SE Uprising

They may be a lot more affordable than PRS’s USA guitars, but the SE range is on a roll, epitomised by the new Hollowbody models. We track down the man behind the mark: Jack Higginbotham

- Dave Burrluck

We’d been at PRS HQ for a matter of minutes when we were ushered into an office expecting to be shown the latest high-ticket guitars for 2020. Instead, we spent the following hour and a bit discussing the new SE offerings, primarily the Hollowbody guitars made not in Korea or Indonesia but in China – a first for a PRS electric. How? Why?

“It’s pretty simple,” Jack Higginbotham, PRS’s chief operating officer, tells us. “We are very happy with our SE acoustic guitars made in Dalian, China, through Cor-Tek. We have an incredible relationship with the man that runs that factory. Instead of him saying, ‘No, we do things our way,’ he has embraced our mission and our philosophy on what makes a good acoustic guitar. I feel very connected to him and very much a part of what he’s doing. His ability to make a guitar to our design is well proven.

“The way I look at the new Hollowbody,” he continues, “well, it’s a coin toss as to whether it’s an acoustic guitar or an electric guitar. So it’s not a radical thought to me to have them make the guitar. As you know, you’ve played them, there are some intense acoustic properties about that guitar: it’s like we’re making an acoustic guitar with twin humbuckers.

“The Cor-Tek factory in Surabaya, Indonesia, is made up of several different factory buildings,” he adds. “The one in China is probably about the same [total] size, but it comes across as being larger because it’s all under the one roof. I’ve been in the factory many, many times, but I think I’d still get lost if I was left on my own. So it’s really large but extraordinarily well equipped and organised.”

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