"I LOVE A RESONANT GUITAR!"

Polyphia virtuoso Tim Henson goes unplugged - with a new nylon string signature

- Ellie Rogers

In recent years, Polyphia have established themselves as virtuosic disruptors of everything the music world thought it knew about genre classifications. Over the course of their first three albums, the Texas-based shredders have brought metal, trap, rock, funk, and a slew of other influences together to spectacular effect.

And now, having recently added nuevo flamenco to their list of stylistic conquests on Playing God - the band's first new song since 2019 and their first ever to feature nylon-string guitars - Polyphia's Tim Henson has not only gone unplugged, but he's taken his nonconformist approach straight into Ibanez's workshop to develop a bespoke new tool for the job. Cue the TOD10N: a prototype nylon-string signature model for Henson.

Angelic sonics collide with devilish aesthetics in this head-turningly modern electro-acoustic, but the event that sparked the whole creative process happened back in 2019, when Henson found himself standing in a pawn shop somewhere in Europe, holding a forgotten relic from Ibanez's catalogue: an electric-nylon hybrid called the SC500N. "I'd never seen anything like it before, so I texted Ibanez and was like, 'What the f*ck is this?"" he laughs. After a brief noodle, he realised he could play much of his Polyphia repertoire - bends excluded on the guitar, and decided to drop 800 bucks to liberate the curious late-90s design experiment and bring it home.