Reprinted from Vintage Guitar Magazine, September, 1994

Here's the story of one of the more interesting Ibanez guitars from the '70's, as told by Jeff Hasselberger himself.

"The KISS boys were always good for a challenge or two. Rather than get wrapped up in the minutiae of fret crown shapes and potentiometer tapers, Paul Stanley knew what the important issues were - like should the pick guard be chrome plated or polished stainless.

"Paul's legendary Mirror Ball Iceman is a perfect example of how to push the envelope of guitar technology. It started with a phone call from Paul about his idea to have a guitar that resembled a shattered mirror. His exact words, if I recall, were, "I want it to look like somebody hit a mirrored guitar with a hammer right on the pickups."

It sounded easy enough. I got some 1/8" mirror, cut it into the shape of an Iceman and smacked it in the pickup area with a hammer. What I ended up with was about 10,000 bits of mirror dust where the hammer hit and three other pieces. This was obviously not going to work. I was going to have to cut each piece to look like it was shattered. I went out and got a lot more 1/8 mirror and a handful of glass cutters.

Starting with one piece of mirror cut into the shape of Paul's guitar, I thought of drawing a plan and transferring it to the mirror. In the end, I decided to wing it and started to cut out pieces that I thought looked cool. It took a couple of days to do this and as I went around the guitar, I started to get the hang of it. When it was finished, I was glad to still have five fingers on each hand. As it turned out, cutting the mirror was the easy part. While I was doing the mirror, my trusty partner in crime at Ibanez, Jim Heffner. was routing a quarter-inch out of the top of one of Paul's guitars. That's right, the mirrors were a retrofit. Jim left the abalonoid binding around the top and the plan was to slap some epoxy in there and set the mirrors into it.

We routed out twice the thickness of the mirror so we could set each piece at a slightly different angle, Paul's stage concept was to hit the guitar with a Super Trooper spot light and have rays of light shooting out from the guitar at all angles like a mirror ball. We figured a 5 to 15 degree difference between adjoining pieces would do it.

I wrapped dowels with masking tape to keep all the holes from clogging with epoxy and went to town. Since the Iceman has a slightly arched top, I had to re-cut some of the mirror to better fit the curve of the top. This part was tedious and trying to keep ahead of the epoxy cure was not always successful, but all the pieces seemed to fit pretty well

Late that night, with all the mirrors in place, Jim and I took the axe outside and gave it a test run in the headlights of my pickup truck. Yup, it worked. Shards of light were shooting off every which way. The only problem was that because the mirrors were set at angles to each other, the joints were razor sharp. You could make mountains of tasty cole slaw with this Veg-O-Caster.

I was prepared to deal with this by flowing a clear polyurethane finish over the mirrors so the surface would be nice and smooth and safe. Next morning, I mixed up the polyurethane and poured it on. I went about my business for a few hours and when I went back to the shop to check it, my stomach knotted. It was drying cloudy and ruining the whole mirror effect. Shit! Now what?

Before it got rock hard, I took a chisel and began to scrape the finish off. Fortunately, glass doesn't hold finish very well, and by dinner time I had removed nearly all the finish. The finish wouldn't come out from between the pieces, but that proved to be the solution to the problem.

I filled all the joints with polyurethane, but that still left sharp edges. I ended up using a small sanding wheel on a Dremel tool to grind each mirror joint smooth, back filling with polyurethane as needed. This took forever, but it did the trick.

All that remained was to get some glass drill bits and to mount all the pickups and hardware. Paul was anxious to give it a go and damage some corneas as well as some eardrums. When I finally saw it on stage with about a million candlepower blasting into it, the vision was pretty impressive.

Of all the custom guitars we did this one sticks in my mind mainly because I found some old photos to jog my failing memory. The fact that it required a tremendous amount of effort to make and contributed virtually nothing to the universe of guitar technology will endear it to me forever.

Jeff Hasselberger

Paul Stanley - The Prince Of Pout and KISS' profilic songwriter - has strutted across the world's concert stages with some pretty amazing custom-made guitars during the last 20 years, with good reason. Its futuristic Iceman shape and Les Paul-like tone are legendary. Stanley recently took a break from KISS' grueling tour rehersals to discuss the guitar that put Ibanez on the map. This interview was published in Guitar Shop, October 1996

Describe your first encounter with the Ibanez Iceman and how the PS-10 model came about.

First of all, the Iceman and the PS10 have about as much in common as a Chevy and a Rolls Royce. The PS10 came about in the '70s, when were on out first trip to Japan. Ibanez was interested in me doing a signature guitar with them. They wanted to me to design something new, and we did go through their catalog, I saw a picture of a guitar that was not terribly popular. I liked the asymmetrical shape to it; it reminded me of a firebird or a Rickenbacker bass turned upside down. It had one pickup on it that looked like you took three bobbins from a humbucker and put them together somehow. It also had that wacky knob that looked like you were to change your television channels with it! I said, "You've got something here, but you don't know what to do with it." My feeling about Ibanez in the '70s, like many companies in Japan, was that they were excellent at copying but they didn't know why they were copying.

So we sat down and, by using that basic shape, I came up with a guitar: construction, frets, inlays, wiring, the type of tail block that has a sustain block built into it, the half-brass/half-bone nut, and so on. In other words, we took a shape a made a new guitar. Although there is still a guitar called an Iceman and some people use the name interchangeably with the PS10, they really have nothing in common expcept a silhouette.

Soundwise, was there a guitar you were trying to emulate?

The classic guitar to me, that I wanted to echo in some way, was a Les Paul Standard. You have a mahogany body that gives you great warmth and you have the maple that gives you the brightness and the sustain.

Was the PS10 more a stage guitar than a studio workhorse?

I used it quite bit in the studio. I started using it in '77 and used it freely from then on. My guitar has proven itself over the last 20 years to be not only credible, but a real cornerstone in what I do. I may have used other guitars at different times, but I always found my way back to those guitars.

What's the story behind your shattered-mirror PS10 that you started using onstage during the Dynasty tour?

When the band was first starting out, I saw Slade, and their singer, Noddy [holder], had a top hat with mirrors around it. They would hit it with a spotlight and these beams of light would come out of his head. It was really cool and the mirror-ball effect we were using in shows was also cool, so why not fracture a mirror on the face of the guitar, but make sure that each facet is offset from the neck so that when the light hits it you literally have hundreds of lights shining out of the guitar.

When you called up Ibanez with this idea, did they think you were out of your mind?

That was a well-known fact from day one! That was nothing new. They were very good-natured about it, and it was much easier than bringing somebody with you tugging and screaming.

If the glass was set into the body, did that mean the maple top was 86'd?

The maple was still there.

Wouldn't the glass screw up the tone of the top wood?

The glass didn't radically affect the tone, maybe because it was set in an epoxy. Glass certainly is dense enough that it propably picks up some of the vibrations. Surprisingly, it sounds very much like my other ones. Go figure.

By Greg Pedersen