PREMISE
Suede DNA is a compilation archive of guitarists' rigs. Each artist's chain of documented setups across the years is treated as a tonal genealogy, a literal signal chain stretched across time. The site is structured around two views: a discovery grid of the rigs in the archive, and per-artist pages presenting that artist's rigs as a chronological strand.
SOURCE
Photographs in this archive originate from the Guitar Geek archive item on the Internet Archive. Filenames follow artist_guitar_rig_year.ext; we parse this grammar at build time and curate display names through an overrides.json map.
METHOD
We do not interpret rig content from photos in v1. No gear-list reconstruction, no signal-chain transcription. Each rig is presented as the source documents it: a single archival photo, a year, an artist, and the path back to the upstream file. The compilation is the value, not the interpretation.
ATTRIBUTION
All images are credited to the Guitar Geek Archives and the Internet Archive item that hosts them. If you are a rights holder and want a photograph removed, or a name corrected, reach out on @aisuede on X or write to info@suedeai.ai.
BY
Compiled by Jason Colapietro (Johnny Suede), founder and CEO of Suede AI. He wrote The Signal Chain, a history of amplifiers, effects, and electric guitar tone, free at guitar.solutions. It grew out of his earlier self-taught instruction thread, The Guitar Without a Number, memoir-driven instruction for the self-taught guitarist, now published inside The Signal Chain rather than as a separate title. His books on AI, rights, and creator ownership: The Human Authenticity Layer, Proof as Infrastructure, and Stake Your Claim, all on Amazon. And The Screenshot: Why AI Recommends Your Competitors, and How to Fix It, eleven chapters on how answer engines decide who to name, and how to repair the pages the machines misread, free in full at seo.suedeai.ai.
COLOPHON
Built by Suede Labs for suede.social on Next.js 15, Tailwind v4, and Geist. The visual language follows the Suede Sonic Laboratory specification used across suedeai.ai and launch.suedeai.ai.