409 RIGS, 390 ARTISTS
Quick answers below. For the longer explanations, see What Suede DNA Is and Sourcing and Verification.
Where do the rig photos come from?
The guitargeek-archives collection on the Internet Archive, a community-maintained compendium of guitarist rig diagrams. Suede DNA does not photograph rigs itself; it normalizes and indexes that upstream archive. Full detail in Sourcing and Verification.
Why isn’t [artist] in the archive?
The archive documents 409 rigs from 390 artists: a sample of guitar history, not an exhaustive one. An artist’s absence reflects what the upstream collection happened to document, not a judgment about their significance.
Why does an artist only have one or two rigs when they had a decades-long career?
Coverage depends entirely on what was documented and preserved upstream. Some artists have a single photographed rig from one tour; others have several spread across years. The DNA chain on an artist page shows exactly what is documented. Nothing is extrapolated to fill gaps.
Does Suede DNA tell me the exact pedals and settings in a photo?
No. The site does not transcribe gear lists or signal chains from the images. Each rig is presented as the photograph, the year, the artist, and a link to the upstream source. Reading the actual gear out of a photo is left to you.
I found a wrong year, wrong artist, or broken image. How do I report it?
Message @aisuede on X or email info@suedeai.org. Corrections are applied through data/overrides.json without altering the underlying image.
Can I use a rig image from the archive?
Images remain the property of their original creators and are surfaced here in the same archival, citation-friendly spirit as the upstream archive.org collection. If you reference a rig elsewhere, credit the guitargeek-archives collection (and the original photographer or documenter where known). See the About page for full attribution language.
Is this an official or authorized source for any artist’s gear history?
No. Suede DNA is an independent compilation project, not affiliated with the artists, their labels, or their gear manufacturers.
How is the archive kept up to date?
The manifest is regenerated from the upstream source with a build script and gated by a schema-validation step before it ships. New rigs enter the archive when they enter the upstream collection and get normalized in a refresh.
Is there an API?
Not currently. The canonical dataset lives in data/rigs.json in the project’s open-source repository on GitHub.