‘About Us’ pages are always interesting. Finding out how a company started. But when the company it’s just you, by yourself, it really turns into ‘about me’, so let’s get started.
Backstory
Having started building guitars at school, the combination of woodwork, electronics and overall aesthetics of various guitar shapes and styles made guitar building a natural choice for me. But I only really took the career seriously after deciding that over a decade working as a Carpenter and Joiner wasn’t scratching a particular itch.
I started at the bottom of a very steep learning curve over 15 years ago. Working on friend’s guitars as well as my own. Being greeted with a cupboard full of broken Superstrats at a friend’s house meant that my learning curve covered many genres of guitars very quickly. I managed to get a job at a local music store and started working on, what would end up to be thousands of guitars. Repairs, restrings and setups to Quality Control checks of new instruments. The exposure to so many different types of instruments was invaluable.
I was also doing my own guitar repair work on the side. It didn’t take long before the numbers of my own customers grew to a point where a decision had to be made.
On My Own
The real ‘about us’ story starts in 2009, when PCJ Custom Guitars was born. The work I had previously done had fuelled my fascination for both building and repairing guitars. While is it very difficult to start a business building guitars on your own, and I give total respect to anyone who managed it, I found much more job satisfaction in repairing instruments. The look on customers’ faces when you hand them back one of their favourite guitars, possibly the first guitar they learnt to play on, in fully working order, all setup and shiny again, became a very enjoyable part of the job.
So the focus of the company became guitar repair and later, amplifier repair. Everything from setups to upgrades to minor and sometimes major repairs were offered so that hopefully the customer could end up with exactly the instrument they wanted, sounding better than ever. The amplifier repairs side of things came, again from customers. While collecting customers’ guitars and talking about their gear in general, the question “You don’t fix amps as well, do you?” kept coming up. So after a lot of research, a really good training course and building on the electrical knowledge I already had, the amplifier department was opened!
The research behind some of the more extravagant guitar wiring suggestions from customers sparked an interest in just what could be done within the confines of a guitar body. How far could you push an instrument’s wiring to produce the most varied tonal palette, but also how to make simple upgrades to a customer’s guitar to make it feel far better to play.
The Next Chapter
Over the years I’ve found a number of blogs and forum rabbit-holes to get lost in while searching for information. Some of which I started archiving while working on customer’s instruments, some just for my own interest. After looking at the range of guitar repair textbooks available, it was clear that they really hadn’t been updated in a while. “Now with Floyd Rose” plastered on the front cover with a bright Clipart-style star dated the textbooks even more than the hardware they were talking about.
So I decided to write my own. Before I got around to publishing, other work commitments got in the way. Then Covid happened, changing, among other things, the working environment for everybody. Instead of publishing a physical book I decided to set up this blog instead.
The next chapter of the ‘about us’ story starts when Infinity Guitar Works was born. Running alongside this site as very much a ‘sister site’ to the more nuts and bolts focus here. It’s the culmination of a lot of different aspects of the guitar-building and repair world. From electrics and pickups to hardware and setups. This way, when I find out more information, I can post about it.
Brands we work with
