came out of listening-party feedback, according to The Guitar Plugged’s breakdown of the PRS development notes.
- Switching: a 5-way becomes a 3-way blade.
- Top wood: figured maple becomes figured mango.
- Case: hardshell becomes gig bag.
Any one of those changes would be a footnote. All of them at once is a different instrument wearing a PRS headstock. The body outline, which PRS describes as starting from a Vela and merging with the Custom shape, has an exaggerated lower horn scoop, a belly carve and a sculpted heel. PRS calls the body and neck the thinnest it has put into standard production but has not published a body thickness or target weight.
String spacing is also wider than traditional PRS spacing, matched to the Silver Sky and the Fiore, and PRS made new pickup bobbins to suit. If you have ever felt that a Custom 24 is a touch cramped for big palm mutes and fast string skipping, this is the fix, and it is a bigger deal under the right hand than any spec sheet suggests.
The Stylus pickups are the most interesting part
Metal pickup design has run on one assumption for 40 years: more output, more compression, more saturation before the amp does anything. The Tekton’s new Stylus humbuckers go the other way. They use Alnico 5 magnets, read roughly 13k at the bridge and 11k at the neck per PRS’s own figures (quoted by The Guitar Plugged), and are voiced with a flatter, more modest output than most humbuckers sold to heavy players.
PRS says that is deliberate, and the reasoning holds up. A modeler or a plugin chain already stacks virtual boosts, drives and multi-stage gain. Feed it a hot ceramic bridge pickup and you are compressing a signal that is about to be compressed several more times, which is how you end up with a crunchy, undefined low end on fast chugs. A cleaner, flatter pickup gives the modeler more headroom to work with and lets you add the gain where you can actually control it. Guitar World’s reviewer said it “might be the first time we’ve seen a mainstream brand build a pickup with modelers in mind.”
It is the mirror image of what Gibson did last month. The Gibson ELEV8 went to Alnico 8 to sell players the hot, tight sound they used to buy from aftermarket brands. PRS looked at the same metal player and concluded that the hot pickup is now a problem the rig solves elsewhere. Both companies can be right; they are just designing for different signal chains. If your rig is a tube head with a Tube Screamer in front, the Gibson logic fits. If it is a Quad Cortex, an Axe-Fx or Neural plugins into an interface, the PRS logic fits better.
Early reviewers seem to agree. Mixdown’s Tekton T review describes the bridge as tight and aggressive for palm-muted rhythm work, the neck as round without turning muddy, and the split sounds as genuinely usable cleans, calling it “a real achievement for a pickup this versatile.”
The neck tells you who it is for
Every model gets hormigo strength rods inside the maple neck alongside a double-acting truss rod. PRS says they serve the same job as the carbon fibre rods it uses in its acoustics and in Herman Li’s Chleo signature. On a thin neck with a 16″ radius that is going to be tuned down and hit hard, stability is not a luxury, and anyone who has watched a thin maple neck move between a cold van and a hot stage knows why.
The Guitar Plugged spec list puts the neck depth at 49/64″ at the first fret and 27/32″ at the 12th, with a 1 11/16″ nut on the six-strings and 1 29/32″ on the SVN. Factory strings are 10-46 on the six-strings and 10-59 on the SVN. That 10-59 detail is worth noting: if you plan to live in drop A on the seven, budget for a heavier set and a setup on day one.
Stainless frets plus a flat radius plus a thin neck is a combination built for legato and wide bends without fretting out. It is not a combination built for vintage-style cowboy chords and gentle vibrato. That is the trade, and it is an honest one.
Why the missing signature name matters
Most premium metal guitars launch on an artist’s back. Jackson just did it with its Legend Series, and PRS itself has leaned on Tremonti, Holcomb and Li for years. The Tekton launches with no artist affiliation at all, which is a different bet: that the spec sheet can sell the guitar without a face on the poster.
PRS staff compared the scale of the project to launching the S2 Series, as Andertons reported from the launch briefing, which in 2014 became the company’s second U.S. production line. That comparison tells you this is meant to be a platform, not a model. Expect more Tekton variants, and probably an SE version at some point, though PRS has announced nothing of the kind.
There is also some history here. PRS has done bolt-on before, starting with the CE in 1988, and we covered why the 1997 CE 22 is still a sleeper on the used market. But the CE was always “a cheaper PRS.” The Tekton is the first PRS bolt-on that reads as its own family with its own purpose, built in Maryland and priced as a premium instrument rather than as the budget way in.
Who should actually look at one
Buy the hardtail Tekton if you play detuned rhythm, record through a modeler, and want a USA-built guitar that stays in tune and stays out of your way. It is the purest expression of what PRS designed here.
The Tekton T is the pick for players who want a PRS trem for shimmer and light vibrato. Guitar World’s review called its ergonomics “the best of any PRS model yet, by far.”
The “Floyd” is the odd one out: all alder, no mango top, non-locking tuners behind a locking trem, and wild finishes like Hot Pink and Neon Green, per dealer listings compiled by The Guitar Plugged. It is the 80s shred guitar of the family. If you need real dive bombs, it is the only option; if you don’t, the hardtail and T get you a mango top and locking tuners for $100 less ($2,899 vs $2,999, per Premier Guitar).
The SVN makes the most sense for Periphery-school players who already know they want 26.5″ and a 7-string, though anyone who has bonded with an SE Mark Holcomb SVN should play one before assuming it is an upgrade, because the neck and pickups are completely different.
The caveats are real. According to The Guitar Plugged’s launch summary, PRS has published no weights, no body thickness and no ship dates, there are no left-handed models at launch, and a $2,899 guitar ships in a gig bag rather than a hardshell case. And if the reason you wanted a PRS is the carved maple, the birds and that 25″ feel, this is simply not that guitar.
What PRS has made instead is an admission that the modern metal player, the one recording into a laptop and touring with a floor modeler, wants different things from a guitar than the player PRS was built around in 1985. Putting a lower-output pickup in a metal guitar is the boldest call in the whole lineup. If it works, other brands will follow it.