The PRS Standard, initially called simply the Paul Reed Smith Guitar, debuted along with the Custom in 1985.

It had an all-mahogany body rather than the maple top of the Custom, but otherwise it sported all of the features that instantly identified a PRS guitar, including the “half-moon” figuration of the fingerboard inlays, the straight string-pull headstock shape, and a vibrato that stayed in tune. The PRS pickup configuration was a standard two-humbucker setup, but the controls on the early models were anything but standard.

The toggle switch, which, on most guitars of the day, would be a pickup selector, was actually a tone control – nicknamed the “sweet switch” – that rolled off high-end frequencies. One of the knobs was dedicated to a rotary pickup selector switch, and the other was a volume control; a tone control knob replaced the sweet switch in 1991.