There are certain privileges that come with being an educator that never appear in a job description. One of the greatest is getting a front-row seat to watch a young person grow up, discover who they are, develop their talents, and then, every once in a while, getting to remain connected long enough to see where all of it leads.
For me, Matt Powell is one of those stories.
Matt was my student at Staten Island Technical High School, and I had the privilege of watching him grow during those years not only as a young man, but as a musician. The fact that we have remained in touch long after high school is one of those rare treats educators occasionally receive. Recently, that relationship came wonderfully full circle when I finally got to visit Matt at Powell Guitars, the business he founded out of the workshop he built with his father, Russell.
And as both an educator and a musician myself, I arrived carrying something slightly more demanding than nostalgia: a guitar in need of help.
My Fender Acoustasonic spends far too much of its life in my office at a New York City public school. For anyone unfamiliar with the environmental sophistication of a NYC school building, let’s just say my office can transition from a relatively civilized 70 degrees to approximately the surface temperature of Mercury. Add months of changing heat, moisture, dryness and humidity, and storing a finely constructed wooden stringed instrument there begins to resemble less of a storage plan and more of a long-term science experiment.
My Acoustasonic had begun paying the price. The fret ends needed dressing, and while I had certainly noticed that the guitar wasn’t feeling quite right, Matt immediately found something I had missed: the neck had developed enough bow that playing in portions of the fretboard had become downright unpleasant. What impressed me wasn’t simply that he could fix these things. It was how quickly he saw them.
That is where Matt’s talent really becomes apparent.
There is a difference between someone who knows how to perform a guitar setup and someone who understands an instrument. Matt examines a guitar almost diagnostically, noticing the tiny things and the large things, understanding how they interact, and then figuring out what the instrument needs to become the best version of itself. There is no assembly-line feeling to the process. It is extraordinarily personal, thoughtful work.
That philosophy is quite literally part of Powell Guitars. Matt and Russell describe their approach as giving each job the time it deserves, never rushing the process and refusing to settle for “good enough.” Their work now spans setups and fretwork to structural repairs, electronics, complete restorations and fully custom instruments. And then I finally got to see the workshop.
I had heard stories about this place for years. Matt and his dad working side by side. The tools. The wood. The projects. The instruments in various stages of becoming instruments. Walking into it for the first time felt less like entering a conventional guitar repair shop and more like entering a working laboratory for sound. There is craftsmanship everywhere you look, but there is also history there. Father and son sharing a workbench, sharing knowledge and continuing to refine a craft they have built together over decades. Powell Guitars itself grew directly from that father-son workshop, with Russell first passing his woodworking knowledge to Matt and both eventually developing their lutherie together.
Then Matt showed me the guitars he builds from the ground up. That was another level entirely.
Seeing Powell proudly adorning those headstocks was one of those moments where my educator brain and musician brain collided. I remembered the high school kid. I was now looking at instruments designed and fabricated by the adult craftsman he had become. These weren’t curiosities hanging on the wall of a workshop. They were sophisticated, beautifully executed, elite instruments that I wanted to plug in immediately.
Which may eventually prove expensive for me. Let’s just say that commissioning Matt Powell to build a custom Powell guitar has officially made its way onto my future plans. I already have ideas. This is how these things begin.
There is another beautiful Staten Island connection woven into Matt’s story. His father, Russell, studied under renowned luthier Flip Scipio, and Matt later apprenticed directly with Flip himself before launching Powell Guitars. Flip, of course, spent six years working as the head of the shop at the legendary Mandolin Brothers on Staten Island, once one of the great destinations in the guitar world. Matt’s education under Flip included exactly the kind of painstaking repair work that now defines his own approach: repairs, setups, fret dressing and the hundreds of tiny judgments that eventually separate a competent technician from a true luthier. That lineage matters.
For generations of guitar players, Mandolin Brothers made Staten Island an unlikely pilgrimage destination for musicians from around New York City and far beyond. You crossed a bridge or got on a ferry because somebody there understood instruments in a way that was increasingly difficult to find.
So, if you were one of those musicians who once made the trip to Staten Island for Mandolin Brothers because you needed a setup, repair, modification, restoration or simply trusted your instrument only to somebody who really knew what they were doing, you should know about Matt Powell and Powell Guitars. There is something wonderfully fitting about that tradition continuing here.
As for my Fender Acoustasonic? Heavenly.
It came back feeling like the instrument I remembered buying. Comfortable. Responsive. Effortless again. The kind of repair where you don’t spend your first ten minutes admiring the repair. You simply start playing and suddenly realize you’ve been playing for forty-five minutes.
Which, I suppose, is the best review a luthier can receive. And because apparently I learn nothing when presented with access to someone this talented, I didn’t leave empty-handed. I left Matt my Peavey Wolfgang. That one is now awaiting the Powell treatment.
For musicians in Staten Island, Brooklyn and throughout New York City and beyond, Powell Guitars deserves to be on your radar. Whether your guitar needs a basic setup, serious fretwork, electronics, structural repair, restoration, modification, or you are thinking about something far more dangerous to your wallet and far more exciting to your soul, namely having Matt build an instrument specifically for you, I cannot recommend him highly enough.
Yes, I’m incredibly proud that Matt Powell was once one of my students, but more so that he became a friend. But this recommendation isn’t coming from his former educator. It’s coming from the musician who just got his guitar back.
And that musician is already planning the next one.
Powell Guitars
Brooklyn & Staten Island, New York
Matt Powell (Instagram: powellguitars)
917-968-7674
Matt@PowellGuitarsNYC.com
www.powellguitarsnyc.com
Repairs and visits are by appointment, and estimates are available directly through the shop.
MarkErlenwein.com 