Dennis Galuszka began building high-end acoustic guitars during his 13 years as a cabinetmaker, combining his passions for music and woodworking. As a self-taught drummer, it was a fateful audition with one of the Fender master builders that led to a job interview (and a steady gig). Hired as an apprentice, he was promoted to master builder in 1999. Galuszka has since built instruments for many influential players, including country legend Buck Owens and jazz master Robben Ford.

With an eye for detail and a keen imagination, Galuszka built a series of clever one-offs, including a Record Stratocaster® guitar with a record player tone arm tremolo, a pickguard customized from a real vinyl album, and fret marker inlays resembling plastic yellow 45 record adaptors. His matching pair of surf guitars (a Stratocaster® and Precision Bass® guitar) built for the 2003 NAMM Show featured a long board body graphic and a custom decal.

Greg Fessler came to the Fender Custom Shop in 1990, working his way up through the ranks as an apprentice. He assisted with the Robben Ford signature line of guitars, eventually becoming the sole builder of those instruments and, later, Ford’s personal builder. Fessler has built one-off Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars for a host of players, including bluesman Jeff Healey, Rhonda Smith (Prince), Neil Schon and 311 to name only a few.

Fessler’s unique abilities as a master builder have earned him accolades from many Fender artists and from discerning customers worldwide. His meticulous attention to detail is exemplified in every instrument he creates, each of which is a perfect example of the intense commitment it takes to earn the title of master builder.

The Custom Shop’s newest Master Builder is Jason Smith, a 13-year Fender veteran and son of longtime Fender R&D legend Dan Smith. As such, he grew up on Fender—“It’s always been in my family,” he said, “And I was always extremely interested in everything my father did.”

Born in Rochester, N.Y., and raised in California, Smith remembers meeting guitar deities from about age five on through his father’s work with Fender—Eric Clapton, Yngwie Malmsteen, Jeff Beck and Robben Ford, to name only a few. He went to his first big rock concert at age six—Rush—and Smith remembers going backstage with his dad and meeting Geddy Lee after the show. Before he was even in his teens, Smith was going to see Pink Floyd, ZZ Top and many other major artists.

Rock music and Fender are simply part of his DNA. Smith joined the Fender Custom Shop in 1995, and in 2006 completed a 5-year apprenticeship under acclaimed Senior Master Builder John English. Among many diverse projects with English, Smith worked on a pair of double-neck Stratocaster® guitars for Stone Temple Pilots guitarist Dean DeLeo.

Smith is an accomplished bass guitarist who brings a player’s sensibility to his work in the Custom Shop in addition to his expertise as a builder. With the Master Builder title that he’s strived for over so many years now his, he’s eager to start taking orders—after all, Fender is practically in his blood.

“I’ve always loved it,” Smith said. “And it feels great that I’ve reached the goal that I’ve worked toward for five years in apprenticeship, and the eight years before that.”

John Cruz came to Fender in 1987, joined the Custom Shop in 1993 and became a Master Builder in 2003. Custom guitars are his passion, and he is the man behind several famous Custom Shop instruments, including the replica of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s famous “Number One” Stratocaster® guitar.

Cruz also built the limited-run Moto guitar and amp sets, worked on the ’49 Woody amp project and developed all production processes for the Rory Gallagher and Muddy Waters tribute guitars. Further, his meticulous work was essential to all aspects of the initial Custom Shop Relic guitars and basses, and he initiated the Custom Shop’s quality assurance program.

Cruz has built fantastic guitars for players such as Doug Aldrich (Dio, Whitesnake), Dave Amato and Bruce Hall (REO Speedwagon), Mick Mars (Mötley Crüe), Richie Sambora (Bon Jovi), Bono (U2), Duff McKagan (Guns N’ Roses), Ike Turner and Brad Whitford (Aerosmith).

Mark Kendrick is revered for building iconic Fender guitars and basses, and is respected for his attention to historical detail and willingness to push the creative envelope. He is a second-generation Fender man (his uncle handled “field services” for Leo in the mid-‘50s) who started in the Custom Shop in 1990.

In the decade he’s been at Fender, Kendrick has amassed a stellar list of players for whom he has built instruments, including Marty Stuart, Sting, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Keith Richards and many, many others. In late 1997, he built a custom one-off gold Stratocaster® for Eric Clapton. Many of the instruments Kendrick crafted are now housed, in fact, in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, and at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tenn.

As one of the preeminent archtop builders at the Custom Shop, Stephen Stern has studied under two of the world’s greatest archtop luthiers—Jimmy D’Aquisto and Bob Benedetto. Stern got his start apprenticing at a high-end cabinet shop straight out of high school. Five years of that prepared him for his first job as a builder at Jackson/Charvel Guitars. Stern came to the Custom Shop in 1993, working with D’Aquisto on the latter’s namesake line of guitars until the great luthier’s death in 1995.

In the late ’90s, millionaire collector Scott Chinery commissioned a number of custom archtop guitars by two dozen of the world’s finest living luthiers; Stern contributed a custom-built D’Aquisto Ultra. Chinery’s “Blue Guitar Collection” is now housed in the Smithsonian Institution. Stern also built a handful of exquisite archtops in collaboration with the Walt Disney Co. to commemorate the anniversary of the animated classic Fantasia.

Calling Todd Krause the “Builder to the Stars” would be a vast understatement. He maintains and builds guitars for Fender signature artists Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Stu Hamm and Roscoe Beck. Further, he has built custom instruments for Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, Roger Waters and Gene Simmons, to name only a few.

Krause’s guitar-building apprenticeship began in March 1981 at Jackson/Charvel guitars. He started at Fender in 1991 and quickly donned many hats, including that of a one-off builder, R&D model maker, woodworking machinist, and, eventually, master builder.

From handcrafting many of his own woodworking tools to showcasing his world-class luthier skills and custom inlay work, Yuriy Shishkov is truly one of the last of the renaissance guitar builders. It was in the small confines of a root cellar in his hometown of Gomel in the former Soviet Union that Shishkov got his start building guitars for friends and colleagues.

When he arrived in the United States in 1990, Shishkov settled in the Chicago area and collaborated with a range of top artists, including late shredder Dimebag Darrell of Pantera, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, Nuno Bettencourt, Robin Zander of Cheap Trick and Paul Stanley of Kiss. Shishkov joined the Fender Custom Shop’s elite team of master builders in 2000.

Andy Summers Tribute Telecaster®                

Link:    Andy Summers     Fender Custom Shop Andy Summers Tribute Telecaster®

Andy Summers was just out of college in Southern California in the early 1970s when one of his guitar students offered to sell him a beat-up 1961 Fender Telecaster that had obviously been modified by a previous owner.

Summers had already had some modest music business success in the late '60s in Britain. Lately though, he'd stuck mainly to his classical guitar studies, and hadn't played an electric in quite a while. Strangely, however, something about this particular Telecaster grabbed him. As he put it himself in his 2006 memoir, One Train Later:

When I start to play it, something stirs within me ... it shakes me ... I find that I can't stop playing it; this guitar sparks something in me and I have to have it.

Summers bought the guitar for $200, and you and the whole world know the rest. Back in London a few years later, he joined a noisy so-called punk outfit called the Police that rose to become the biggest band in the world, thanks in no small part to the deftly innovative and influential sounds Summers conjured from that beat-up Telecaster.

Hit after hit was recorded and performed on it— "Roxanne," "So Lonely," "Walking On the Moon," the breathtaking "Message In a Bottle," "Don't Stand So Close to Me," "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," "Every Breath You Take," "Wrapped Around Your Finger," "Synchronicity II" and "King of Pain."

Now, Fender couldn't be more proud and excited to unveil a very special 250-instrument Limited Edition run of the Fender Custom Shop Andy Summers Tribute Telecaster as part of the Fender Custom Shop's legendary Tribute Series. It's a note-perfect replica of the 1961 Tele® that Summers used to help propel the Police to untold heights of worldwide pop superstardom.

The prototype, built by Fender Custom Shop Master Builder Dennis Galuszka over the course of a year, is currently in use with Andy now. The guitar features the same "eccentric" modifications that the original had when Summers first bought it, most of which were unchanged throughout the nonstop work and excitement of the Police years:

• Ferocious humbucking neck pickup.
• Bridge pickup mounted in the body rather than in the
   broken brass (not chrome) bridge plate.
• Control plate-mounted mini-toggle phase switch.
• Body-mounted preamp on/off mini-toggle switch (the
  original preamp "died," Galuszka said; the Custom
  Shop has recreated the Police-era preamp).
• Rear-mounted overdrive unit controlled by a third
  knob below the two traditional Telecaster volume and
  tone controls.
• "Soft" brass bridge pieces.
• Schaller® tuners.

Summers played number one of the 250 replicas when the Police once again electrified the music world by reuniting on Feb. 11, 2007, to open the 49th annual Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. Even more exciting, Summers will play the replica during the momentous 2007 30th anniversary worldwide Police reunion tour, one of the most hoped-for and eagerly awaited events in pop music history. It promises to be a thrilling musical event featuring one of rock's most innovative guitarists playing a spot-on replica of one rock's most distinctive guitars.