Most signature guitars work the same way: a famous player gets famous first, then a company puts their name on a headstock to sell more guitars. The PRS DGT ran the process in reverse. David Grissom wasn’t a headline act when he started shaping this guitar — he was the guy in the room helping Paul Reed Smith figure out what a PRS electric should actually sound like, years before the DGT existed as a product at all. By the time his name went on the truss rod cover in 2007, Grissom had already spent more than two decades as one of the most respected working guitarists in American roots music, and PRS had spent nearly as long building instruments shaped in part by his opinions.
That backstory is the whole reason the DGT sounds the way it does. It isn’t a superstar’s dream guitar dressed up with flashy inlays and a signature on the headstock. It’s a touring and session musician’s tool, refined over a working lifetime of gigs, sessions, and record dates, built by a company that happened to be founded around the same time Grissom moved to town. One UK reviewer admitted the team assigned to evaluate the budget SE spin-off “just can’t stop playing” the original Core model instead — a reaction that says more about the guitar than any spec sheet could.
From Louisville to Austin: The Making of a Guitarist’s Guitarist
Grissom started out as a drummer in Louisville, Kentucky, before switching to guitar after hearing the Beatles’ Revolver. He moved to Austin in 1983 — what he later called arriving in “guitarland” — and within two years was playing alongside Lou Ann Barton and the Fabulous Thunderbirds crowd on the local circuit. The break that mattered came in 1985, when Texas songwriter Joe Ely hired him. Grissom toured and recorded with Ely for six years, developing the muscular, blues-rooted lead style that would define his career.
In 1991 he joined John Mellencamp‘s band, appearing on three albums and touring arenas for the first time. The pivot point came in 1993, when a three-week run filling in for an ailing Dickey Betts in the Allman Brothers Band reminded Grissom why he’d picked up a guitar in the first place. He left Mellencamp’s private-jet touring world behind, went back to Austin, and formed Storyville with singer Malford Milligan and — crucially for the guitar’s tone story — Stevie Ray Vaughan‘s Double Trouble rhythm section, bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer Chris Layton. Storyville cut two major-label albums and built a national following before splitting.
From there, Grissom became one of Americana’s most in-demand sidemen: touring stints with the Allman Brothers Band and the Dixie Chicks, session work on four Buddy Guy records, dates with Robben Ford (including 1993’s Mystic Mile), John Mayall, Chris Isaak, Ringo Starr, and Bob Dylan, plus songwriting credits recorded by Mayall, Rita Coolidge, Trisha Yearwood, and Lee Ann Womack. In 2007 — the same year the DGT launched — he released his first solo album, Loud Music, followed by 10,000 Feet (2009), Way Down Deep (2011), How It Feels to Fly (2014), and the live album Trio Live 2020. He still fronts his own band most weeks at Austin’s Saxon Pub when he isn’t out helping somebody else’s record sound better.
Grissom has described his own musical foundation as a collision of styles that shouldn’t fit together but do: a childhood diet of Waylon Jennings and bluegrass radio, a formative discovery of Roy Buchanan’s 1971 PBS special The Greatest Unknown Guitarist in the World, guitar teachers who pushed him toward Keith Richards, B.B. King, and Kenny Burrell in succession, and a teenage obsession with Southern rock shows — ZZ Top, the Allman Brothers — that rolled through Louisville. That grab-bag of influences is audible in his playing: hybrid picking borrowed from country pickers, string-bending vocabulary from blues, and a rock rhythm-guitar sensibility that made him equally at home behind Joe Ely’s roots-rock and John Mellencamp’s heartland arena rock. It’s also, not coincidentally, exactly the range of tones the DGT was built to cover in one guitar.
The Guitar Before the Guitar: Grissom’s Hand in the Original McCarty
Here’s the detail most gear write-ups skip: David Grissom’s fingerprints are on PRS guitars that predate his own signature model by more than a decade. According to Paul Reed Smith, Grissom came to him wanting a guitar that could produce the sound of Duane Allman on the Allman Brothers’ Live at Fillmore East — and helped design the instrument that became the original PRS McCarty in 1994. For years afterward, Grissom’s main stage guitar wasn’t a signature model at all; it was a modified PRS McCarty Trem he’d customized and gigged relentlessly for over a decade, refining exactly what he wanted a working guitar to do.
That’s the context PRS means when they describe the DGT as “the culmination of a 25-year working relationship.” It wasn’t a company approaching an artist to license a name. It was a guitarist who had already helped shape the platform finally getting a version built entirely to his own specification.
2007: The DGT Arrives
The DGT launched at the Austin Summer NAMM Show in 2007 — reportedly almost called the “McCarty II” before PRS settled on naming it directly after Grissom. Built on the McCarty platform (the same lineage that would later branch into the McCarty 594 in 2016 — the DGT actually came first, based on the original 1994 McCarty rather than the later 24.594″ scale), the DGT wasn’t a cosmetic signature job. Grissom and Paul Reed Smith spent roughly a year A/B-testing more than forty sets of pickups before settling on the vintage-voiced humbuckers that carry his name.
The control layout is the DGT’s real signature. Instead of a standard master volume and tone, it has an individual volume knob for each pickup plus a push/pull master tone that engages a simultaneous coil-split. Grissom has said the twin-volume setup was inspired by the way Jimmy Page blended pickups on the early Led Zeppelin records — a session musician’s practical solution for dialing in exact pickup balance on the fly, rather than a gimmick.
The neck carve, simply called the “DGT” profile, sits close to PRS’s Pattern Regular shape but with slightly enhanced shoulders, reportedly taken from Grissom’s own well-loved 2010 PRS Gold Top. It’s paired with taller Dunlop 6100 fretwire — the same wire PRS uses on the Core Santana Retro — for easier bends and a touch more sustain. The body is finished in high-gloss nitrocellulose, the same aging, breathing finish found on vintage instruments Grissom spent years chasing the sound of. In 2012, PRS added an all-mahogany DGT Standard (no maple top) for players chasing a darker, woodier tone, and in 2021 the tremolo was updated to the Gen III PRS Patented design across the line.
Full Specifications (PRS DGT, Core Model)
Under the Hood: Tone and Construction
Strip away the signature-model story and the DGT is, in the words of more than one reviewer, “a hot-rodded McCarty.” The mahogany-body-with-maple-cap formula gives it PRS’s familiar combination of midrange warmth and top-end snap, but the DGT’s specific pickup voicing sits deliberately vintage — less compressed and hi-fi than a modern humbucker, more like the early-’90s McCarty tone Grissom spent a year chasing during development. The dual-volume control layout means a player can ride the bridge pickup hot for a solo and back off the neck pickup for rhythm without ever touching a mixer — a genuinely useful feature for a guitarist who spent decades switching between session and stage roles in the same night.
The coil-split, engaged by pulling the tone knob, produces a convincingly single-coil-adjacent sound without the modern “thin and quacky” artifact some coil-splits suffer from — useful for covering Fender-style rhythm parts without swapping guitars mid-set. Combined with the taller frets and enhanced-shoulder neck carve, the whole package is built around ease of bending and sustained playability across long gigs, not showroom flash.
The Players: One Guitarist, and Everyone He’s Backed
The names above tell it: Joe Ely, who gave him his first real platform; John Mellencamp, who took him to arenas; Dickey Betts and the Allman Brothers Band, whose stand-in gig changed his direction entirely; Stevie Ray Vaughan‘s Double Trouble rhythm section, who became the engine of Storyville; and Buddy Guy and Robben Ford, who kept him in the room with blues royalty for decades. At a 2007 charity concert called “The Road to Austin,” Grissom traded leads with Eric Johnson on electric arrangements of “Layla” and “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad” — a rare pairing of two very different Austin guitar legends on the same stage.
Tone Recipes
- Blues/roots rhythm: Both pickups blended via the dual volumes, tone knob down slightly, amp pushed to the edge of breakup — through something like a Fender Deluxe Reverb for classic headroom-and-breakup balance.
- Singing lead tone: Bridge pickup solo, tone knob up, into a mid-gain overdrive for sustain without losing note definition.
- Glassy clean: Pull the tone knob for coil-split, neck pickup, clean amp channel — a genuine alternative to reaching for a Stratocaster mid-set.
- Rock crunch: Both pickups together (middle toggle position), cranked tube amp, an overdrive like the Ibanez TS9 for extra push into the front end.
PRS DGT vs. the Rest of the Family
The DGT’s closest relative on paper is the PRS McCarty 594, but the family tree runs the opposite direction from what the shared name suggests — the 594 arrived in 2016, nine years after the DGT, and borrowed some of its design language rather than the other way around. The DGT uses the standard 25″ PRS scale rather than the 594’s shorter 24.594″, and its dual-volume, single-master-tone control layout is unique to this model; nothing else in the PRS catalog is wired quite the same way.
Against the standard Core McCarty, the DGT adds the tremolo, the taller frets, the coil-split-enabled dual-volume wiring, and Grissom’s specific pickup voicing — genuine functional upgrades rather than cosmetic changes. And against guitars outside the PRS family, like a Fender Stratocaster or Gibson Les Paul Standard, the DGT essentially tries to split the difference: humbucker output and sustain with a coil-split escape hatch into single-coil territory, aimed squarely at a working musician who doesn’t want to own three guitars to cover one gig.
It’s also worth setting the DGT against a Fender Telecaster for players deciding between the two as a do-everything roots-rock instrument. The Telecaster’s bridge-pickup twang and simplicity suit a stripped-down country or rockabilly gig; the DGT’s dual-humbucker platform with a coil-split trades some of that raw single-coil bite for broader tonal range within one guitar — a fair description of the trade-off Grissom himself made when he moved away from single-coil instruments early in his career in favor of a guitar that could cover an entire night’s setlist without a change.
Buying Guide
The Core USA-built DGT runs roughly $4,000–4,500 new, available in finishes including Gold Top with moon inlays and McCarty Tobacco Sunburst with bird inlays — though longtime fans still lobby PRS for a Seafoam Green option, a nod to the color of Grissom’s own well-worn mid-’80s PRS. For players who want the DGT experience without the Core price tag, PRS launched the SE DGT in 2023 — the first time this signature model came to the Indonesian-built SE line — followed in 2026 by the all-mahogany SE DGT Standard at roughly $679, and a semi-hollow DGT variant for players chasing extra air and resonance. Each of those deserves (and gets) its own dedicated write-up rather than a paragraph here.
On the used market, Core DGTs hold their value well — a reflection of how few working players who buy one ever sell it, rather than any collector-driven speculation. Buyers should still confirm which tremolo revision a used example carries (pre- or post-2021 Gen III) since replacement parts and setup expectations differ slightly between the two.
On the amp side, Grissom’s own signature line — originally the DG Custom 30, developed over three years with amp designer Doug Sewell, and more recently the DGT 15 head and combo — gives players a factory-matched amp voicing if they want to chase the complete rig rather than just the guitar.
Practical Ownership Notes
- The nitrocellulose finish ages and checks over time, like a vintage instrument — treat it like one, away from vinyl guitar-stand arms and direct sunlight for long stretches.
- The push/pull coil-split is genuinely useful in a live setting, but it’s easy to forget which position you left it in mid-set; a quick visual check of the knob height becomes second nature after a few gigs.
- The Gen III PRS Patented Tremolo (2021-onward) holds tuning well under moderate use; players doing heavy dive-bomb work should still stretch strings thoroughly after setup.
- Taller Dunlop 6100 fretwire feels great for bending but shows wear faster under aggressive pick attack than PRS’s standard fretwire — factor a fret dress into long-term maintenance planning.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does DGT stand for?
David Grissom Trem — a reference both to the artist and to the tremolo bridge that distinguishes it from the standard McCarty.
Is the PRS DGT based on the McCarty or the McCarty 594?
The original McCarty. The DGT launched in 2007, nine years before the McCarty 594 existed, and uses the standard 25″ PRS scale rather than the 594’s 24.594″ scale.
Does the SE DGT sound like the Core version?
Reviewers generally find it gets remarkably close for the price gap, though the Core’s US-made pickups, nitro finish, and hand-carved top carry a noticeably more refined, “vintage” character that the SE approximates rather than duplicates.
What amp does David Grissom use?
His own PRS signature line, developed with amp designer Doug Sewell — originally the DG Custom 30, more recently available as the DGT 15 head and combo.
Is the DGT a good all-purpose guitar, or is it built for one genre?
Its entire design brief was versatility for a touring/session player who needed one guitar to cover blues, roots-rock, country, and straight rock gigs in the same night — that’s arguably its defining feature over more specialized signature models.
Why is it called a “trem” model when PRS makes both trem and stoptail guitars?
The name distinguishes it from a stoptail-bridge McCarty; the Gen III PRS Patented Tremolo is a core part of the DGT’s identity and playing feel, not an optional add-on, which is why it’s baked directly into the model name.