NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

West Coast luthier Ron Thorn took a trip to the Big Apple. He came back with his stunning new Florentine Empirial.

- DAVE HUNTER

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.