Former KISS guitarist Bruce Kulick and “The Sensei of Vintage 1980s Guitars,” Johnny DiFatta of AXN Guitars, are collaborating to engineer boutique guitars under a new banner, Kulick Guitars.
“Meeting Johnny from AXN ignited my love of M-1 guitars from the 1980s,” Kulick said. “This collaboration will help me create boutique quality guitars worthy of my name on the headstock.”
As the lead guitarist of KISS from 1984 to 1996, Kulick appeared on eight albums with the band, including “Asylum” (1985) and “Revenge” (1992). He also has been a member of Grand Funk Railroad for 23 years, while additional credits include Meat Loaf, Billy Squier, Union, Avantasia, Lordi and Michael Bolton.
“Bruce reached out because we liked the same things, and we started talking about the guitars he used during his era of KISS,” DiFatta said. “We went over the early 1980s ESP catalogs of guitars Bruce played and used live at that time. ESP Guitars were one of my two main influences as a guitar manufacturer with the other being early Charvel Guitars.”
“The ESP Bruce played live in the early KISS days was his 1985 ESP M-1 with a Flip-Flop paint job,” DiFatta said. “It’s the same guitar that is hanging in the Hard Rock Cafe in London England right next to Eric Clapton’s Stratocaster today. So I went on to manufacture and produce a replica of that M-1 ESP but it had a chunkier neck on it. We applied some guitar math and used a caliper tool to examine his favorite ESP guitars. I instructed Bruce on how to calibrate the thickness of a guitar neck. Bruce settled on a slightly thinner neck profile that was very 1980s-ish with an R2 nut. Now Bruce has that tribute guitar and uses it live.”
The guitar features DiFatt’s take on the Beatles-esque headshots on the “Asylum” album cover.
“Bruce said it would be great if we could do a guitar with his face on it from the ‘Asylum ‘cover,” DiFatta said. “I said that was doable and I was already making AXN custom guitars with artwork on them. So I took photos of a guitar without any artwork on it. Since I’m also an artist, I went into Photoshop and designed the guitar. I also went and bought the biggest poster I could find of the ‘Asylum’ artwork, and I photographed just his face and did a lot of cool stuff with it. I had to move some of the paint splatters around the pickups, the bridges and the neck and move Bruce’s face around until the symmetry was there.”
The result became a tribute guitar, and the mockup blossomed into a further collaborative effort by two “guitar geeks.”
“Bruce wants to offer boutique guitars,” DiFatta said. “His fans are constantly asking Bruce for more guitars that celebrates his KISS era. We started talking about the woods, the hardware, all the specifications and the pickups. Everything that is involved in the process of making guitars. Bruce showed an interest in learning more about what makes a guitar truly great. He was intrigued by my knowledge since I’m a luthier and I’m a guitar player and I used to be in a working band.”
Some of the features a Kulick guitar will offer are locking bridges, a single humbucker and a non-reversed headstock carrying the Kulick logo on the front and the AXN logo on the back. It’s handcrafted and “period correct,” DiFatta said.
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