Add /docs and /articles sections

public/llms.txt

@@ -13,6 +13,12 @@ Suede DNA archives the rigs and signal chains of notable guitarists. Each entry
 
 This is a reference resource, not a commercial catalog. It is the guitar DNA archive — the signal-chain history of recorded music.
 
+## Documentation and articles
+
+- Docs (sourcing, verification, search syntax, FAQ): https://dna.suedeai.ai/docs
+- Articles (rig history, tone genealogy, gear-chain essays): https://dna.suedeai.ai/articles
+- About / the method: https://dna.suedeai.ai/about
+
 ## Related properties
 
 - Guitar chord tools and scales: https://guitarchords.info

src/app/articles/building-a-tone-over-a-career/page.tsx

@@ -0,0 +1,148 @@
+import type { Metadata } from 'next';
+import { PageShell, DocSection, SuedeLink } from '@/components/docs/PageShell';
+import { getArticle } from '@/lib/articles-content';
+
+const SITE_URL = process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL ?? 'https://dna.suedeai.ai';
+const SLUG = 'building-a-tone-over-a-career';
+const article = getArticle(SLUG)!;
+
+export const metadata: Metadata = {
+  title: article.title,
+  description: article.description,
+  alternates: { canonical: `${SITE_URL}/articles/${SLUG}` },
+  openGraph: {
+    title: `${article.title} — Suede DNA`,
+    description: article.description,
+    url: `${SITE_URL}/articles/${SLUG}`,
+    siteName: 'Suede DNA',
+    type: 'article',
+    publishedTime: article.date,
+  },
+  twitter: {
+    card: 'summary_large_image',
+    title: `${article.title} — Suede DNA`,
+    description: article.description,
+  },
+};
+
+function formatDate(iso: string) {
+  return new Date(`${iso}T00:00:00Z`).toLocaleDateString('en-US', {
+    year: 'numeric',
+    month: 'long',
+    day: 'numeric',
+    timeZone: 'UTC',
+  });
+}
+
+export default function ArticlePage() {
+  return (
+    <PageShell
+      eyebrow="SUEDE/DNA / ARTICLES"
+      title={article.title}
+      meta={`${formatDate(article.date)} · ${article.readTime.toUpperCase()} READ`}
+      backHref="/articles"
+      backLabel="← ALL ARTICLES"
+    >
+      <DocSection heading="THREE YEARS, THREE BANDS">
+        <p>
+          The archive holds three documented rigs for Eric Clapton, filed under three different
+          band names because that is how the source material labeled them:{' '}
+          <SuedeLink href="/eric-clapton-the-yardbirds">the Yardbirds, 1964</SuedeLink>,{' '}
+          <SuedeLink href="/eric-clapton-bluesbreakers">John Mayall&apos;s Bluesbreakers, 1966</SuedeLink>,
+          and <SuedeLink href="/eric-clapton-cream">Cream, 1967</SuedeLink>. Three years, three
+          rigs, one guitarist. It is a small sample by any standard: a handful of documented
+          setups out of a career that has run more than six decades. But it happens to fall
+          across exactly the stretch where Clapton&apos;s reputation as a guitarist was built,
+          which makes it a useful case study in how a signal chain accumulates a personality over
+          time rather than arriving with one.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+
+      <DocSection heading="1964: THE PURIST">
+        <p>
+          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.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          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
+          &ldquo;For Your Love,&rdquo; a decision that reads, in hindsight, like an early
+          declaration about what kind of guitarist he intended to be.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+
+      <DocSection heading="1966: THE SOUND THAT DEFINED A GENRE">
+        <p>
+          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 &ldquo;Beano&rdquo;
+          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.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          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.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+
+      <DocSection heading="1967: LOUDER ROOMS, A NEW GUITAR, A WAH">
+        <p>
+          By the time the archive&apos;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&apos;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.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          A wah pedal enters the picture around this era too, most audibly on tracks like
+          &ldquo;Tales of Brave Ulysses.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;For Your Love&rdquo;
+          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&apos;s life actually looks like when you track the gear instead of the
+          reputation.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+
+      <DocSection heading="WHAT THE SEQUENCE SHOWS">
+        <p>
+          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{' '}
+          <SuedeLink href="/eric-clapton-cream">DNA chain on an artist page</SuedeLink> is built to
+          do, they read as a chronology. Plainer gear and stricter genre commitments give way to
+          louder rooms, a different guitar, and the first pedal in the chain. None of that is a
+          single decision. It is accretion: one band, one room size, one new opportunity at a
+          time. And that accretion is closer to what &ldquo;a guitarist&apos;s tone&rdquo; usually
+          means than any single rig photo could be on its own.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          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{' '}
+          <SuedeLink href="/docs/sourcing-and-verification">Sourcing and Verification</SuedeLink>.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+    </PageShell>
+  );
+}

src/app/articles/page.tsx

@@ -0,0 +1,86 @@
+import type { Metadata } from 'next';
+import Link from 'next/link';
+import { ARTICLES } from '@/lib/articles-content';
+
+const SITE_URL = process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL ?? 'https://dna.suedeai.ai';
+
+export const metadata: Metadata = {
+  title: 'Articles',
+  description:
+    'Essays on rig history, tone genealogy, and the craft of the signal chain — from the Suede DNA archive.',
+  alternates: { canonical: `${SITE_URL}/articles` },
+  openGraph: {
+    title: 'Articles — Suede DNA',
+    description:
+      'Essays on rig history, tone genealogy, and the craft of the signal chain — from the Suede DNA archive.',
+    url: `${SITE_URL}/articles`,
+    siteName: 'Suede DNA',
+    type: 'website',
+  },
+  twitter: {
+    card: 'summary_large_image',
+    title: 'Articles — Suede DNA',
+    description:
+      'Essays on rig history, tone genealogy, and the craft of the signal chain — from the Suede DNA archive.',
+  },
+};
+
+function formatDate(iso: string) {
+  return new Date(`${iso}T00:00:00Z`).toLocaleDateString('en-US', {
+    year: 'numeric',
+    month: 'long',
+    day: 'numeric',
+    timeZone: 'UTC',
+  });
+}
+
+export default function ArticlesIndexPage() {
+  return (
+    <main className="mx-auto max-w-[900px] px-6 py-24">
+      <p className="mono-label">SUEDE/DNA / ARTICLES</p>
+      <h1
+        className="font-[820] text-white mt-4"
+        style={{ fontSize: 'var(--text-section)', lineHeight: 1, letterSpacing: 'var(--tracking-tight)' }}
+      >
+        Articles.
+      </h1>
+      <p
+        className="mt-6 max-w-[640px] text-[color:var(--color-bone)] leading-relaxed"
+        style={{ fontSize: 'var(--text-body)' }}
+      >
+        Essays on rig history, tone genealogy, and the craft of the signal chain, written from
+        inside the archive.
+      </p>
+
+      <div className="mt-14 divide-y hairline">
+        {ARTICLES.map((article) => (
+          <Link
+            key={article.slug}
+            href={`/articles/${article.slug}`}
+            className="rig-interactive-card block py-8 first:pt-0"
+          >
+            <p className="mono-label">
+              {formatDate(article.date)} · {article.readTime.toUpperCase()} READ
+            </p>
+            <h2
+              className="mt-2 font-[820] text-white"
+              style={{ fontSize: 'clamp(1.4rem, 1rem + 1.4vw, 2rem)' }}
+            >
+              {article.title}
+            </h2>
+            <p className="mt-3 text-[color:var(--color-bone)] leading-relaxed max-w-[720px]">
+              {article.description}
+            </p>
+            <span className="rig-arrow mono-label mt-4 inline-block text-[color:var(--color-mute-readable)]">
+              READ →
+            </span>
+          </Link>
+        ))}
+      </div>
+
+      <Link href="/" className="inline-block mt-16 mono-label hover:text-[color:var(--color-signal)]">
+        ← BACK TO THE COMPILATION
+      </Link>
+    </main>
+  );
+}

src/app/articles/rig-archaeology-and-the-ear-trained-player/page.tsx

@@ -0,0 +1,145 @@
+import type { Metadata } from 'next';
+import { PageShell, DocSection, SuedeLink } from '@/components/docs/PageShell';
+import { getArticle } from '@/lib/articles-content';
+
+const SITE_URL = process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL ?? 'https://dna.suedeai.ai';
+const SLUG = 'rig-archaeology-and-the-ear-trained-player';
+const article = getArticle(SLUG)!;
+
+export const metadata: Metadata = {
+  title: article.title,
+  description: article.description,
+  alternates: { canonical: `${SITE_URL}/articles/${SLUG}` },
+  openGraph: {
+    title: `${article.title} — Suede DNA`,
+    description: article.description,
+    url: `${SITE_URL}/articles/${SLUG}`,
+    siteName: 'Suede DNA',
+    type: 'article',
+    publishedTime: article.date,
+  },
+  twitter: {
+    card: 'summary_large_image',
+    title: `${article.title} — Suede DNA`,
+    description: article.description,
+  },
+};
+
+function formatDate(iso: string) {
+  return new Date(`${iso}T00:00:00Z`).toLocaleDateString('en-US', {
+    year: 'numeric',
+    month: 'long',
+    day: 'numeric',
+    timeZone: 'UTC',
+  });
+}
+
+export default function ArticlePage() {
+  return (
+    <PageShell
+      eyebrow="SUEDE/DNA / ARTICLES"
+      title={article.title}
+      meta={`${formatDate(article.date)} · ${article.readTime.toUpperCase()} READ`}
+      backHref="/articles"
+      backLabel="← ALL ARTICLES"
+    >
+      <DocSection heading="THE PROBLEM WITH LEARNING BY EAR ALONE">
+        <p>
+          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.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+
+      <DocSection heading="WHAT GEAR KNOWLEDGE ACTUALLY CHANGES">
+        <p>
+          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.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+
+      <DocSection heading="WHERE IT BECOMES A TRAP">
+        <p>
+          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.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          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.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+
+      <DocSection heading="A PRACTICAL SEQUENCE">
+        <p>
+          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.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          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.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+
+      <DocSection heading="WHY THE YEAR MATTERS AS MUCH AS THE ARTIST">
+        <p>
+          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&apos;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.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+
+      <DocSection heading="A NOTE FOR PLAYERS ACTIVELY BUILDING THEIR EAR">
+        <p>
+          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{' '}
+          <SuedeLink href="https://strumly.suedeai.ai">Strumly</SuedeLink> built specifically around
+          working through material by ear. The archive can tell you what a player was holding. It
+          cannot tell you how they held it. That part is still yours to figure out.
+        </p>
+      </DocSection>
+    </PageShell>
+  );
+}