“$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.

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.