Monty’s Guitars was founded in 2010 by Matt Gleeson, a musician and guitar enthusiast with a clear goal: to take the best guitar tones the world has to offer and make them available to everyone.
Matt’s love for guitars started long before Monty’s was even a glint in his eye. To find the spark, we must rewind to the 1980s, and a young Matt was sitting in front of the TV, watching Back to the Future and seeing Marty McFly, this moment changed everything, and from that point on music became an obsession, a passion, an obsessive passion if you will and the guitar was at the centre of it all.
After playing guitar through his teenage years, Matt moved to London in 1999 to study music performance at the Guitar Institute. He had constant issues with his only guitar, a Mexican Telecaster. This led him to make regular trips to Chandler Guitars in Kew for repairs. It was because if these trips his natural curiosity drew him towards the world of guitar tinkering and after Matt left his music course in 2000, after much persistence, and just a little begging, he started an apprenticeship with Charlie Chandler. At the time, Chandler’s was arguably the best guitar shop in the UK, with the choicest gear, an incredible workshop, and a rather impressive client list.
As an apprentice Matt spent countless hours operating the Plek machine, setting up guitars, and making endless rounds of tea while soaking up every bit of information he could. One day, Charlie handed him a guitar to work on. The owner was impressed with Matt’s work, the owner was David Gilmour and from that point, Matt became a full-time member of the workshop.
In 2003, Charlie left Chandler’s to start his own business, taking the entire workshop staff with him. Matt chose to stay behind as the sole guitar repair person, rebuilding the workshop with some of the best luthiers and technicians in the UK.
While loving the atmosphere at Chandlers Matt always knew he wanted to work for himself. So, in 2006, he started Monty’s Guitar Repairs as a side hustle his spare bedroom. Initially, he did work for his musician friends but over time his regular Chandlers customers came directly to him.
It wasn’t just guitar repair work that filled his time, from the beginning Matt meticulously noted the specifications of every pickup that landed on his bench and did a lot of pickup rewinds and repairs. Seeing the impact a good set of pickups has on a guitar he decided to dip his toe in the murky waters of pickup making. He had a real love for a very special 1968 Lake Placid Blue Tele owned by Terry Britten and decided this would be the first project. With the knowledge gained from years of working on great guitars and some help from Jason Lollar’s book on pickup winding, he built a winder and began the process of recreating the set.
Happy with the outcome, he began sharing his work with his musician friends, and their reaction exceeded his expectations. They encouraged him to create more and started working on different types of pickups. Inspired by this success, Matt began exploring other sonic ideas he had been considering as a gigging guitarist.
In 2010, after the birth of his first child, and after ten years of working at Chandler’s, he made the leap and after selling his motorbike to fund it, founded Monty’s Guitars Ltd.
Over the years, Monty’s has grown steadily, starting in a spare bedroom, moving to a garage, and then a shed. In 2014, Monty’s relocated to a real bricks and mortar workshop in Acton, West London, where it stayed until 2020, when the business moved to Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, the heart of the West Country, where we still reside.
Monty’s in 2025 is not just Matt—it’s a small, dedicated team of guitar tinkerers committed to creating the most exceptional sonic curiosities known to guitar playing man (or woman) and providing the guitar-playing world with the best service possible.