Behold Kenny Lee's beautiful prototype stained glass guitar. Heavily influenced by the geometric patterns of the Art Deco era, its Telecaster body glistens with silver and gold.
Kenny was born and raised in Marine Park, Brooklyn, and has lived in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn for 18 years. A lifelong musician and tinkerer, he has always enjoyed assembling and upgrading his own guitars. However, Kenny only began to pursue his passion for stained glass-making in 2008. His two hobbies had remained separate for years, until he began collaborating with Voccoli Guitars - ran by fellow Brooklynite, Victor V. Gurbo, a self-taught musician and luthier. Together, Victor and Kenny produced a handful of handmade guitars with stained glass pick guards.
However, Kenny wanted to venture further, on this personal project that he has brought to fruition. Rather than creating a pick guard to then be screwed onto the face of a standard Telecaster body, he imagined a Telecaster body with a stained glass face. In order to achieve this, he purchased a black Fender Modern Player Telecaster body and used a hand-router to painstakingly hollow out its surface, making sure to keep the edges. After having finalized his design, the next step was to print the template on a large-format printer, and cut out the individual pieces. Using four different colors of glass, the pieces were then meticulously cut to those exact dimensions, being careful to leave room for the guitar's hardware. The glass was glued directly onto the wood using a special type of adhesive used to attach mirrors to walls. After the glass was glued down, he used grout to fill in the gaps. Kenny said that he chose this method over more traditional stained glass methods such as lead came, due to lead's toxicity and because the glass needed to lay perfectly flat.
The gorgeous, shiny mirrored glass was produced by a glass company called Spectrum. Kenny mentioned that Spectrum has ceased their production of the mirrored glass due to environmental concerns, so he recently purchased a stockpile of different colors.
Overall, the guitar was assembled in about a week, with Kenny working on it for hours every day.
To match its Fender body, the guitar features a licensed Fender neck with an ebony fingerboard. It also features an Eddie Van Halen Frankenstein Humbucker Pickup.
The guitar made its very first concert-debut when Kenny played with Victor V. Gurbo & Co. in the main room of The Bowery Electric on November 13th of this year. As the stage lights reflected off of the metallic mirrored glass as it moved, light beams bounced across the dance floor.
Right now, Kenny has a second Art-Deco inspired design in the works, this time using ruby-red accents rather than gold - and he has countless more ideas. His goal is to collaborate with Voccoli Guitars again on these designs, working together to install a stained glass face into one of Victor's vintage-inspired bodies made from reclaimed or salvaged lumber.
