PJD Guitars St. John Standard | Stunningly versatile made-in-the-UK offset goodness! Review & Demo

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This is my in-depth look at the PJD Guitars St. John Standard!

PJD Guitars were the breakout brand I discovered in 2021 at 42 Gear Street, and it’s taken almost a year for a St. John to become available for me to test… but was it worth the wait? That’s what we’re going to find out in this video!

Check out PJD Guitars here:

The St. John is PJD’s offset model, and it is available in three tiers. They’re all made in the UK, and the Standard is the most affordable (currently costing £1,950 as of August 2022), followed by the more luxurious Elite and the Limited options.

The St. John Standard features a chambered ash body and an ash top (you can choose whether your guitar comes with an f-hole or not when you order it) coupled with a roasted maple neck and fingerboard. The neck is a medium C shape with a 25.5” scale length, 22 narrow-tall Jescar 55090 frets, and a 10-12” fingerboard radius (i.e. it gets slightly thicker as you move up the neck!).

You get Gotoh tuners and a Gotoh hardtail bridge, and the pickups are by fellow English builder Cream T – a custom PJD P90 at the neck, and an Eliminator (which is the brand’s classic PAF-style option) humbucker at the bridge. The guitar I’m looking at comes in a stunning shade of satin Midnight Black, with a tortoiseshell pickguard, and the guitar has a nitro finish.

Custom shop level specs at less than custom shop prices, then, but how does the St. John Standard actually perform? In the video, I put the guitar through its paces in as many different genres and styles as I can: that means everything from country, folk and indie, to pop, rock, punk, metal and more. Let’s see how it handles it all!

Here are some links to the various playing samples and info bits:

00:00 Hello!
00:10 Introduction to PJD Guitars and the St. John
01:47 Specs and info
03:39 Today’s rig and plan

Clean Sounds
04:27 Clean tone reference chords on all pickup settings
04:49 Blues progression
04:56 Country strummed chords
05:15 Poppy barre chords
05:30 Country ballad arpeggios
05:43 Country lead sound
05:50 Funky rhythm chords
06:05 Atmospheric droning indie chords
06:24 Tone control test
07:38 Folk pop chords
07:55 60s pop rhythm sound
08:06 Indie pop picked arpeggios
08:25 Ascending open indie chords

Overdriven Sounds
08:38 Indie rock rhythm sound
08:54 Indie octave chords riff
09:18 Kings Of Leon inspired indie rock riff
09:33 Garage rock riff
09:50 Edgy indie barre chords
10:04 Volume control test
10:54 Upbeat indie rock barre chords
11:15 AC/DC inspired classic rock riff
11:30 Hendrix inspired classic rock riff
11:47 Classic rock riff
12:05 Groovy classic rock riff
12:30 Bluesey rock riff

Higher gain drive sounds
12:47 Classic rock riff
13:04 Hard rock riff
13:21 Glam rock riff
13:36 Hard rock rhythm tone
14:02 Hard rock lead melody
14:14 Chunky alt rock chords
14:39 Alt rock riff
14:52 Foo Fighters inspired modern rock riff
15:10 Pop punk riff
15:22 Pop punk melodic lead riff
15:37 Green Day inspired punk rock riff
15:51 Punk rock power chords
16:17 Progressive rock riff (Drop D tuning)
16:33 Modern rock palm-muted chords (Drop D)
16:56 Rage Against The Machine inspired groovy riff (Drop D)

Heavy Distortion sounds (all in Drop D)
17:12 Metal chugging riff
17:28 Mastodon inspired metal riff with country twang
17:39 Classic metal melodic lead sound
17:55 Fast chugging riff
18:05 Hardcore punk riff
18:20 Rammstein inspired industrial metal riff
18:34 Classic heavy metal/sludge riff

19:08 My thoughts: first impressions out of the box
20:04 Weight
21:16 Feel, build quality and hardware
21:45 Playability and neck
22:43 Sounds discussion
24:29 Pickup setting volume differences
25:07 My conclusions on the St. John Standard
27:58 Thanks and goodbye


My setup was as follows: I ran the St. John into my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 head, also using my Greer Lightspeed for the overdrive and my Revv G3 for the heavy distortion sounds. The amp went from the Red Box DI straight into my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which went into Logic Pro X. That's it. No post-processing on the sounds was done.

Here’s some links to those bits of gear:

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H&K Black Spirit 200 head:
Greer Lightspeed:
Revv G3:
Focusrite 4i4 (this is the newer equivalent of my 2i4, which they don’t make any more!):
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Enjoy!


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Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe.

#PJDGuitars #PJDGuitarsStJohn #OffsetGuitars #CreamTPickups


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