Every so often a guitar comes through with a story as good as the instrument, and the PRS SE Rock Lady is one of those. Here's how it goes. The crew from PRS Japan was in a meeting back at the factory, rolled some video, and it turned out a Japanese anime had built one of its lead characters around a PRS guitar. PRS took it as the compliment it was and decided to make the thing real. The show is Rock Is a Lady's Modesty, the character is Lilisa "Lily" Suzunomiya, and this guitar is about as close to the one she plays on screen as a production instrument gets. The difference is you can actually take this one home and plug it in.
The look. The color is the first thing you notice. It's a Pearl Pink top over a natural mahogany back, so you still see real wood around the edges instead of paint everywhere. Get up close and the details do the talking: custom purple-toned pickup bobbins made specifically for this run, a gloss black headstock face, and a single line-drawn lily on the truss rod cover that nods to Lily herself. PRS being PRS, they couldn't leave the fretboard plain, so their signature bird inlays fly up the neck where the anime guitar has plain dots. Faithful to the show, but nobody's going to mistake it for anything other than a PRS.
The tones. Pretty finishes are easy. What keeps a guitar in your hands is how it plays and sounds, and that's where the Rock Lady earns its keep. It's built on two instruments we already trust on the floor: the SE Paul's Guitar and the Limited Edition Custom 24-08 that PRS artist Kanami Tono plays. The pickups are a pair of TCI "S" units voiced with Paul Reed Smith himself, and they cover real ground, from spanky single-coil chime to thick, soapbar-style heat. A three-way toggle picks your pickups, and two little mini-toggles let you coil-tap each one on its own. Add it up and you've got eight distinct sounds out of one guitar, which is a lot of range for a player who does a bit of everything.
Holding it all together is a PRS Stoptail bridge with brass inserts, the kind of detail that doesn't show up in a photo but you feel the second you dig in: solid, resonant, and it stays in tune. The rest is honest PRS spec. A 25-inch scale, 22 frets, a Wide Fat mahogany neck that gives you something to hold onto, a 10-inch radius rosewood board, vintage-style tuners, and a maple top on a mahogany body. It comes set up on PRS Signature 10-46 strings with a gig bag in the box, so it's ready to play the day it lands.
More than a paint job. If you follow the show, you already know the connection runs deeper than the artwork. BAND-MAID's Kanami Tono wrote the theme song, and the production used motion capture of her actual playing to animate the performances, which is why they look as alive as they do. So this isn't a cartoon guitar with a sticker slapped on it. It's tied to a real player whose feel and gear are built into the whole thing.
Rock Is a Lady's Modesty anime series copyrighted by ©Hiroshi Fukuda, HAKUSENSHA/Rock Lady
How many, and for how long. PRS is only building 690 of these in 2026, so this is a genuine limited run, not something that will sit on the wall forever. And for what it's worth, PRS clearly had a blast with it. Asked whether they would ever get on stage with Lily, their answer was about perfect: no blue M&Ms, no demands, they would just show up and rock it. That is the spirit of the whole project.
If you've got questions, that is exactly what we're here for. Come play one in Wheaton and get your hands on it, or grab it at ChuckLevins.com. With only 690 in the world, once they are gone they are gone, and we are glad to walk you through it or set one aside.
Rock Is a Lady's Modesty anime series copyrighted by ©Hiroshi Fukuda, HAKUSENSHA/Rock Lady