Development While a Fender-endorsed artist, Mayer sought to design a guitar with greater consistency in production quality while having room to develop and build on his own ideas, but he found Fender unreceptive. In approaching PRS, Mayer valued being able to collaborate with Paul Reed Smith himself as the company owner. In 2016, PRS released their first guitar designed with Mayer, the "Super Eagle," and then in 2017 the "Super Eagle II"—both exotic, high-end guitars produced in limited numbers. But Mayer sought to look "deeper into the genetic code of things" and produce a series of guitars for the mass market that represented his point of view. Mayer rejected the notion of the Silver Sky as a conventional signature model, opting not to use his name on the front of the headstock or to brand it as such. He instead chose to use the name "Silver Sky," which he said might have been a fragment of a forgotten song lyric but liked it because it sounded mysterious and felt consistent with PRS's bird nomenclature. All color options initially had rosewood fretboards with later editions offering maple. In designing the guitar's custom 635JM pickups, Mayer sought to replicate his '64 Strat pickups while improving clarity and reducing the inherent "quack" of the two and four pickup selector positions.
SE model Two years after the introduction of the USA-made Silver Sky, PRS and Mayer began developing a version for the brand's affordable, foreign-made "SE" line of guitars. PRS initially began manufacturing the SE Silver Sky in Indonesia in partnership with Cor-Tek, using the same facility as
Cort Guitars. In 2022, the SE models moved to a new building dedicated to PRS's SE line-ups. == Reception ==