+ The archive holds three documented rigs for Eric Clapton, filed under three different
+ band names because that is how the source material labeled them:{' '}
+
+ Clapton joined the Yardbirds in 1963 as a teenager with a reputation for strict blues + orthodoxy. By most accounts of the period, he was the member most resistant to the + band drifting toward pop material. His rig in this era was comparatively plain: a Fender + guitar and a modest amp setup, the kind of gear a working blues band could afford and + haul between London clubs. There is no pedalboard to speak of, because the vocabulary of + the pedalboard did not really exist yet for a player like him. Tone came from fingers, + a guitar, and an amplifier pushed to its own natural breakup. Nothing sat between the + two. +
++ It is worth pausing on how little that setup asks of anyone trying to understand it. One + guitar, one amp, no chain to trace. The interesting part of 1964 Clapton is not the gear; + it is the restraint. He left the Yardbirds in 1965, reportedly over the direction of + “For Your Love,” a decision that reads, in hindsight, like an early + declaration about what kind of guitarist he intended to be. +
++ The Bluesbreakers rig is the one most guitarists actually know by ear before they know + it by name. This is the era of the John Mayall album that fans nicknamed “Beano” + after the comic Clapton is reading on the cover, and it produced a guitar tone that + effectively set the template for British blues-rock: a Gibson Les Paul into a cranked + Marshall combo, pushed loud enough in the studio that the story, repeated often enough + in guitar circles to have become its own piece of folklore, has an engineer objecting + and Clapton and Mayall keeping the take anyway. Whether every detail of that story is + precise or slightly burnished by fifty years of retelling, the tone itself is not in + dispute. It is on the record. +
++ What changed between 1964 and 1966 was not a new pedal or a clever trick. It was volume + and a different amplifier doing something a smaller, cleaner rig could not: a natural, + touch-sensitive overdrive that responded to how hard Clapton hit the strings. That single + shift, the same basic building blocks pushed harder, is arguably more influential on + decades of guitarists who followed than anything that came later in his career, pedals + included. +
++ By the time the archive's Cream entry picks up in 1967, the context has changed + again. Cream was a power trio built to fill much bigger rooms than the Bluesbreakers ever + played, and Clapton's rig grew to match: Marshall stacks scaled for arena volume + instead of club volume and, most visibly, a different guitar. The Gibson SG associated + with this period, famously repainted in psychedelic swirls by the Dutch design + collective The Fool and known ever since by that name, is one of the most photographed + guitars in rock history, a visual signal of just how far the aesthetic had drifted from + a plain-finish Telecaster in a blues club three years earlier. +
++ A wah pedal enters the picture around this era too, most audibly on tracks like + “Tales of Brave Ulysses.” It is a small addition next to a new guitar and a + bigger amp stack, but it marks something: the beginning of the pedalboard as part of the + story, not an afterthought to it. The purist who resisted “For Your Love” + three years earlier was now playing psychedelic rock through a wah pedal in an + arena-scale power trio. Nothing about that is a contradiction. It is what three years of + a working musician's life actually looks like when you track the gear instead of the + reputation. +
+
+ Looked at individually, each of these three rigs is a snapshot: a guitar, an amp, a year.
+ Looked at in sequence, which is exactly what the{' '}
+
+ It is also a useful reminder about the limits of the archive itself. Suede DNA documents
+ three specific years for Clapton because three specific years are what upstream
+ photography preserved, not because his tone stood still in between. The chain shows what
+ was recorded, not everything that happened. For more on exactly what the archive does
+ and does not claim to verify, see{' '}
+
SUEDE/DNA / ARTICLES
++ Essays on rig history, tone genealogy, and the craft of the signal chain, written from + inside the archive. +
+ ++ {formatDate(article.date)} · {article.readTime.toUpperCase()} READ +
++ {article.description} +
+ + READ → + + + ))} ++ Learning a part by ear is usually taught as a purely auditory skill: listen closely + enough, repeat it enough times, and the part reveals itself. That is true as far as it + goes, but it skips a step that experienced players tend to do without noticing: before + they try to reproduce a phrase, they make a guess about what produced it. A bend that + seems to come out of nowhere sounds different if you know the player was using a + whammy bar instead of a finger bend. A part that sounds impossibly clean at speed sounds + different once you know it was played through a rack system designed specifically to + keep gain consistent across the neck. Knowing the rig does not replace listening. It + changes what you are listening for. +
++ Three things, mostly. First, it narrows the search space for technique. If you know a + part was recorded on a guitar with a scalloped fretboard, an unusually deep, hovering + vibrato stops being a mystery and starts being an expected consequence of the setup, and + you stop trying to replicate an effect and start replicating a technique, which is a + more useful thing to practice. Second, it recalibrates expectations about tone before + you spend an hour chasing a sound your own gear cannot physically produce. A part cut + through a heavily gained rack system into a 4x12 cabinet is not going to come out of a + bedroom amp at low volume no matter how precisely you dial in the knobs, and knowing + that up front saves the hour. Third, and this is the one that matters most for actual + ear training, it tells you where to stop listening for gear and start listening for the + player. Two guitarists with an identical rig still sound like two different people. Once + the hardware stops being the mystery, what is left is technique, timing, and touch, + which is the part worth learning by ear in the first place. +
++ The same habit has an obvious failure mode: treating gear research as a substitute for + practice instead of a shortcut through it. It is possible to spend far more time + reading about a rig than playing along to the record it produced, and that time does + not transfer to the fingers. A signal chain diagram tells you the order of the pedals. It + does not tell you how hard the player picked, where their hand sat relative to the + bridge, or how they built a phrase across four bars instead of one. Those things only + come from listening, slowing the recording down, and playing it back until the hands + catch up with the ears. Rig knowledge is a lens, not a bypass. +
++ There is a related trap worth naming directly: assuming identical gear produces + identical results. Chase the exact scalloped Stratocaster and cranked Marshall from a + 1966 blues record and you will get closer to the tone, and still not sound like the + guitarist who played it, because tone is downstream of touch as much as it is downstream + of hardware. The rig narrows the gap. It does not close it. +
++ The useful order, in practice, tends to run the opposite direction from how gear + curiosity usually unfolds. Most players hear a tone, immediately want to know the gear, + and only get around to actually learning the part afterward, or never. A more productive + sequence starts with the part: listen enough times to attempt it cold, form a hypothesis + about the technique, and only then check the gear to confirm or correct that hypothesis. + Used this way, an archive like the one on this site functions less like a shopping list + and more like an answer key: something you consult after you have already tried, to + check your guess about why a phrase sounds the way it does, not something you consult + instead of trying. +
++ This is also the reason artist pages here are built as a chronology rather than a single + gear list. A part learned from a 1966 recording and a part learned from a 1975 recording + by the same guitarist may call for genuinely different technique assumptions, because the + rig behind each one was different. +
++ One habit worth building deliberately: check the year before you check the gear. It is + tempting to search an archive by artist name alone and assume whatever rig comes up + applies to the recording you are trying to learn. A guitarist's setup at the + start of a career and twenty years later can differ in every meaningful respect, from + the guitar itself to the amp voicing to the whole relationship between gain and + headroom. A rig documented three years after the record you are studying can + send you chasing a tone that has nothing to do with the one on the track. Cross-checking + the recording date against the documented year, when both are available, is a small step + that prevents a real and common mistake. +
+
+ If ear training is the actual goal rather than gear trivia, rig archaeology works best as
+ a supplement to structured practice, not a replacement for it: a resource to check
+ after the attempt, alongside whatever method you use to build the skill in the first
+ place, whether that is a teacher, a method book, or a tool like{' '}
+
+ Somewhere in the mid-1980s, a certain kind of guitar rig stopped being a general-purpose + tool and started being built for one job: making extremely difficult things easy to play + live, night after night, at volume. Call it the virtuoso rig. It shows up across a run + of players documented in this archive: Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Zakk + Wylde, who otherwise have little in common stylistically, but whose gear, looked at + side by side, is solving the same handful of problems: sustain without mush, gain + without losing note definition, and a level of physical reliability that a touring + rig from a decade earlier was never asked to provide. +
+
+ Malmsteen's
+ Steve Vai and Joe Satriani both came up through session and sideman work. Vai
+ transcribed and performed famously difficult material for Frank Zappa before going
+ solo, and both built rigs in the late 1980s and 1990s around rack-mounted effects and
+ MIDI switching rather than a pedalboard on the floor. The instinct is practical: a rack
+ system lets a player recall a complex combination of gain, delay, and modulation
+ settings with a single footswitch press instead of stomping four pedals in sequence
+ mid-solo.
+ Not every rig in this era chased speed. Tom Morello's{' '}
+
+ Not every player working in this window bought into rack systems or scalloped necks at
+ all. Zakk Wylde's
+ The most durable legacy of this stretch of gear history is not any specific pedal or + amp. It is the idea that a rig could be designed, not just assembled, that the distance + between a player's intention and their live sound was an engineering problem worth + solving with a scalloped neck, a MIDI rack, a kill switch, or nothing more than a Les + Paul and a loud amp, depending on what the player was actually trying to do. That + plurality of approach, all coexisting in the same fifteen-year stretch, is easier to see + lined up side by side in an archive than it ever was one artist at a time. +
++ There is no formal name for the rig diagram as a document: the flattened, labeled + drawing of a pedalboard signal path, or the photograph annotated with amp settings and + guitar-to-amp order. It sits somewhere between a technical schematic and a fan artifact, + and it has been produced, informally and without much coordination, by three different + groups for three different reasons: touring techs who needed setups to be reproducible, + magazine editors who needed content, and fans who wanted to know how a record actually + sounded like that. None of those groups set out to build an archive. The archive is what + happened anyway. +
++ The oldest and least glamorous form of rig documentation is the patch sheet a guitar + tech keeps so a rig can be rebuilt identically after a flight case gets thrown around an + airport for a week. This version has no interest in narrative. It is a list: guitar, + cable, pedal one, pedal two, amp input, amp settings, in order. Its entire job is + reproducibility, and it succeeds by being boring. Most of this material never left the + touring party that produced it. It existed to solve a Tuesday-night problem, not to + inform anyone. When it does surface publicly, decades later, in an interview or a book, + it tends to be treated as a small revelation, because for most of the history of + recorded music this was the only version of the diagram that existed at all. +
++ Guitar magazines turned rig documentation into a recurring feature decades before video + made it easy. A writer would visit a tour, ask the guitarist or their tech to walk + through the board, and publish a gear list alongside the interview, sometimes with a + hand-drawn signal chain, sometimes just prose description. This is where a lot of gear + folklore actually originates: the studio anecdote about an amp pushed past its intended + volume, the pedal a player swears by that nobody else uses, the guitar that shows up in + every photo from one specific era and then never again. Video eventually did to this + format what it did to most print journalism. Premier Guitar's long-running{' '} + Rig Rundown series is the clearest modern descendant, walking a tech or a + player through an actual board on camera instead of describing it in a paragraph. The + underlying instinct did not change: readers and viewers wanted the signal chain, not + just the anecdote. +
+
+ The material underneath Suede DNA comes from a third lineage: a fan-run website,{' '}
+
+ That collection was eventually preserved on the Internet Archive as{' '}
+
+ What ties the tech's patch list, the magazine feature, and the fan-run website + together is not format. It is the belief that a signal chain is worth writing down + because it is not obvious from listening. Two guitarists can describe the same tone in + completely different vocabulary; a diagram forces the ambiguity out. It says: this + guitar, into this pedal, into this amp, set here. It is a bad tool for describing feel, + phrasing, or a player's touch (those don't survive translation to a diagram at + all), but it is close to the best tool available for describing the physical chain + feel travels through. +
++ That is also the limit worth being honest about. A diagram, or a photo of a + pedalboard, tells you the hardware. It does not tell you how hard someone hit the + strings, how the room was mic'd, or what got adjusted between takes and never + written down anywhere. The form has always been partial. It has just been useful enough, + for long enough, that three separate communities kept producing it without ever agreeing + on a name for what they were doing. +
++ Ask what gear made a tone, and the answer is almost always a guitar and an amp, maybe a + named pedal if one was doing something distinctive. That answer is not wrong. It is + incomplete in a specific and predictable way: it lists the parts of the signal chain + that are easy to see in a photo and easy to name in an interview, and it skips almost + everything that sits between them. A pedalboard photograph shows the pedals. It rarely + shows the power supply feeding them, the condition of the patch cables, or the order the + tech actually wired things in versus the order they are laid out on the board for looks. + None of that is a secret exactly. It is just the part of the chain nobody thinks to + photograph. +
++ A 9V supply feeding a board full of pedals is one of the least interesting-looking + objects in a signal chain and one of the most consequential. Daisy-chaining several + high-gain pedals off a single unfiltered supply is a well-known way to introduce hum and + noise that has nothing to do with the pedals themselves. The fix is isolated power, not + a different pedal, and plenty of players have spent money chasing a “bad” + pedal that was actually a power problem. It is a useful reminder that a signal chain + diagram, which typically shows boxes connected by lines representing audio signal, is + quietly missing an entire second chain running underneath it: the power chain, which + affects the sound just as much and gets none of the attention. +
++ A guitar cable is not a neutral wire. Longer cables and cheaper cables carry more + capacitance, which rolls off high frequencies before the signal even reaches the first + pedal. It is a real, measurable effect, and also one of the most argued-about topics in + guitar forums precisely because it is subtle enough to be genuinely debatable in a way a + distortion pedal is not. Most gear lists do not mention cable length or brand at all, + which means one real variable in the final tone is almost never recorded anywhere, on + this site or any other rig-documentation source. It is a small, honest gap worth naming + rather than pretending a diagram is more complete than it is. +
++ For most of the electric guitar's history, powering a pedalboard meant a pile of + individual 9V batteries or a single daisy-chained adapter, and both had obvious + downsides: batteries die mid-set, and a shared unfiltered supply lets noise from one + pedal bleed into every other pedal on the chain. The fix, an isolated multi-output power + supply giving each pedal its own clean, separated feed, did not become a standard part + of a serious touring rig until relatively late in the pedalboard's history, once + boards grew crowded enough with high-gain and digital pedals that the noise problem + became impossible to ignore. It is a genuinely unglamorous piece of gear history: no + player has ever been asked in an interview what power supply they used, and yet the + answer quietly determines whether a big, ambitious pedalboard is usable on a stage at + all or plagued with a hum loud enough to hear between songs. +
++ For a recorded tone specifically, as opposed to a live one, the guitar and amp are + arguably not even the last two links in the chain. Microphone choice and placement come + after them, and change the result more than most gear lists acknowledge. The same + amplifier, mic'd an inch off the speaker cone versus a foot back in the room, or + aimed dead center on the dust cap versus off toward the cone's edge, produces + audibly different recordings without a single setting on the amp changing. This is + common knowledge among recording engineers and almost never appears in a rig diagram, + because a rig diagram is drawn from the player's side of the signal chain and a + microphone belongs to the room, not the rig. It is one more reason a photograph of a + pedalboard, however well documented, is describing half a signal chain at most for + anything that made it onto a record. +
+
+ None of this is an argument against documenting rigs. It is the opposite: an
+ argument for being precise about what a rig photo actually documents. A photograph shows
+ the guitar, the pedals, and usually the amp. It does not show the power supply
+ underneath the board, the cable running to the input jack, or the microphone that
+ captured whatever came out of the speaker. Every rig entry in this archive is exactly
+ that: real, useful, and partial. The same honesty applies to the tech-built patch sheets
+ and fan-run diagrams discussed in{' '}
+
+ Quick answers below. For the longer explanations, see{' '}
+
{item.a}
+SUEDE/DNA / DOCS
++ Reference material on how the archive is built, sourced, and searched. For the short + version, see the{' '} + + about page + + . For the long version, start here. +
+ +
+ {children}
+
+ );
+}
+
+export default function SearchAndFiltersPage() {
+ return (
+ + The search box on the home page reads a single string but understands two different + things inside it: artist-name text and year expressions. It splits a query into those + two parts before doing anything else, so hendrix 1968 filters to rigs from + 1968 and then ranks by how well the remaining text matches an artist name. +
+The parser recognizes several year and range formats inside the same query:
++ Multiple year expressions in one query are combined. An artist must satisfy every + range mentioned, not just one of them. Years are matched against an artist's full + documented range (their earliest to latest rig), so a query for a single year will + surface an artist whose overall range spans that year even if no individual rig lands + exactly on it; the rig grid itself still only shows rigs from years that satisfy the + query. +
++ Whatever text is left after year expressions are stripped out is matched against artist + names and a small alias table (for cases like abbreviations or alternate spellings). + Matching is diacritic-insensitive and punctuation-insensitive, and it tolerates minor + typos through a bounded edit-distance check: short queries need an exact or near-exact + token match, longer queries get a little more slack. +
++ Results are ranked, not just filtered: an exact name match scores highest, a + name that starts with the query scores next, a match on a whole word scores above a + match buried mid-string, and so on down to fuzzy token matches. A query that is only a + year expression, with no text, switches the result list to chronological order instead + of relevance order. +
++ Independent of the search box, the filter rail exposes decade toggles (multi-select) and + a sort order: name, earliest year first, or latest year first. Decade filters and search + text combine: turning on a decade toggle narrows the pool of artists before the search + query is scored against it. +
+
+ All of this round-trips through the URL as query parameters:{' '}
+ ?q= for the search text,{' '}
+ ?decades= for a comma-separated list of decade
+ years, and ?sort= for the sort order, so a
+ filtered view is a link you can share or bookmark.
+
+ Press / or ⌘K / Ctrl K from anywhere on the page to + jump focus to the search box, and Esc while focused to clear it. When a query + returns no results, the site shows suggested near-matches drawn from the same ranking + logic that powers normal search, rather than a dead end. +
+
+ Every photograph in Suede DNA originates from{' '}
+ archive.org/download/guitargeek-archives/.
+
+ What Suede DNA adds is a presentation, normalization, and search layer over that + upstream collection, not a re-publication of new material. +
+
+ The canonical dataset is data/rigs.json, built
+ by a script (scripts/build-manifest.ts) that
+ parses upstream filenames against a known grammar,{' '}
+ artist_guitar_rig_year.ext, and produces a
+ flat list of rig records: an id, an artist slug, a year, a source URL, and a file
+ format. A companion script (
+ scripts/validate-manifest.ts) checks the
+ manifest's schema and integrity before every build; a broken or malformed manifest
+ fails the build rather than shipping.
+
+ Two small hand-maintained files sit on top of the automated parse:{' '}
+ data/overrides.json, which corrects display
+ names where the upstream filename grammar is ambiguous or abbreviated (turning{' '}
+ ac_dc into{' '}
+ AC/DC, for instance), and{' '}
+ data/excluded.json, a short list of items
+ intentionally left out, mostly upstream files that returned an error status when
+ fetched and could not be resolved to a valid image.
+
+ It is worth being precise here, because “verified” can mean very different + things. The manifest pipeline verifies structure: that a rig record has a valid artist, + a plausible year, a working source URL, and a consistent id. It does not verify content. + Suede DNA does not interpret what is inside a rig photo. There is no gear-list + reconstruction, no signal-chain transcription, no cross-referencing against interviews + or magazine features. Each rig is presented as the source document it is: one archival + photo, one year, one artist, and a link back to the upstream file. The compilation is + the value here, not an editorial interpretation layered on top of it. +
+
+ That also means Suede DNA does not independently fact-check the accuracy of the
+ upstream archive itself. If a photo in guitargeek-archives was mislabeled with the wrong
+ year or the wrong artist before it reached this site, that error can carry through. The{' '}
+ overrides.json file exists specifically to
+ catch and correct cases like that as they are found. It is a living correction log, not
+ a guarantee that every record is error-free.
+
+ The archive documents 409 rigs across 390 artists. That is a meaningful sample of + guitar history, not an exhaustive one. Many artists have no entry at all; many who do + have only one or two documented years out of a much longer career. Absence from the + archive says nothing about an artist's significance. It only reflects what the + upstream guitargeek-archives collection happened to document and what has been + normalized into the manifest so far. +
+
+ If you find a misattributed rig, a wrong year, or a broken image, the fastest path to a
+ fix is data/overrides.json. The
+ underlying image is never edited or re-hosted, only the metadata around it.
+
+ Suede DNA is a compilation archive of guitarists' rigs. Right now it holds{' '} + {stats.totalRigs} documented setups across {stats.totalArtists} artists, spanning{' '} + {stats.yearMin}–{stats.yearMax}. Each entry is a photograph of a rig: the guitar, the + amp, the pedals, sometimes a rack, tied to an artist and a year. +
++ The idea underneath the site is simple: a guitarist's tone is not one fixed thing. It + changes as they change instruments, amps, and effects, sometimes within the same tour. + Line up every documented rig for one artist in chronological order and you get + something closer to a genealogy than a single snapshot: a signal chain stretched + across a career instead of frozen at one moment. +
++ The site is built around two ways of looking at that idea. +
++ The compilation grid on the home page is the + discovery view: every rig in the archive, grouped by artist, sortable and filterable by + decade and year. It is meant for browsing: scroll, search, or jump straight to a + letter with the A–Z rail. +
++ Each artist page is the genealogy view. Rigs for + that artist are laid out on a horizontal timeline (the “DNA chain”) joined by a + single strand, in year order, with a specimen card underneath each one. If an artist has + three documented rigs across a decade, the artist page is the closest thing on the site + to watching their tone evolve. +
+
+ Suede DNA is not a gear-list encyclopedia, and it does not claim to catalog every piece
+ of equipment an artist ever used. It is not an editorial publication with staff writers
+ reporting on rigs firsthand. It does not transcribe signal chains from the photographs;
+ see{' '}
+
+ What it is: a fast, searchable, citation-friendly index over a much older community + archive, presented in a way that makes the “career as signal chain” framing + visible at a glance. +
++ Musicians researching a specific era of an artist's tone. Students of gear history + looking for a starting point before going deeper. Anyone who has ever looked at a live + photo and wondered what that pedal on the floor actually was. The archive does not + answer every question (often it only gives you the photo and the year), but it is + built so that question is easy to ask. +
+{eyebrow}
+{description}
+ + READ → + + + ); +} diff --git a/src/components/docs/PageShell.tsx b/src/components/docs/PageShell.tsx new file mode 100644 index 0000000..78f9104 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/components/docs/PageShell.tsx @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +import Link from 'next/link'; +import type { ReactNode } from 'react'; + +export function PageShell({ + eyebrow, + title, + lede, + meta, + children, + backHref = '/', + backLabel = '← BACK TO THE COMPILATION', + maxWidth = '800px', +}: { + eyebrow: string; + title: string; + lede?: ReactNode; + meta?: ReactNode; + children: ReactNode; + backHref?: string; + backLabel?: string; + maxWidth?: string; +}) { + return ( +{eyebrow}
++ {lede} +
+ ) : null} + +