Nikolai Goudkov, a luthier who creates custom guitars from his woodshed in West Union, SC, believes he still hasn't made his ultimate masterpiece.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
Nikolai Goudkov
Age: 72.
Resides in: West Union.
Claim to fame: Luthier and guitar restorer.
Bear necessities: When a musician from a North Carolina band called Bearfoot asked Goudkov to build him a custom guitar in the shape of a bear's paw, Goudkov asked only for a hand-drawn sketch. "If you send me a sketch," he says, "even drawn by your own hand, pencil, whatever—we can work with that."
Price range: Goudkov's custom guitars run $250–$450. Walk-ins are welcome, and he recommends coming in person so you can play before you buy.
As a kid growing up in the Soviet city of Alexandrov, Nikolai Goudkov told his mother he needed a board. She worked at a sawmill, so she found him one. His father, a bulldozer driver, sourced leftover paint from a construction site. With these crude materials, Goudkov built his first guitar, fastening the strings with nails.
It would not, however, be his last guitar.
Decades later, after a career as a working musician and self-taught radio engineer in Russia—where he wound his own pickups, built his own amplifiers and fashioned guitars for musicians because Soviet-made instruments were, as he says, nearly unplayable—Goudkov emigrated to the foothills of upstate South Carolina to live near his son and family.
Now in West Union, Goudkov operates a small luthier's shop in a woodshed, where he makes custom electric guitars and restores damaged ones, sourcing tonewoods by feel and experience. Sometimes the materials come from Home Depot, and once from a neighbor's ruined piano that Goudkov disassembled and recycled.
He builds by instinct more than blueprint, starting with a body, shaping a neck and letting new ideas surface as he goes.
"He doesn't start with a concrete plan and finish with that," his son Dmitri explains, translating his father's Russian into English. "It's fluid—in the process of the moment."
Goudkov's client list has grown to include local musicians and collectors. Recently, a guitarist who once played with Pink came in to have a guitar set up before an Atlanta concert.
But Goudkov's philosophy hasn't changed since those first nail-strung strings in Alexandrov. A guitar isn't its price tag nor its country of origin. It's the way it feels in a player's hands.
"Pick it up," he says. "Play it. If it's yours, it's yours."
As for his great masterpiece, Goudkov says he hasn't made it yet. Each guitar he makes, he believes, might be the one.
"It's like a carrot in front of a donkey," he says. "You see it, but you never get there."