With new guitar-making ventures seemingly popping up on a daily basis, we check in with the style and craft of one of the industry’s most experienced luthiers
Next year, Patrick James Eggle will celebrate a decade of electricguitar making, a period that has seen him and his team producing some of the most jaw-dropping electric guitars money can buy. “There are so many anniversaries because I’ve switched track so many times,” says Patrick, “so next year, 2024, is the 10th anniversary of when we started building electric guitars again, in the UK at these premises in Oswestry. I was building electrics, of course, in the early 90s, then everything went west and I wandered around, went walkabout for a little while, ended up in America, came back and eventually started building electric guitars again – 10 years ago next year.”
The electric focus put the brakes on Patrick’s highly regarded acoustic instruments. Does he miss making those? “Not really, because I’m so busy doing what I’m doing now. I actually sold all the tooling I had for the acoustics and a few people said I shouldn’t do that because they thought I might want to start again in the future. But I said, ‘No, I’m not going to build acoustic guitars ever again.’ At the moment, that still stands. But who knows? In my 70s, pottering around in my shed, I might want to give it a go.”
While it’s the set-neck Macon that holds the No 1 spot in terms of orders, the bolt-on T-style Oz and the S-style 96 models remain popular and, like the Macon, each comes in various styles. “Yes, the 96 comes in three levels,” explains Patrick. “Our order book is mainly for the 96 Vintage with either alder or swamp ash bodies. The Contour Top definitely falls second to that, which is probably down to price and perhaps because it’s a bit more ‘furniture’, with the maple top, and less utilitarian.” The 96 Carved Top takes that further and is the upper level of the mini-series. But the combination of the three core models and their variants means that virtually every major style of electric guitar is covered in the PJE range.
“My first guitar was an SG copy and that’s always come up with me as my go-to guitar as a player,” Patrick tells us. “But as a guitar builder, you want to try everything, don’t you? And I’ve built everything from bass guitars to mandolins over the years. You want to have a crack at everything and understand what’s cool about that instrument and see if you can add anything to it or just faithfully reproduce what it is that people find good and useful.
“So most of the projects I embark upon are e
