“$499 is incredibly high value for a guitar you can go and buy, and go and gig it. And that’s what I want: it’s not a toy”: PRS’ Jack Higginbotham reflects on the history of the SE line

PRS Guitars COO Jack Higginbotham poses with a PRS SE Custom 24 Semi-Hollow Piezo in front of stacks and stacks of tonewood blanks.
(Image credit: PRS Guitars / Hunter Selman)

Creating a successful 40-year-old company is far from an easy thing to do, not least in the fickle, often fashion-led world of the electric guitar.

But it won’t be long before PRS’s SE division hits its mid-20s, and in many ways it now seems like a guitar company within a guitar company – not least, of course, that the SEs have always been made ‘offshore’, originally in Korea and now primarily in Indonesia. The SE acoustics and Hollowbodies are made by Cor-Tek in China.

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Dave Burrluck
Gear Reviews Editor, Guitarist

Dave Burrluck is one of the world’s most experienced guitar journalists, who started writing back in the '80s for International Musician and Recording World, co-founded The Guitar Magazine and has been the Gear Reviews Editor of Guitarist magazine for the past two decades. Along the way, Dave has been the sole author of The PRS Guitar Book and The Player's Guide to Guitar Maintenance as well as contributing to numerous other books on the electric guitar. Dave is an active gigging and recording musician and still finds time to make, repair and mod guitars, not least for Guitarist’s The Mod Squad.