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 aand 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.
