Future Moves

It's been a busy year so far for PJD Guitars, setting up a new workshop, designing and redesigning guitars, creating and winding in-house pickups... We drop in for a chat

- Dave Burrluck

Hot on the heels of PRS's entry into the T-style market, PJD's new York model certainly wasn't inspired by that launch. "No, this has literally been a guitar outline on my computer for about six years," smiles Leigh Dovey, the driving force behind PJD Guitars. "It was one of those things I kept coming back to, tweaking it and thinking, 'That's it!" But then the next day I'd be going, 'No, I'm not happy with that?' I tried different pickup configurations, visually, and then finally I got to the stage where I realised I was going to have to make one and see what it looked like.

"I didn't want to do the same thing again with a Gotoh hardtail bridge [like the existing models in the PJD range] and just a different body shape," Leigh continues, "because I've done that with the Carey then the St John. This had to be a different guitar. I hadn't done a T-style, but I've always liked them and I've owned a few. Quite a few people have said that our PJD headstock looks a bit like a T-style anyway and asked why we use that on the single-cut Carey. So I thought I'd build a body to match our headstock. I built one and loved the shape, how it looked, and how it felt really comfortable. I then needed some pickups.

"The first PJD pickups, the Dr Wallis set, were created for the Woodford Pioneer [an upmarket S-style made exclusively for Andertons], so the York's High Teas aren't the first. You might wonder why we'd bother with so many people making classic-style pickups out there. But I thought, 'Who knows our guitars better than us? Nobody.' So, now, when we build a new guitar we can build the pickups to match the guitar, its body wood, the neck, everything. We have Josh Parkin with us who makes the pickups. He's an incredible guitar builder in his own right- a genius! and really into making pickups."