ASK CALIFORNIA GUITAR maker Ron Thorn how it feels to have departed the world-renowned Fender Custom Shop to make guitars on his own again, and he doesn't beat around the bush. "I'm back to doing what I love!" Thorn declares. "Building guitars completely from scratch, where I've made all the design choices, selected every board, chiseled every binding corner, soldered every joint. I didn't realize just how much I missed that until diving back into it refreshingly revitalized my passion for guitar building."
Just one look at the new Thorn Florentine Empirial reveals how that renewed passion has translated into a next-level, master-grade electric guitar. To catch the general drift, you might call it the love child of a '59 Les Paul and golden-era D'Angelico New Yorker, conceived on a night when a 1942 Epiphone Emperor and a 1960 Gibson Byrdland were tangling in the room above. That said, we can equally look to two of Thorn's more exalted pre-Fender models, the Artisan Florentine solidbody and Grantura semi-acoustic, to probe the roots of this stellar new creation. Either way you choose to look at it, the Florentine Empirial is a stunner.
Thorn's history with the Fender Musical Instrument Corporation extends through three decades. He was the Fender Custom Shop's sole supplier of custom inlay work from the mid '90s on, while earning a reputation as a highly respected customguitar maker in his own right. In 2018, FCS hired Thorn outright as a principal master builder, and he was named director of the Custom Shop a short time later.
Anyone who has laid hands on one of his guitars before, during or after Fender - will understand that Ron Thorn doesn't just make guitars; he crafts them to within an iota of perfection. Having played several in the past, and even owned a couple, I can attest that I have rarely been more impressed by the merging of talent, passion and innovation than by what I've found in his work.
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PRS
PREVIOUSLY PART OF PRS's Maryland-built guitar line, the SE NF3 was recently reissued in the company's offshore-produced SE series. The SE NF3 is so named for its Narrowfield Deep Dish (a.k.a. DD) \"S\" pickups. These unique PRS-design units have deeper bobbins to accommodate more windings and extra metal pieces between the magnets to yield a more powerful \"single-coil\" tone, while remaining noise-free because they are in fact humbuckers. A control set consisting of master volume, tone and a five-way blade switch allows the usual selections of bridge, middle and neck pickups by themselves and the neck-plus-middle and bridge-plus-middle combinations that allow the SE NF3 to veer into Strat-like territory in switch positions two and four.
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