Skaggs with his new Tonare Grand from PRS. Photo by Marc Quigley.
to make good records—I knew I had to. my studio, we don’t have a whole lot of
They had to sound good, they had to work booths; most the stuff is right out in one
good, they had to come in on budget and big, open room and it sounds great. We
on time, so I had to grow up pretty quick. got big thick, dense foam that’s like 8 feet
long and maybe 4 to 5 feet wide, and we
set them on their side and we sort of build
ourselves in a little den there so we have
some separation and we’ll cut thataway.
Today when I make records, a lot of it
depends on what we’re cutting. We’ll go in
and do a gospel song where we sing four
parts around a microphone, I’ll play mandolin and Cody [Kilby] will play guitar, and
we’ll cut that live—and we love doing it live
like that. But most of the time, we’ll go in
and I know what I hear in my head. I give
the guys a chart to play, or I’ll sit down and
play what the song’s gonna be, and they’ll
write it out. We’ll cut a track with no vocal.
You’ve recently been involved with the
creation of a couple of amazing acoustic guitars, the Bourgeois Ricky Skaggs
Limited Edition and the new Paul Reed
Smith acoustics, the Tonare Grand and
the Angelus. You’ve had a long relationship with Dana Bourgeois, but how did
you get involved with PRS?
acoustic guitar, who should I get to walk
with me through this process?’ and your
name kept coming up as the guy to get
in touch with, so I’m just bringing these
before you so you can look at ‘em.” So I
looked at ‘em and saw that they were a
little thinner bodywise than the Bourgeois
dreadnoughts and Martins that I’d been
playing—but boy, when I strummed the
instrument the first time the thing just
jumped out of my hands. I realized right
then that they were really on to something.
Sometimes I’ll go into a vocal booth and
sing and maybe even play to where they
can hear the groove that I’m hearin’,
and then I’ll go back in and fix my guitar and fix my vocal again. But we try to
get fiddle, mandolin, acoustic guitar and
bass—and many times banjo, if we’re
cutting a track that needs a banjo. In
Almost four years ago now, Paul Reed
Smith came to me and brought me some
really rough prototypes—they were very,
very prototype, but he brought them to
me anyway. He said, “I’ve called around
the country and I’ve asked a lot of musicians, ‘If I was gonna create a great
I said, “We gotta find something that
sounds good, plays good and looks good,
and all your electric guitars play great, so
you’ve got that part of it down. We just
gotta make sure that part gets transferred
to the necks of these acoustic guitars.” So
many times, you know, you find a great-sounding acoustic guitar and the neck
is just hard to play—it’s not friendly. At
55 years old, I don’t want to have to be
working to play an instrument, I want the
instrument to play me. That’s what
