PRS McCarty 594: The Guitar One Session Player Helped Build Before Anyone Else Fell in Love With It

Every gear list needs a PRS entry, and every PRS entry seems to arrive dragging the same five names behind it: Carlos Santana, Mark Tremonti, John Mayer, Orianthi, David Grissom. It’s the house band of PRS artist relations, copy-pasted across McCarty 594 pages, Custom 24 pages, CE 24 pages, and half a dozen others, regardless of which guitar is actually being discussed. Most of the time, at least one or two names on that list never touched the specific model in question.

The McCarty 594 is the rare case where digging into the list pays off. Two of those five names have a real, well-documented, specific relationship with this instrument — one of them literally helped shape the DNA it was built from decades before the “594” designation existed. A third has a certified, if slightly indirect, connection through the guitar that came before his own signature model. The other two belong to different PRS shapes entirely, and pointing that out is more interesting than pretending otherwise.

A Tribute Guitar That Became a Cult Object

The McCarty name goes back to 1994, when Paul Reed Smith released a new solidbody as a tribute to Ted McCarty — the former Gibson president who oversaw the creation of the Les Paul, the ES-335, and the humbucking pickup during the 1950s, and who later became a mentor and friend to Smith during PRS’s early years. The original McCarty took the double-cutaway PRS body that had defined the company since 1985 and warmed it up: a slightly thicker mahogany body, a longer neck tenon, and pickups voiced closer to a vintage PAF than the hotter, more modern-sounding humbuckers PRS had used up to that point. It was PRS speaking Gibson’s language without copying Gibson’s guitar.

The McCarty stuck around as a steady seller and a favorite among players who wanted PRS build quality with a vintage-leaning voice, but it wasn’t until 2016 that the platform got its most significant update. PRS’s team spent roughly three years re-examining every detail that touches the string: scale length, bridge material, tuner mass, pickup winds, neck carve. The result was a new scale length of 24.594 inches, slightly longer than the original McCarty’s 24.5″, which became the source of the model’s name. Development guitars first appeared as a February 2016 Private Stock “Guitar of the Month,” and the McCarty 594 became a permanent Core model shortly after, followed by a Singlecut version in 2017 and a semi-hollow McCarty 594 Hollowbody II in 2019.

PRS McCarty 594 — Full Specifications

Mahogany, Maple, and Low-Turn Pickups: Why the 594 Sounds the Way It Does

The McCarty 594’s tone is built around restraint rather than output. The 58/15 LT pickups — “LT” for low turns — were deliberately wound with fewer coil turns than PRS’s hotter humbuckers, which lowers output and widens headroom before the pickup itself starts to compress. Paired with a mahogany body and maple top, the same tonewood pairing PRS has leaned on since the 1980s, the guitar produces a humbucking tone that’s warm and full-bodied from the mahogany core but retains articulate top-end from the maple cap — closer to a well-worn late-1950s PAF than to the more aggressive, higher-output voicing associated with most modern PRS models.

The zinc two-piece bridge and the Phase III tuners matter more here than they would on a shredder-oriented guitar. No fine tuners on the bridge means added mass and more direct string-to-body contact, at the cost of some fine-tuning convenience, and the tuner buttons are engineered so string energy transfers into the body instead of dissipating into hardware. The 24.594″ scale length sits almost exactly between Gibson’s 24.75″ and PRS’s own 25″ standard, giving slightly looser string tension than a Custom 24 while staying tighter than a Les Paul.

Since 2024, Core-line McCarty 594 models have shipped with McCarty III pickups rather than the original 58/15 LT set — a quieter running change most players won’t notice unless they’re comparing serial numbers, but worth knowing if you’re shopping used and want a specific pickup era.

Famous Players: What the Spreadsheet Got Right, and Where It Recycled

This is the rare gear-guide entry where the generic PRS artist list turns out to be mostly defensible — but only once you sort out which relationship belongs to which guitar.

David Grissom: The Player Who Helped Design the Platform

David Grissom is a Texas session and touring guitarist — Storyville, John Mellencamp, Joe Ely, and countless Austin sessions — who became a close collaborator with Paul Reed Smith during the original McCarty’s development in the 1990s. Smith has called Grissom “my ears,” and Grissom was among the key figures shaping the original 1994 McCarty design. After a decade of touring on McCartys, Grissom worked with PRS to refine his own signature model, the DGT (David Grissom Trem), released in 2007 and explicitly built on the McCarty platform, with a vibrato added back in and a neck carve blended from his own ’93 McCarty and ’87 Standard.

The DGT isn’t the McCarty 594 — it predates the 594 designation by nearly a decade — but the lineage runs directly through it. Grissom’s years of feedback on pickup voicing, neck carve, and what a “vintage” PRS should feel like shaped the design language PRS’s team drew on when they set out to build the 594 in 2016. It’s a rare case of a signature-model relationship that predates the product it went on to influence.

Mark Tremonti: The McCarty That Became a Different Guitar

Mark Tremonti‘s connection to the McCarty platform is genuine but, like Grissom’s, points backward rather than at the 594 specifically. While Creed was touring behind their 1997 debut My Own Prison, PRS reached out and sent Tremonti a stock McCarty model. He played that guitar almost exclusively for a stretch before deciding he wanted hotter pickups and a thinner neck profile to suit his heavily palm-muted rhythm style. That collaboration became the Mark Tremonti Signature model, released in 2001 — years before the 594 scale length existed. Today Tremonti’s own line uses a Pattern Thin neck and Tremonti-spec pickups, not the 594’s Pattern Vintage carve or 58/15 LT/McCarty III pickups, so while the family tree is real, the specific guitar in this article isn’t the one he plays on stage.

John Mayer: The Endorsement That’s Actually About This Guitar

John Mayer lacks a gear-guide entry in our current database, but unlike Tremonti and Grissom, his relationship to the McCarty 594 is specific and current rather than historical. Mayer has praised the guitar directly, crediting it with a “vintage heart and soul” alongside the intonation and upper-fret playability of a modern instrument — a guitar-player’s compliment, not a marketing line, focused on the exact tradeoff the 594 was designed to solve. Separately, Mayer was reported to be using a McCarty 594 extensively while recording an album, introducing the guitar to a wider audience through a widely-viewed video demo. Mayer’s main touring identity has long been built around Fender Stratocasters and his own Silver Sky signature model, but the 594 relationship is a documented, guitar-specific endorsement rather than a recycled name from a different PRS shape.

Joe Walsh: When “Perfect Out of the Box” Becomes a Signature Model

Joe Walsh — Eagles guitarist, longtime vintage-guitar collector, and famously particular about setup — isn’t on the spreadsheet’s list at all, which makes his story the most interesting omission in this thread. Paul Reed Smith sent Walsh a custom McCarty 594, and Walsh was impressed enough that he called Smith directly to say it needed no changes. “Out of the box this is absolutely perfect,” Walsh said of the guitar in a PRS press statement.

That reaction became the McCarty 594 Singlecut Joe Walsh Limited Edition, released in 2021: a run of just 200 pieces, built on the Singlecut 594 platform with a Brazilian rosewood fretboard and stainless steel frets, Paul Reed Smith’s handwritten signature on the headstock, and Walsh’s own signature on the backplate. It’s a genuine artist collaboration born entirely from a player falling for a stock production model — the opposite of a guitar built to a celebrity’s specifications from scratch, and arguably the strongest single-player story attached to the 594 platform.

The Two Names That Point Elsewhere

Carlos Santana has his own dedicated PRS shape — the Santana I, II, and III models — with roots that predate the McCarty platform entirely and a shorter 24.5″ scale length that has nothing to do with the 594’s namesake measurement. Orianthi‘s documented PRS signature is built from a Private Stock Custom 24, the guitar covered in our PRS Core Custom 24 entry, not the McCarty family. Both are legitimate PRS artists — just not McCarty 594 players, and the spreadsheet’s habit of recycling the same five names across every PRS product page catches up with it here.

Tone Recipes

Classic rock warmth (Walsh-inspired): Bridge humbucker, moderate-gain tube amp pushed into light breakup, minimal pedal coloration — let the mahogany-and-maple body and low-output 58/15 LT (or McCarty III) pickups do the work rather than piling on gain.

Session clarity (Mayer-inspired): Neck pickup, coil-split via the push/pull tone control, into a clean-to-edge-of-breakup amp for a single-coil-adjacent sound with humbucker-level noise immunity — useful for tracking rhythm parts that need to sit cleanly in a mix.

Blues-rock grind (Grissom-inspired): Both pickups blended via the 3-way toggle, individual volume knobs rolled to taste, into an overdriven tube combo — the McCarty 594’s dual-volume layout exists specifically to let players dial in exactly this kind of blend on the fly.

Palm-muted rhythm (Tremonti’s starting point, before his own signature diverged from it): Bridge humbucker, tighter gain structure, noise gate if needed — a reminder of how far a stock McCarty pushed one player toward wanting hotter pickups and a thinner neck, which is precisely the gap his signature model was built to close.

How It Compares

Against PRS’s own Core Custom 24, the McCarty 594 is the vintage-voiced counterpart: longer scale length on the Custom 24 (25″ vs. 24.594″), 24 frets instead of 22, hotter 85/15 or DMO pickups instead of the 594’s low-output set, and a lighter overall build. Players who find the Custom 24 too bright or too modern-sounding often land on the 594 instead.

Against a Gibson Les Paul Standard, the comparison is closer than PRS’s reputation for “shredder guitars” might suggest — similar scale-length territory, similar mahogany-and-maple construction, similar weight class. The differences come down to neck joint construction, fret access, and PRS’s tighter factory tolerances versus the Les Paul’s more variable vintage-inspired build quality.

Against a Fender Stratocaster or Telecaster, the 594 sits at the opposite end of the humbucker-versus-single-coil spectrum, though its coil-split function narrows the gap for players who want both vocabularies in one guitar without switching instruments mid-set.

Buying Guide

The standard Core McCarty 594 doublecut is the most common configuration and the best starting point for most players. The Singlecut version — the same platform that became Joe Walsh’s signature — trades a small amount of upper-fret access for a slightly different resonance and a more traditional silhouette. The McCarty 594 Hollowbody II, introduced in 2019, adds a semi-hollow chamber for players who want more air and acoustic-like resonance without leaving the McCarty voicing behind. The Standard 594 configuration drops the figured maple top and gloss nitro for an all-mahogany body and satin finish at a lower price point, useful for players who want the tone without the cosmetic premium. Buyers focused purely on budget should also watch for the SE McCarty 594 — the Indonesian-built version that brings the same body shape and general voicing down to a fraction of the Core price.

Practical Ownership Notes

The two-piece zinc bridge has no fine tuners, which means setup and intonation require a bit more patience than a Custom 24 with its wraparound-style hardware, but tuning stability is excellent once dialed in. The nitrocellulose finish is thinner and more vintage-feeling than PRS’s usual polyester/acrylic finishes, but it will show wear and lacquer checking over time — a feature for players chasing a played-in look, a downside for anyone who wants a guitar to look showroom-new for years. At roughly 8.3 lbs, the 594 is noticeably heavier than a Custom 24 and worth trying on a strap before committing if shoulder fatigue is a concern over long sets.

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