PRS’s SE line has featured numerous signatures over the past two decades, including those from Carlos Santana, Mark Tremonti and Bernie Marsden. David Grissom had to wait…
As a PRS player since 1985 and an official signature artist since 2007, David Grissom seems rather late in joining the SE party. What took so long? “Maybe they were reluctant to bring it up with me because I tend to be pretty hands on,” laughs David today. “To be honest, I’m pretty shocked because the DGT actually came out some 15 years ago. I thought it’d have a lifespan of three or four years and here it is doing better than ever, so PRS is doing something right – we’re doing something right. I guess they thought this was the right time.”
PRS’s COO, Jack Higginbotham, weighs in: “I always liked David personally and his guitar playing; he’s very talented and I’m always surprised when other people aren’t [so] familiar with him. I like the thought of giving him his due.
“I have a friend who owns an older DGT model,” Jack continues, “and I mentioned we were working with David on a new pickup and he said he’d like to check those out, so he shipped me the guitar so we could get it to current specs. It came to my office and I pulled it out, put my hand around the neck and went, ‘Holy smokes, man – Ilove these guitars!’ I like the way the neck feels, I like the intention of the instrument. I was just noodling on it and that’s really what planted the seed: how awesome would it be if we could give more people around the world the opportunity to have the experience to play one of these things?”
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“I’ve been onboard since day one,” continues David, “and they [PRS] have been very cool. I said so long as I can pull the plug on it at any point if it’s not up to snuff then I’m cool with giving it a shot. It’s been very rewarding.”
The project has taken about a year, although “the heavy lifting has been done over the past 20 years”, continues David, “through the McCarty and then the DGT. The challenge was to make that guitar translate to something that costs 25 per cent of the Core DGT model. The whole philosophy and specs were in place, so it was a much different project than coming up with a completely new model.”
Doing Time
You could suggest that the SE DGT’s journey to production actually started in 1985. This was when David traded in a 1959 Fender Esquire for a first year of production PRS all-mahogany ‘Standard’ (although it wasn’t actually called that until 1987). Meanwhile, his Fiesta Red 1960 Strat, which he’d previously bought in Memphis for $400, became a spare.
