Tell me what you want (what you really really want)

We are located in a unit within a large industrial complex, so it can be a bit tricky to find us. The best way to get to us is to aim for Vale Grove, W3 7QP. Once there, go to the small blue door on the right hand side and dial up for 'Mutronics' (#06). Once in, go up the stairs and follow round to the left until you see our door.

Okay, I see your predicament here. Don't worry, I'll talk you through it. To get to us, walk though the entrance beyond the E2S flag and follow straight down the corridor in front of you (don't turn left. Bad things will happen if you turn left). Keep walking until the corridor opens into a loading bay and you see some large blue doors leading out on to a street. Walk through these and immediately turn left. Providing that I'm good at giving directions, there should be a blue door on your left. Dial up #06 on the buzzers (remembering to press the bell once you've keyed in the numbers) and, once you've been let in, go up the stairs. Follow round to the left until you see the large blue door with Monty's logo on it and ring our buzzer. Congratulations, you've made it (hopefully). If you're at all confused, please just give us a call and one of us will run down to meet you.

One of us is always in from 8am to 5pm Monday to Friday. In addition, we'll be around from 9am to 1pm on Saturdays. We're a hard working bunch (even if I do say so myself), so there's a chance that one of us will be in outside of these hours. If you need to come in outside of working hours, please give us a call and we'll see what we can do to help.

Our turnaround time varies a little bit depending on our workload, but it tends to be around 2 weeks. That being said, we can often do small jobs either on the spot or within a few days, so please do come to see us and we'll do all we can to help. If you need any larger repairs done urgently, we can offer a jump the queue option for an additional £30 per guitar. This allows us to start working on your guitar immediately and has a turn around time of 1-2 days. 

Please be aware that we are unable to offer jump the queue at particularly busy times of year, or on work that inherently requires more than a day to complete (Sadly, as much as we like Harry Potter, none of us wizards).

There's no need to book before coming to see us, but, as an alternative to leaving your guitar with us, we would be delighted to give an appointment for a specific time. You would be more than welcome to stay and chat whilst we work on your guitar, although you could go away for a few hours and then pop back in when it's ready to go. It really is up to you. Appointments need to be booked at least 2 weeks in advance and may require a deposit on the cost of any parts we have to order in. Please contact us to book.

The due dates that we send out on our estimates are approximate dates, so it's possible that we're just running a few days behind. That being said, we're not perfect and do we do make mistakes occasionally, so if you have any concerns at all regarding timescale, please do get in touch.

If possible, we'd love for you to come and pick up your guitar fairly soon after we've finished working on it. Equally, we understand that things sometimes don't go to plan and that you might not be able to. If you know that you're going to need us to hold onto something for more than a couple of weeks, please let us know. We might start getting worried otherwise!

Yes, we have full insurance coverage for all and any guitars on our premises. That being said, if you own something as expensive as a '59 Burst (we're talking several hundred thousand pounds here) and you want us to work on it, we might need to have a chat about insurance. If you have any concerns at all surrounding insurance (or, for that matter, anything else), please feel free to get in touch.  

We can do basically whatever you want, from a simple string change to a full custom guitar build. We can work on anything with strings on, including (but by no means limited to) electric and acoustic guitars, basses, ukuleles and mandolins. We also have a dedicated amp tech (he's called John, he's a splendiferous chap) who's a dab hand at repairing all manner of amplifiers and effects pedals. For a list of our services, including pricing, please click here

Absolutely we do. We can repair and service pretty much any amp and/or pedal.

We would be delighted to set up your guitar for you. That being said, almost every guitar can also benefit from a fret dress (which involves levelling and crowning the frets, before then doing a setup). We can often get away with just doing a setup, but, if the frets are very uneven, it becomes very difficult to adequately set up a guitar without also fret dressing it. As ever, the best way for us to advise on which your guitar needs is to see it in person.

Chips are always a bit of a tricky one. The amount we can do depends on the colour of the guitar, the type of finish and the severity of the damage. Often, the only way to get a guitar looking as new is to completely strip and refinish the offending area, which -whilst eminently doable- can be rather expensive. That being said, we often seal around chips to prevent further damage and can, in some cases, improve their appearance with relative ease, so we may very well be able to help you out.

Yes we can! We do minor refinishing work in house and work with a number of dedicated spray shops across the UK for bigger jobs. If you want any finishing work done to your guitar, please get in touch and we'll be able to talk you through the options.

We are happy to take pretty much all payment methods, including cash, card, Paypal and bank transfer. (We don't take trading beans. Matt has kids to feed. Although, you can feed kids with beans... we still don't take trading beans.)

No, we don't need to take a deposit. We're more than happy for you to pay in full once we've finished working on your guitar. The only exception to this occurs when you've booked an appointment and we need to order in specific parts prior to the day. In this case, we will ask to take a deposit on the cost of the parts.

I know some people get a bit sceptical about the effect that the construction of a capacitor can have have on a guitar's tone, but we really believe that it makes a difference. A few years ago, we put some original bumblebee capacitors in a client's Les Paul. We were amazed to find that, despite the values being the same as the old capacitors, it really opened up the sound of the guitar, making the tone knob far more usable; rather than simply getting muddy as we rolled the tone down, we found that the guitar now developed a really interesting mid-range character, reminiscent of a subtle wah sound. We were determined to find some caps that sounded as good as this and, after much looking, found these NOS Russian caps. 

If you've thoroughly perused our website and are yet to find anything that tickles your fancies, we would be delighted to make you a set of custom pickups (or a custom loom for that matter). Please just drop us an email to get the ball rolling.

In our PAFs, we use Alnico 5 for the neck and Alnico 2 for the bridge. The choice of Alnico 5 often raises eyebrows, as many people consider that it is too strong a magnet for a low wind humbucker. 

We decided upon this combo after years of research, getting hands on with literally hundreds (We think. We've slightly lost count) of sets of original PAFs that we've had the incredibly good fortune to test and/or repair. We've found that the best sounding PAF sets have a fairly strong magnet in the neck and a weaker magnet in the bridge. This keeps a nice amount of clarity in the neck pickup, whilst preventing the bridge pickup from getting too shrill. After testing basically every combination we could think of, we realised that the best way to replicate this is to use Alnico 5 in the neck and Alnico 2 in the bridge.

Obviously it goes with out saying that the choice of magnet is only one part of a pickup's design; the sound of a pickup is created by the interaction of all of its parts, so it's difficult to say that a particular magnet has a certain sound. Our PAFs are built around the Alnico 5/2 magnet combo and we believe that they sound their best when using this combo. That being said, everybody's taste is different; if you're sure that you want a different magnet combo, we would be delighted to custom wind a set of PAFs to your specification. 

50's wiring was the wiring that Gibson used in the 50's (makes sense, doesn't it) and modern wiring is the wiring that Gibson uses now (also quite unsurprising). The main difference between the two is the way the tone cap is wired into the guitar; Modern wiring has the cap coming off the input (left hand lug) of the volume pot, whereas 50's wiring has it coming off the output (center lug). 

Whilst this may not sound like a massive difference, it has a huge effect on the behaviour of your guitar's electronics; whereas the sound of a guitar with modern wiring tends to get a bit muddy as you turn down the volume pot, a 50's wired guitar will stay nice and bright. 50's wiring also tends to be a little brighter overall. Whilst some people prefer to use modern wiring and overcome the muddiness with the addition of a treble bleed, we find that treble bleed circuits negatively affect the taper of the volume knob. As such, we would always recommend 50's wiring over modern wiring.

It also worth saying that, whilst this electronical dichotomy is normally only applied to Gibson guitars, you can wire basically any guitar with 50's wiring. In fact we like it so much that we wire all of our Fender looms with 50's wiring as standard.

Braided 2 conductor wire is the stuff that Gibson used in the 50's. It's comprised of an insulated live wire surrounded by a braided sheath that gets soldered to ground. It's lovely and easy to work with, but doesn't allow for any coil splitting/tapping or series/parallel switching.

We would always recommend using 500k pots with Humbuckers/P90s and 250k pots with Fender single coils. That being said, there really are no rules, so don't feel that you can't mix this up a bit if you want to.

Yes we can. Monty's is an active repairshop and we regularly fit both our own pickups and other manfacturer's pickups to our client's guitars. If you want us to fit your pickups for you (or do any other work on your guitar), please feel free get in touch.

Unfortuantely we aren't able to solder pickups into wiring harnesses before shipping them to you. This will prevent you being able to install them in most guitars and, even if it doesn't, we'll never be able to get the pickup lead length right.

Like original 50's PAFs, our PAFs are completely unpotted. Unpotted pickups sometimes get a bit of a bad rep for squealing and being excessively microphonic, but, when they are well built (and I promise that ours are), they will be able to handle almost any amount of gain that you can through at them; we have clients that use them for heavy metal without any issues whatsoever.

When buying through our website, you can pay by card or PayPal. If you'd rather pay by bank transfer, you are more than welcome to drop us email detailing what you want to order and we'll get an invoice to you.

DON'T PANIC. Did I help?.

Once of the advantages of being a boutique company with a build time on most of our products is that there's a bit of a delay between your order being placed and us actually shipping it. If you notice a mistake on your order, please just contact us and one of our team of guitar enthusiasts/coffee connoisseurs will sort it out for you.

If we've made a mistake, then it's absolutely at the top of our priorities to fix it for you. Please contact us to tell us what's wrong and we'll get it sorted.

We can ship to pretty much any country and regularly deal with customers from every corner of the globe.

UK:

We have two options for shipping within the UK, 1st Class and Special Delivery. 1st class shipping is only available on smaller items and costs £4. Special Delivery is our standard delivery and costs £9, or £15 for heavier orders.

International:

We have a flat £15 shipping rate for international orders

Some of our orders are subject to build times that can be seen here. All our pickups and international orders are sent out fully tracked, so, once they've been dispatched, you should be able to follow them on their journey to you. If you haven't received a tracking number, or if we're being slow dispatching your order, please drop us an email and we'll be able to help you out.

Our build time on orders varies depending on the product:

Pickups and MORE! pedals have a 2-3 week build time.

Wiring harnesses have a 1-2 week build time.

Custom orders have a 2-4 week build time, depending on the availability of parts.

All other products are kept in stock and should be shipped within 1 day.

We'll send you an email telling you when we've shipped your order. Please note that we will always ship your order in one package, meaning that we won't dispatch any of it until we've finished making it all.

All UK orders will arrive with you the day after they are shipped (see our build time FAQ). International orders should arrive in:

Europe: 3-5 days

Rest of World: 1 week

Please be aware that international orders can occasionally get held up in customs, so they may take a little longer to arrive than shown above. If you're worried that your order hasn't arrived, please contact us.

There are no import duties on any shipments to the EU (for now, at least), but other international customers will have to pay duties/tariffs. Unfortunately, these are completely out of our control, so we are not able to provide for them in the shipping cost.

You can tell us of your intention to return an item any time up until 14 days after you have received it. You then have a further 30 days to return it to us in the condition you received it. We will then issue you a full refund for the item and the initial postage (postage will not be refunded if only part of an order is being returned). Unfortunately, we can't refund you for the return postage and you are responsible for the getting the item to us safely. If the item is returned to us in non-original condition, we reserve the right to refuse the return or, in the case of pickups that have already been soldered into a guitar, charge a £30 restocking fee.

Please note that we can't accept returns on custom orders. This is defined as anything that you asked to have spec'd outside of our standard options.

We know this all sounds a little nasty, but we promise we're really very nice; if you have any issues, please feel free to get in contact and we will do our absolute best to help you out.

We really hope that you don't want to cancel your order, but we quite understand that sometimes you need to. Under UK/EU law, you have the right to cancel your order any time up until 14 days after it has been delivered. If you want to cancel your order, please send us an email stating your intention to cancel. If we haven't shipped your order yet, we'll refund you straight away.

If we've already shipped your order, please refer to the returns FAQ. This should outline the process for returning items to us. As ever, if you have any questions, please do get in touch.

All of our pickups and pedals have a lifetime warranty to the original owner against defects in materials and workmanship (we back ourselves like that).

In addition, all of our wiring looms have a 12 month warranty against the same defects.

Obviously it goes without saying that we can't guarantee against damage caused by incorrect installation, use or modification, as well normal wear and tear. If you're at all worried about fitting your pickups/loom please contact us and we'll be happy to help you out or point you in the direction of someone who can.