This site aims to provide a comprehensive, thorough, illustrated guide to Sonic Youth's guitars & other musical equipment. By no means is it complete, and it's certainly not perfect -- however, it is definitely the largest resource of its type and extensively researched to provide as much content as possible. In the process of creating this site, I scoured thru a heap of old guitar mags, examined dozens of live concert videos from 1983 to 2000, sifted thru countless photographs, witnessed many live shows, filled 2 notebooks, and basically dug up as much information as I could possibly find and pieced it all together in what I hope is an informative, and interesting website.

Navigation of this page is very simple -- click the name of the member whose gear you want to view, and from there you can click "view all guitars" to load their list of instruments in the left window. Amplifier/effects pedal and any additional instrument information is located right on the page. The default list to the left contains ALL of the guitars/basses featured on this site, and all lists are in alphabetical order. If you want a (roughly) chronological experience, start here and follow the arrows at the bottom of the page until you find yourself back at the start. I've also provided a special page dedicated solely to the equipment stolen in July 1999. Instruments whose titles are in red rather than white were stolen.

There used to be many guitars I could not identify, but through the years I've sorted most of them out with the help of reader input -- those that remain are prefixed by 'Unknown' and some vague descriptor. If you can identify any guitar that I have listed but not named, please feel free to contact me!

In the left column you will find details such as who used the guitar, what years they used it and what tunings/songs it was used on. This is basically just for those who are interested -- it gives you an idea of which guitars suited a particular tuning very well and which guitars shuffled thru different ones. I tried to be as accurate as possible, but remember -- if I didn't have the information, it's not there. I tried to avoid making any guesses or inferences, though there are a few here and there...

Below this info are the notes for each guitar. The first entry is my brief summary of the instrument, which is sometimes interesting but more often than not just me desperately trying to think of something to say. (!) Then there are the known specs and anything else I deemed compelling enough to include.

In the right column are the pictures, most of which you can click to open a larger version in a new window -- there's only a few guitars on this site that I could not provide photographs of. Those who've been visiting this site since it launched in 2002 will remember that many guitars used to be represented by lousy digicam pictures of my TV screen, rather than have no images at all. Over the years I've managed to replace most of these, and of course since the site launched I've started taking my own pictures of their equipment every couple of years. Because of this, PLEASE do not take photographs from this page -- I honestly worked long and hard to ensure this page was fully illustrated and it would upset me to see that undermined. I don't put watermarks or anything on the images (and to be honest I've probably swiped a couple from uncredited sources over the years), but I try hard to provide unique content for y'all and would appreciate that being respected.

If you have anything to contribute to this page, or would like to write me for whatever reason, please do so! I can be reached here. Enjoy the page!

...Chris Lawrence 03/11/02 [and generally agreed with 5 years later..] [and slightly touched up 3 years after that]