A Career Born of a Love for Guitars

[7/4]

May 4, 2008

Luthier

A Career Born of a Love for Guitars

By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER, NYT

Copiague

CRISTIAN MIRABELLA was 10 years old when he walked into a guitar shop here and fell in love.

He had started learning to play the instrument and was fascinated with how it was made. With his mother’s help, he persuaded the owner of the shop, DeMarino’s Musical Instruments (since closed), to let him work there after school and on Saturdays, sweeping the floor, polishing guitars and eventually becoming an apprentice in the luthier’s craft.

Now, Mr. Mirabella, 36, owns his own showroom for stringed instruments, near where DeMarino’s used to be, as well as a workshop in St. James. Repair work helps pay the rent: he has reassembled a guitar that once belonged to Pete Townshend and that was tossed from a seventh-story window and retrieved by fans. He has also done restoration work for Brian Setzer, and, earlier this year, he made a pickguard for a guitar belonging to Keith Richards. In recent years, he has been spending more and more time building his own instruments.

As an apprentice, he watched masters like Jimmy D’Aquisto carve full-bellied archtop guitars, whose rich, full sound is favored by jazz musicians. The archtop was invented by Orville Gibson, the founder of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, and modified by Lloyd Loar. Mr. D’Aquisto, who had shops in Farmingdale and Greenport, died in 1995.

As a guitar maker, Mr. Mirabella focuses on building $18,000 archtops and custom laminate electric guitars, which sell for $5,000 to $6,000; he has also made flat-top guitars, upright basses and mandolins. With more than 40 instruments completed and 40 on order, he has a two-year waiting list. His sister, Annamichelle Mirabella, runs the office; his brother-in-law, William Langdon, helps with prep work.

Each instrument has to be “a piece of art” as well as “a usable tool,” Mr. Mirabella said.

Using a bending iron, he shapes the sides from European flame maple to give them a striped appearance. The tops are usually of air-dried spruce because of its tight grain, he said.

The final product “is a great-sounding guitar that will make the guys hold on to the guitar,” he said, but also “a pretty guitar that is going to make the guys pick it up in the first place.”

Last October, Peter Coco, 28, a professional bassist who has played with the jazz guitarist Frank Vignola, got an $8,500 upright bass made by Mr. Mirabella. “It plays so beautifully,” said Mr. Coco, who, with his twin brother, John, also a guitarist, teaches at their music studio in Garden City. “It feels like an extension of my body.”

Mr. Mirabella said his “modern” archtop guitar is a “trap-door” model designed “to push every possibility acoustically.” Based on the 1995 Side-Sound model of John Monteleone, a renowned Islip guitar maker, it has doors on the sides that open and close, attenuating the sound. Mr. Mirabella said that when his trap-door model is played with doors closed, it has the “more direct, punchy sound” of a flat top.

Mr. Monteleone, 60, who has made 400 guitars — they fetch $20,000 to $60,000 — said he did not mind that Mr. Mirabella used his models as a point of departure to create his own. “We all learn from other people,” he said. “We borrow from other people.”

Mr. Monteleone credited Mr. Mirabella with “a unique sense for design” and said he showed “a lot of promise.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Mirabella continues doing repairs for clients like Laurence Wexer, a Manhattan-based dealer of high-end vintage collectible guitars.

Mr. Wexer described Mr. Mirabella as “a very fine restoration person” with “a real love for the guitar and a real feeling of responsibility of maintaining the musical heritage of the fine vintage instruments.”

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Mr. Mirabella’s showroom, which he opened 10 years ago, attracted several of the regulars who hang out there. One of them, David Feinman, 55, of Farmingdale, owns a wholesale candy business but dreams of selling it to pursue a career as a professional guitarist. He owns the sixth archtop guitar Mr. Mirabella built and has ordered a custom-made bass and a solid-body electric guitar.

“The craftsmanship is impeccable, and he has a very refined eye for the aesthetics,” Mr. Feinman said. Because people bring their vintage instruments to Mr. Mirabella to have the bridges or necks reset or headstocks grafted back on, the shop sometimes resembles “Antiques Roadshow,” Mr. Feinman said.

Mr. Mirabella and his wife, Jeannette, 36, a special-education teacher for the Children’s Learning Center of United Cerebral Palsy in Roosevelt, live in Smithtown with their three young children. The couple met through a friend when they were both 16.

“All my girlfriends went through the guitar shop,” Mr. Mirabella said, “and Jeannette was the one girl, when I told her I wanted to be a guitar maker, who said, ‘Wow, that is cool,’ as opposed to ‘What are you really going to do?’ ”

He decided: “She might be the keeper.”