Straight talked there is no iconic PRS tone.
The applicable definition of icon (we aren't talking about statues or painted pictures of gods or saints) is:
"A person or thing regarded as a
representative symbol of something:
this iron-jawed icon of American manhood." (Emphasis Added).
Elvis, the Beatles, and certain other bands are iconic of music of the early rock years. They dominated radio, they dominated record sales, they were the ones that were widely admired and copied. They are
symbols of an era.
Name one band today that is truly a dominating media icon, a symbol of today's music
in the same way.
You can't.
In fact, you can't name a style of music that is a dominating media icon in the way that rock music was back in the day. It doesn't exist.
Whether that's a good or bad thing is an important question, but I won't go into that here.
The reason is that music has gone from one worldwide mass market, to many niche markets. There aren't a lot of musical icons out there any more in a mass media sense. Sure, there are a lot of great bands and so on. But I'm talking true icons.
The problem is that
iconic music creates iconic instrument tones. Not the other way around.
Based on many recordings made a long time ago, Gibson's jazz body guitars were iconic-symbols by the late 1930s. Fenders became iconic-symbols in the early 1950s. Lots of records came and went before Paul Smith was born. They are indeed "representative symbols" of certain styles of guitar music.
Paul Smith came along many years after the Fender and Gibson sounds had already been heard on thousands of hit records. It's hard to be a symbol in the same way, when the golden age of rock and roll
happened when you were in elementary school.
To say that every player sounds like himself regardless of the guitar used is to miss the main point when talking about tone; sure we all sound like ourselves. I even sound like myself on the piano, and my fingers don't touch the strings. But I have a certain touch on the keys, and I'd recognize my own playing on a recording. That doesn't mean that the instrument I'm playing is irrelevant to the outcome. In fact, it is very relevant. I sound quite different playing a Yamaha as opposed to playing a Steinway.
Part of the issue with electric guitars is that we use many different amplifiers from one another, and that's a HUGE part of guitar sound. Part of it is that we all play differently, and a big part of our tone is in our hand-brain connection. Throw in a few pedals, and you've muddied the waters even more.
But while, for example, Carlos Santana sounds like himself on a PRS or his old LP or SG,
he sounds like himself playing that particular guitar. His PRS sound is indeed different from his early sound, although the process of recording a guitar sent through an amplifier into a Shure SM57 into a recording console does tend to homogenize an awful lot of how the thing sounds in a room!
The moment you say, "I sound different on a Strat than I do on a Les Paul," you've admitted that you don't sound the same regardless of what you play. Thousands of posts here say things like, "I want to get that Strat sound," or "I want to get a 335 sound" etc., "What should I buy?"
And thousands of answers will say, "A PRS has its own sound, if you want a Strat, buy a Strat." Etc. No one says, "It doesn't matter, you will sound the same no matter what you play." And the reason is we all know that's simply not true.
In fact, I know that I sound different, even recorded, on different PRS guitars. Whether someone else would notice, I don't know, nor do I care. A player has to make choices, and play what the
player thinks is right for the song. Part is the inspiration that comes from the tone; part is the inspiration that comes from the tactile stuff; part is from the eyeballs.
OK, the eyeballs part has a lot to do with it.
An awful lot of players want to affect a certain image. One has only to look at the astonishing success of brand-new, artificially-relic'd instruments to understand that it's all about image. And image is about style.
A guy in ripped-up (usually artificially relic'd) jeans, sneakers, and an armpit undershirt, covered with tattoos is not necessarily compatible in some folks' mind appearing on stage with a fancy-looking guitar like many PRS guitars.
And the wannabes who never go on stage, but enjoy simply mentally posing as rock stars with their guitars and in their basements still want "the look."
And that, of course, has nothing to do with iconic tone.
Forgive me for rambling, but the fact is that
icons are largely
bullsh!t, and a whole lot of other stuff, such as what's "in," what's "famous," and so on. Today's media icon isn't a rock star, it's a reality TV person with zero talent like a Kardashian, and that to me is one very sad comment on life in the world as it is today.
But to diss PRS guitars by saying there's no iconic PRS tone, well...sorry. There are lots of unique and cool PRS tones, and to worry over whether or not they're iconic is entirely beside the point.
