PJD GUITARS CAREY STANDARD & CAREY CUSTOM 10TH ANNIVERSARY £1,799 & £3,199

CONTACT PJD Guitars PHONE 01904 947288 WEB www.pjdguitars.com

It’s been a busy year for PJD Guitars. Aside from a factory move, the company’s founder, Leigh Dovey, has expanded his workforce to include Zach Pygall. “Zach does most of the work when it comes off the CNC machine, refining the necks and doing the sanding,” Leigh tells us. “I still look after wood selection, milling up the wood and kind of getting everything as it should be – the crucial work is so often at the start, the right materials and stuff. Then we have Andy Jackson who has recently joined us; Andy mainly does assembly, wiring and setups.”

A new spray booth was literally being installed as we spoke to Leigh. This will bring finishing in-house and the team is aiming for a capacity increase of between 80 and 100 per cent. As Leigh moved into his production stride back in 2017, a tie-up with Guitar Galleries meant the retail store took on sales and marketing in return for being the exclusive outlet.

“Now we’re moving forward with some other dealers across the UK,” says Leigh, while admitting he’s poached Mike Dunn from Guitar Galleries to run the sales and business side of PJD.

What hasn’t changed is the superbly detailed and crisply built instruments. Our two review samples bookend the Carey Elite – PJD’s core model – in both style and price. The new Standard is a big-hitter on price alone, bearing in mind it’s made in the UK with a chambered, nitro-finished swamp ash body, quarter-sawn roasted and lightly figured neck and fingerboard, Gotoh hardware and Bare Knuckle Boot Camp pickups. It’s deliciously light, too, and comes with a PJD logo’d Hiscox case.

Like many modern makers, Leigh pulls influences from benchmark designs to

The Standard has a crisp resonance, like a nice old Tele might well have sounded back in the day

create a seemingly familiar look that’s easy on the eye. The Carey model starts with a Fender-scale bolt-on neck that is a beautifully caramel-coloured piece of quarter-sawn roasted maple with a separate fingerboard of the same stuff. The fingerboard has some subtle flecking punctuated by the unique acrylic rectangle inlays and, of course, the 22 frets. Detailing is superb: from the fretting – with each fret end beautifully domed – to the perfectly cut bone nut.

The Carey’s slightly oversized single-cut light ash slab body – with no contouring back or front – apes a Fender White Blonde with its translucent bright-white finish. There’s nothing to tell you it’s a chambered construction aside perhaps from the weight, which at 2.63kg (5.79lb) is one of, if not the lightest we’ve had on test over the past few years. It’s lighter than our 10th Anniversary model and also the previous Carey Elite we looked at in issue 451, which was hardly heavy at 2.74kg (6lb). There is a utility feel to the edges, though, which aren’t so much radius’d as chamfered.

In stark contrast, the Carey Custom 10th Anniversary – one of 10 – uses the same foundation but adds this quite spectacular bookmatched ziracote top and fingerboard. Dark chocolate in colour and vividly striped in the main, it’s contrasted by the light biscuit-coloured sapwood. Ziracote hails from Central America and Mexico, and you’re more likely to see it used for the back and sides on a high-end acoustic guitar. It’s not just a veneer facing, either, but a pretty substantial 6mm-thick top that, acoustically, gives a noticeably different response: a little rounder and firmer in the high-end. As we’ve seen before on the Carey Elite, the top is edge-bound with quite a deep (10mm) single-ply cream binding, again with quite a precise edge to it. The back is swamp ash – although left natural here – and you can really feel the grain. Here, too, the switch and control backplates are ziracote.

To complement its elevated status, the neck – again quarter-sawn – has a beautiful tiger-striped flame. Other differences include the slightly contoured body heel, still with the same inset Allen key bolts that screw into threaded inserts in the neck, and the Gotoh hardware and Bare Knuckle pickup covers are tastefully aged.

To support its top-of-the-line status we have Bare Knuckle’s classic Mules, the neck pickup like the Standard’s P-90, suspended in the Les Paul Junior/Specialstyle pickguard that, here, is a black/white/ black laminate, as opposed to the single black ply of the Standard. It’s an exotic piece but remains quite unfussy in its virtually unfinished-looking satin-nitro finish.

Feel & Sounds

Both guitars have virtually identical necks, what PJD calls its ‘standard C’ profile. It’s a fairly mainstream shape but with little taper: 22.1mm at the 1st fret and 23mm by the 12th, so the lower positions feel quite big and the upper positions feel a little slimmer, as if your hand is expecting a little more meat. The C profile has a nice vintage-y fullshouldered feel in lower positions and seems like it’s a little shallower as you move up.

The medium/tall wire certainly doesn’t feel too large, while the well-rounded fingerboard edges temper the ‘modernism’ of the 254 to 305mm (10- to 12-inch) compound radius. No, it doesn’t feel quite like a classic old Fender but it certainly captures some of that worn-in vibe. Both necks feel exceptional: very precise players with a standard string height as supplied (1.6mm on bass and treble sides).

With light guitars like these, there’s always the worry that they may be slightly neck heavy when strapped on. With a slippery strap both dive a little but with the

The Custom comes across as a more mature voice: less acoustically zinging but still very lively

overall light weight, certainly balanced by your forearm, it isn’t an issue, especially when the immediate gain is an almost acoustic-like loud ring unplugged.

And that’s pretty much what we hear plugged in. The Standard has a crisp resonance with lots of detail, like a nice old Tele might well have sounded back in the day. There’s plenty of power and push from the neck single coil that does stinging blues with bags of attack or, with volume and tone

rolled way back, a nicely muted and damped jazz voice with your choice of clarity. The bridge ’bucker is typical Bare Knuckle – an old-style honky attack with a subtly rounder high-end response, compared with the neck that adds a bite-y attack to cleans and pushes a lightly crunchy and responsive amp into touch-sensitive overdrive. It’s beautifully nuanced.

The Custom comes across as a more mature voice: less acoustically zinging but still very lively with a smoother attack, which relates to a bigger, stronger voice. In fact, the ’buckers sound as old as they look with a sonorous bell-like voice that contrasts the Standard’s more textured character. And while the simple volume/ tone drive seems to suit the plummier Standard, we can’t help thinking that a fourcontrol layout on the Custom would really suit the twin-humbucker style – it does lean more on the Gibson side of the tracks than the Standard. It’s marginally heavier but still a lightweight build at 2.95kg (6.49lb) and just sits a little better with a strap.

We almost missed the pull-switch on the tone control, not previously a PJD feature, and here it splits just the bridge humbucker to single coil, voicing the slug coil. It certainly adds another dimension, creating a less thick, more single coil-like mix, and there’s something very cool going

on with this split at the bridge as you roll down the tone control with a crunchy amp voice – there’s a really vocal Peter Greenlike voice, which is the final dollop of cream on a very tasty cake that is far from singular in its flavour.

Verdict

Aside from now being one of the largest electric guitar makers in the UK, PJD’s vision is – thankfully – not based solely on copying a classic. The Carey is shaping up to be an extremely flexible production platform pared down to its bare essentials in the Standard format or made into a far more exotic vision in the Custom 10th Anniversary. The chambered light-ash back works very well with the different tops we have here – and there’s myriad wood combos that could be used, too, not least with different pickup sets. It’s a very viable design. These are both lively, vibrant guitars that ring for days. They’re great players with exceptional sounds, too. Really, what’s not to like?

The Carey is shaping up to be an extremely flexible production platform, in the Standard format or more exotic Anniversary vision

In different style from PJD’s Corey Elite and Custom, the new Standard features this Bare Knuckle Boot Camp Old Guard P-90-style soapbar single coil, which provides a stand-out sound

1 1. Beautifully aged hardware is a feature of this Corey Custom. Again, Bare Knuckle is the pickup of choice: here we have a Mule with its very PAF-alike spec including a sand-cast Alnico 4 magnet with “a differing number of turns of vintage-correct 42 AWG plain enamel wire on each coil”

2 2. While both our review guitars use the same vintage-style Gotoh splitpost tuners, they have a different appearance in line with their styles: the Standard’s here are bright nickel; the Custom’s look decidedly old

3 3. The ziracote fingerboard is unique to this limited Custom and displays a vivid contrast between the darker heartwood and the lighter sapwood. Also note the subtle rectangular fingerboard inlays

4

The Bare Knuckle/Jensen cap dominates the Custom’s control cavity

The Standard’s control circuit uses an Orange Drop capacitor

5. Another example of the ziracote’s exotic colouration. However, with its satin nitro finish it really avoids looking over-posh. Note, too, the body binding here; the Standard is unbound 5

6. To match that soapbar neck pickup, the Standard’s bridge pickup is a Bare Knuckle Boot Camp Old Guard humbucker. All Old Guards feature Alnico 2 magnets and a vintage-style lower output 6

7 7. One of the few guitars out there that actually uses bolts, not screws, to attach its neck to body. It’s an extremely tight and rigid fitting neck and a feature of all PJD designs