About MONOGRAPH

A reference work about guitar hardware and method: what a thing is, what it is made of, what it was made from, and what the numbers actually mean.

820 catalogue entries · 107 makers

What MONOGRAPH is

MONOGRAPH is an independent, non-commercial reference for people who want to understand an instrument rather than be sold one. It gathers what can be verified about guitars, basses, amplifiers, effects and parts — model lineage, materials, construction, dimensions — and states it in a form that can be checked: plain sentences, plain tables, and a visible source for every claim.

The site is a set of static HTML files built by a scheduled pipeline. There is no database behind a page view, no account, no cookie wall, and no advertising.

What it is not

• Not a shop, and not a shopping guide. No prices, no stock, no availability, no affiliate links, no referral revenue.
• Not a review site. There are no ratings, no scores, no stars, and no verdicts on whether something is "worth it".
• Not a tablature or lyric site. Neither is collected or published, in any form.
• Not a manufacturer's site, and not affiliated with one — see the trademark notice.
• Not a forum or a comment platform. There is nothing to sign up for because there is nothing to sign into.

Editorial standard

1. Facts, not adjectives. A claim is either a number with a unit, a material, a construction detail, or a dated event. "Warm", "punchy" and "vintage-voiced" are not facts and are not used as though they were.
2. Sources are visible. Where a fact comes from an open dataset, the record it came from is named. Where it is adapted from an encyclopedia article, the article and revision are named. Where it is computed, the raw figure and the method are named.
3. Uncertainty is published, not hidden. If a specification is disputed, differs by production year, or exists only as a maker's claim, the entry says so rather than picking the tidier number.
4. No hype, no first person, no exclamation. The writing is declarative. Nothing is "game-changing", nothing is "must-have", and nothing is recommended for purchase.
5. Unknown is a valid value. A missing specification is marked missing. Nothing is inferred from a similar model, averaged between two sources, or filled in to make a table look complete.
6. Entries are added when verified, not when announced. A product that exists only as a press release does not get a page until there is something verifiable to put on it.
7. Corrections are published, not quietly applied. Where a correction changes the substance of an entry, the entry records that it was corrected.
8. Independence is absolute. No manufacturer has editorial input, no manufacturer can have a sourced fact removed, and no page has ever been paid for. The correction route below is open to everyone, including the manufacturer who dislikes what a page says.

How the pages are made

The site is generated from a structured dataset — partly ingested from open sources, partly written by hand — by a deterministic build. The same inputs always produce the same files, and every output file is content-hashed, so a change to a published page is a change to an input and nothing else. There is no template that invents text, and no generated prose in a specification field. The AI and automation policy sets out what is machine-generated, what is not, and how the difference is kept honest.

How to contribute a correction

Anyone may correct this site, and a correction from a reader carries the same weight as one from a manufacturer.

1. Find the address of the page you are correcting — it is in the address bar, and it is a flat .html file on this domain.
2. Quote the sentence or figure that is wrong. If a table row, name the row's first column.
3. Attach or link a source: a manual, the maker's own specification page, a dated catalogue, a photograph with a scale. First-hand measurement is accepted for physical dimensions if you say how it was measured.
4. Send it to corrections@myguitarnotes.com.

The outcome is one of three: corrected, qualified, or withdrawn — described in full on the correction policy. Reports are acknowledged, and the target is a decision within 7 days.

Credits

Open data from Wikidata (CC0), Wikimedia Commons (CC BY / CC BY-SA / public domain, per file), Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), and MusicBrainz (CC0). The obligations that come with those licences, and how each is discharged, are set out on licensing and attribution. The contributors to those projects are the reason a site like this can exist; the credit is theirs.