About
About the founder
Pearson Instruments was founded by industrial designer Dom Pearson in late 2023. He is the lead product designer and oversees all New Zealand based manufacturing and production.
Dom was born and raised in the small New Zealand town of Rotorua. He is a trained classical guitarist, classical violinist and electric guitarist who began guitar lessons at age 8. He has performed in various rock bands, jazz bands and choirs over the years.
After leaving high-school, he began working with his uncle (a highly skilled carbon composites specialist) to design and build carbon fiber electric guitars. Through the process of designing and iterating designs, Dom became a highly competent industrial designer though the constant use of CAD and product prototyping, which has lead to the advanced products Pearson Instruments now offers.
Now in his 20s, he plans to take on the entrenched guitar market by offering more advanced and cost effective headless guitars to the international market with the aim of spreading technically superior guitar design to players worldwide.
Pearson Instruments explained
Why this guitar exists, and what the goals were.
Finding the solution to lowering hardware cost for manufacturer of headless guitars.
Dom Pearson:
“I came into this with one very strong conviction. Headless guitars are better than non headless guitars. I truly believe this. I believe the vast majority of guitars sold by 2050 will be headless. I see no reason a fixed bridge guitar should have a head stock.
Headless guitars are not yet mainstream. This causes many issues. If only a few headless guitars are sold, headless specific parts are produced in smaller quantities, and thus cost more than hardware on traditional guitars. Although headless tuners are not much more complex to manufacturer than normal tuners, an OEM hard tail headless bridge system (similar to what Strandberg uses) usually costs at least 10x what traditional hard tail bridges cost.
This is a serious issue. Not only is there no way around this cost issue before scaling, but you also have the additional issue of customer adoption of new hardware, especially when aiming to convert traditional players into headless players as there will be a grace period before the “new to headless” players age out. I expect zero resistance to headlessness by 2050 as the new cohort of young players slowly replace the current ones and as the “Fender/Gibson nostalgia” marketing strategy fades away into obscurity.
The ideal would then be to use traditional/familiar mass produced hardware, but repurpose the parts in order to make the guitar headless. What is amazing, is that this is actually possible! I decided the solution was traditional locking tuners behind a Tune-O-Matic/Stoptail style bridge. This allows the guitar to be headless, while only requiring off the shelf and cost effective hardware, and remaining familiar to every guitarist no matter their background.”
Kepping costs down, without sacraficing quality.
Dom Pearson:
“This is like a very difficult game of chess with trade offs, and sacrifices.
When you want to make an affordable guitar, there are generally only a few ways to do it. You can use lower quality/cheaper parts or you can outsource the factory to a country with lower labor costs. I didn’t want to do either.
There is another way, but it required re-thinking how an electric guitar is constructed, and re-thinking how a guitar is sold.
This first variable is construction. We’re using an aluminum sub-frame developed in-house. This is the primary structural component that houses tuners, bridge and neck. This is not too expensive to have machined here in New Zealand, nor is it time consuming to assemble here. This solved the first issue of labor cost. We don’t need to use cheap labor, as the guitar has been designed specifically to require less labor to build than traditional construction methods.. This means we can keep the factory in New Zealand. While we would like to build all parts in New Zealand, due to the high quality and dominance China has in guitar neck and electronics manufacturing, we do import the hardware and necks, but do all assembly, setups and QC here in Rotorua, New Zealand.
The second variable is sales. The legacy guitar industry functions like many old fashioned distributor chained markets. When you buy a guitar form a music store, you’re paying a bunch of people to take a cut at many stages of that guitars life. This is an anti-consumer practice, and it doesn’t need to work this way.
We’re selling directly to the consumer. We’re the company, factory and store. The more vertically integrated, the more efficient. We’re cutting out middlemen, so you get a higher quality guitar for even less.”