Pratley Guitars is a design focused guitar maker based on the Gold Coast of Australia. We produce world class instruments with unique design and classic appeal. Our guitars feature sustainable Australian native tone-woods.

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2020 IS BEHIND US!!!

We are back!!!!!!!!!

 

I made a sudden decision to re-purpose our factory for medical manufacturing this time last year. The government had not announced jobkeeper/jobseeker and the future was unknown and looking bad.....

 

We helped out by manufacturing 10s of thousands of medical products for Qld Health, NSW Health, VIC Gov and many more during some of the worst parts of 2020..... until Chinese orders flooded in and we were kicked to the side.

 

Looking back I see that we could have continued making guitars and fared well but at least we are still here. The good news is that we have finally returned to Guitars since early February 2021. I have changed our company vision and we are now manufacturing Australian acoustic guitars for Australian music stores.

I am so excited for this new beginning and look forward to supporting working musicians across Australia.

 

 

- Martin Pratley - 

 Owner / Head Luthier

 

 

 

The regional firms with global visions

Pratley guitars in the Australian newspaper

Martin Pratley - Owner of Pratley Guitars

Sweet Music

In South Queensland Martin Pratley is creating unique timbres from native timber.

At his four-person factory in Nerang, on the Gold Coast, they are using Bunya Pine, Queensland Maple Silk and Tasmanian Blackwood to shape their lovingly handcrafted acoustic guitars. They are also pioneering the use of Silver Quandong, a sustainable rainforest hardwood. “It’s similar to mahogany but doesn’t look anything like it – it’s a lovely white, cream white colour,” Pratley says. “It gives out warmer and more articulate tones.”

Guitar making has been a labour of love to Pratley for over 20 years. He spent his youth in the wood shop with his father, a carpenter, before going into industrial design at university. An avid surfer and camper, he pioneered a guitar that packs down by removing the neck and earned a degree of fame for his invention. 

He parlayed that into an electric guitar business supplying local rock bands and while on the circuit jamming with acts, stumbled upon another innovation. Favoured by blues musician and buskers, the stomp box allows the guitarist to replicate a drumbeat with a tap of a foot pedal, and Pratley’s version earned a cult following.

 

Pratley guitars and ash grunwald

(Blues man Ash Grunwald with his signature model Pratley Guitar)

 

He knows that because his Facebook and Instagram pages tell him.

“(Aria winner) Tash Sultana uses one, and I found out because someone tagged me in their video of her playing; a session musician in the US who plays for Ed Sheeran has posted himself using it; I’ve even been tagged in a post by a Uruguayan busker – God knows where he got one from!” Pratley says.

Pratley’s range of acoustic guitars are embedded in a music ecosystem that communicates via social media. Renowned Australian blues musician Ash Grunwald started using the guitars after his manager commented on a Pratley Guitar Instagram post, and seven-ARIA nominated act The Teskey Brothers are also fans on social media. “I’m hoping they’ll play my guitars at the awards,” Pratley says.

In a world where artists are influencers, it’s money-can’t-buy branding.

“These guitars are $3,000 each, so it’s a big decision for a potential buyer,” Pratley says. “Sometimes it takes a year or five years to get to know the product. You can be as good as you want at making a guitar but if you don’t have the artists its a hard slog. Seeing a post with an artist with it is an essential tool to get the brand out there.”

And as a small business owner with his hands mostly on the tools, Pratley finds the simplicity of social posts a particular time saver. Via his only Shopify e-commerce store, plugins for Facebook and Instagram allow him to send out marketing messages with directly linked to sales campaigns, while he communicates with customers all over the world via Facebook Messenger.

Pratley Guitars are among the nearly 60 per cent of Australian small businesses (SMB) who use Facebook to connect to customers, according to a report commissioned for Facebook by PWC. The report estimated that 8.2 million Australians purchased a product from a SMB after seeing content on the site. It also found that of the 35 per cent of SMBs who export to foreign markets in 2017, 80 per cent had a Facebook page.

There are direct regional benefits, according the report. In regional Australia in 2017, growing small to medium businesses hired 35,000 new employees generating an estimated $4 billion in additional economic value.

It’s good for business, but importantly for Martin Pratley it leaves more time for doing what he loves.

“When you build a guitar it comes to life,” he says. “It could be Ash Grunwald playing blues or some other amazing acoustic guitarist. It just puts the hairs up on the back of your neck.”

 

Martin Pratley of Pratley Guitars - Head Luthier

 

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sponsored/DmB8bIttoajv6SyR6DIH/the-regional-firms-with-global-visions/

Ash Grunwald Signature Model Pratley Guitar - Australian Made

Australian Musician Interview

Ash, there’s a lot happening for you this year with the new album Mojo coming out, you’re playing our Melbourne Guitar Show, you have a new signature guitar coming out and a book. How’s your headspace with all of that about to happen?
Fantastic. Really good because the album is five years in the making, the book took up a lot my life last year and this year. The signature guitar is just a pleasure. I feel relaxed. It’s funny because we were living in Bali for three years, it was a time of a lot of rebuilding, regrouping and working really hard on myself, my guitar playing, my physical and mental self. Now I just feel like I am stepping into something that I have been envisaging for a long time.

Martin Pratley with Ash Grunwald at the Pratley Guitars Factory

We’re really excited about this signature guitar. How did the Pratley association come about?

Martin (Pratley) is a really good luthier from up our way. He’s on the Gold Coast and he approached me after giving me a few stomp boxes, which were cool and then he said do you want to start working on a signature guitar? I thought what am I into and what’s right for this phase of my career? I’m a really big fan of big body guitars. I played a Gibson 137 for many years, that was my main guitar. Then I switched over to a Les Paul when I started doing band things. So I’d switch between those two. Obviously I’ve had a lot of guitars over the years but lately I have been playing D’Angelico, a variant of the 335 and that’s a really cool guitar but the chance to design my own guitar is really cool. We wanted to do something classy and cool and then when it hits production … I don’t know what price Martin will put on it in the end but we want to try to make it in such a way that people can afford to own the guitar. If you get too frilly and put things on that might make it look cool, it’s putting the labour up. At the moment it’s all made in Australia and it’s not made somewhere where labour is cheap.

Has there been much back and forth with prototypes?
There’s a lot of back and forth and so far I’ve only just been playing the first one. The idea is that it looks like a classic guitar in the mould of the 335 but with a different shape and a lot more fret access and the neck is designed to be very playable.

Ash Grunwald Signature Model Guitar

What about tone-wise, will you get much variation from this guitar?
I’m probably going to experiment with this a little bit between P90s and humbuckers. Martin makes his own pickups, so there are a few different options. With my tone, I stick to the neck pickup a lot. I like that big round mellow neck tone, especially on the P90s and get my variation from my pedalboard. But I go through phases where I just get the tone through my amp, just loading the front end of the amps and doing the old blues thing with just the volume. That first prototype in my studio is a lot of fun and has a really nice tone. Currently it has two P90s but we’re probably be going to work through one more prototype, maybe two before the Melbourne Guitar Show.

How important was the look of the guitar, the visual design? It has a beautiful colour scheme to it.
I love earthy tones. I’ve got a Les Paul Studio that I keep in Canada that is unfinished completely, it’s just like a raw wood thing and I almost thought that was my perfect Les Paul because I have that earthy side to myself, to my songs and to what I like. I like raw wood so it is a half way point between that and some really fancy ornate guitar that you can see a lot of work has been put into it. It’s made of Black Ash, I think it is called, which is a pretty funny coincidence but I still wanted it to have a warm sunburst look to it with a little bit of red coming through. I think it looks wicked. I’m pretty happy with it. I like vintage warm and natural, so I am really happy with the look of the thing.

You must be pretty stoked because there aren’t a huge amount of Australian musicians who have a signature guitar.
It’s really cool and I am really stoked. It’s really funny when you have played a million gigs, it’s really enjoyable to get to that level where you’ve been doing it for a long time and you get recognised for that. It feels really good. It almost feels like fate that all of these things are coming in now, that I have come back to Australia with a bit of a rebuild. One of the things I did while I was in Bali was I prepared myself for a new part of my career. I came up through the roots scene of the noughties. I started as a blues player in Melbourne. At that time I’d played a lot of guitar and was keen on the guitar, then I got into the roots scene and focussed a lot more on my songwriting. I kinda thought, I don’t want to be some shredder guitarist, I want to be tasty and be a songwriter. I think over the last few years I’ve looked at my career and thought about where I want to be going forward and I decided that now is the time being older, to go back to treating the guitar with more respect and being more in the guitarist scene. As soon as I did that, the irony of it… in a way it was me accepting my age in a way. Ok, I’m going back to a different phase and the irony of that is that I have felt so much love for my instruments. In the years gone by they were just my tools. I loved them but I didn’t froth. It didn’t excite my like when I was fifteen. Now I feel like I am fifteen again and the reason is that I am practising. I am putting the work in and I have found that it is a funny by-product that the more work you put into your playing, the more love you feel for the guitar and the more enjoyment you get every time you pick the instrument up. It couldn’t have come at a better time for me.

Ash Grunwald with his Signature Model Guitar

You are playing our Melbourne Guitar Show in August. Have you ever played a show like that before where there are a lot of musicians in the attendance?
I have done little things that were fairly threatening as a guitarist before. I have done guitar clinics and at Port Fairy I played with the Grigoryan Brothers and Lloyd (Spiegel) and Nick Charles and a few other really good guitarists and that was fairly intimidating as a guitarist. But I am just me. I have my own peculiarities as a guitarist. A big part of me has always been my vocals and songwriting and I think that’s what I bring to my guitar playing. It’s always my intention to talk through the instrument, so I will be enjoying doing that. I just think for me personally, to be there is actually a real honour on that side of the equation and I am just going to be really interested in nerding out completely and plugging into a million pedals and watching different players.  I am putting together a bit of a pedalboard that I will be using with a lot of cool analogue pedals too.

 

Will you be playing some tracks from the new album?

Yeah and the new album is really ‘guitary’. The first single Whispering Voice with Kasey Chambers singing on it is a reworking of an old song that I used to play on my Cole Clark lap steel back in the day and it was really mellow but I reworked it with the band into a dub mix, Hendrix kind of thing. So that was fun to have a fret on, so that will be a good one to play.

https://australianmusician.com.au/ash-grunwald-announces-signature-pratley-guitar-new-album-book-national-tour/