Dean Guitars Lights Up with Jimmy Fallon - "Gathedral" Stained Glass Razorback
posted on 2010-05-27
Dean Guitars Owner Elliott "Dean" Rubinson recently presented TV celebrity Jimmy Fallon with a one of a kind, stained-glass Dean electric guitar. "The Gathedral" as Jimmy coined his custom "cathedral guitar", is a one-of-a-kind Dean Razorback featuring a hand-crafted stained-glass body that actually lights up from the inside with the push of the tone knob. It is truly a beautiful piece of art.
Jimmy Fallon invited Elliott, along with Dean Artist Relations Director Josh Maloney to NBC Studios in New York for a taping of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon". The guitar was presented to Jimmy immediately following the taping of his show on May 24th, 2010.
This trip to NBC studios comes hot off the heels of Dean artist Bret Michaels exciting victory on NBC's "Celebrity Apprentice" earlier in the week.
Jimmy Fallon's "Gathedral" Dean guitar took about six-months of research and design development and was hand-built in the Dean Guitars USA Custom Shop located in Tampa, Florida.
Yvonne de Villiers, designer for Dean's sister company Luna Guitars and a former stained glass artist, designed and built the glass panel for the "Gathedral." When asked what the design challenges were, here is what she had to say: "I tried to use all of the traditional colors people associate with "stained glass", but the challenge was in creating a contemporary design within a very unusual "frame". It was also challenging to build a glass panel with a hole in the center (for the pickups and floyd) as well as accommodating the various knobs.
Glass cut & set on pattern on the light table (before foiling and soldering)
Glass (after foiling but before soldering) set into wood form
Detail shot of completed "Gathedral"
For a bit of flash, Yvonne used "dichroic glass" for the rainbow-looking curved sections. Dichroic glass is created by a highly technical vacuum deposition process whereby multiple micro-thin layers of metal oxides, quartz crystals and others are vaporized with an electron beam gun mounted at the bottom of an airless vacuum chamber. This produces a "interference filter" that creates the varied colors we see, similar to what happens when viewing hummingbird or peacock feathers. To my knowledge, this is the first fully functional stained glass guitar created!!!"
The other challenge was, obviously, lighting it effectively within an extremely shallow depth achieved by internal LED lighting.
