Within the confines of his Corona work space, guitar designer Yuriy Shishkov had transformed a plank of blond ash wood into the body of a new Fender Telecaster. Seated at his bench, where he spends hours every day creating one-of-a-kind hand-crafted instruments, he studied the nascent creation. Holes had been cut for where tone-control knobs, a five-positioning pickup selector switch, the bridge and the pickups will be mounted, and the instrument's neck, sawed and shaped from a complementary piece of bird's-eye maple, rested in a rack to his left, finely sanded but still unfinished.
Shishkov -- one of a handful of “senior master guitar builders" working at the Fender Custom Shop, the high-end division of Fender Musical Instruments -- reached into a box of 700 square pieces of mirrored glass, selecting pieces to adorn the guitar that soon will be presented to its new owner, Australian country- music superstar Keith Urban.
The musician, a longtime Fender aficionado, wants a special Telecaster for his new concert tour, which opens May 5 in Connecticut. He wants one with a top that looks like a cracked mirror, or a disco ball -- they're still shooting e-mails back and forth on the final design. Urban is after something that will split the light into hundreds of fragments that will be reflected back on his fans.
Shishkov's passion is crafting elite, money-is-no-object instruments for some of the world's most successful, and most demanding. He's crafted instruments for blues man Buddy Guy, Journey's Neal Schon and Ernie Isley of the Isley Brothers, among others.
In the case of Urban's instrument, Shishkov is thinking beyond just achieving the mirrored effect, beyond cementing and grouting the sharp-edged pieces so they don't slice Urban's hands while he plays. He's added a strip of sparkling metal-flake veneer on the edge of the guitar body to heighten the dazzle factor.
“Even if they've got wild idea, sometimes we throw in something to make it even more wild," said Shishkov, 45, who will speak about his work at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles tonight.
His boss, Mike Eldred, the Custom Shop's marketing director and an accomplished guitarist himself, said Shishkov's DIY approach to the art of guitar-making reflects “survivor instinct. . . . Everybody here is pretty well-rounded, but his stuff has that old-world craftsman vibe. A lot of guys don't have that."
That instinct was born in a 4-by-6-foot cinder-block root cellar beneath the city of Gomel, near Chernobyl, in the then Soviet Union, where Shishkov built his first electric guitar. He did it by hand and completely from scratch, about the same time Fender opened its Custom Shop half a world away.
“If somebody would tell me when I lived in Soviet Union, 'You're going to end up at Custom Shop building guitars for famous people,' “ the gentle-voiced guitar maker said, “I guarantee I would believe more if somebody tell me, 'You will fly to space.' “
