Name

“The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” is one of the coolest books I’ve ever seen. It coins the term silience to describe the “brilliant artistry hidden all around you”. I thought that was a great name for a guitar.

But while designing the guitar, I found I kept calling it “silence” instead. Which, I decided, is a pretty great name for a guitar as well. Silence is easily the most important, yet overlooked, aspect of music. It’s the whitespace of audio.

Design

A cool thing about doing something for a long time, is you really develop a taste and style. The downside to that is you might find the things you truly want don’t exist. If the want grows large enough, you either put the work in and learn to create, or you settle in frustration.

For this guitar, I wanted to borrow design language for the upper horn of the Schecter 006. I remember seeing it in guitar magazines, probably circa 2000, and really digging it. It looked unique, but also classic and kinda weird. But then they disappeared. I think I later saw that they continued the model in Europe longer than the US.

I also wanted something really light, comfortable, balanced, progressive, and easy to use so I could play it live. I really hate letting loose at a show and accidentally changing the pickup selector. So I wanted this one permanently wired to a single, split-coil bridge humbucker, because that’s the best single setting to play live. I can still get gnarly heavy tones while also making clean sounds pop a bit better than a humbucker can do in series. Switches are for the studio.

Comfort means curves. And having an original design means no router templates here. I had to learn CAD and CNC. That ended up being a huge learning curve. But worth it. I am far from done.

I love it. Version 2 is going to be sick.