Founder
Joe Glaser
Founded Gearcheck to build a permanent, trusted record for the instruments that shape music history.
The Team
Building records that live on, together.
Co-Founder
Josh Rawlings
Co-founder focused on product, partnerships and bringing the record to builders, dealers and collectors.
Co-Founder, Head of Sales
Dustin Miller
Leads dealer and institutional relationships across the US and Europe.
Head of Technology
John Tafoya
Heads engineering and the platform's architecture, keeping the record secure, scalable and built to last.
Advisors
Guided by the people who know these instruments best.
Advisor
Dave Hinson
Dave Hinson brings more than five decades of hands-on experience with instruments that matter. He has been dealing and studying guitars independently since 1970, founded and continues to operate Killer Vintage Guitars (St. Louis and Dallas), and has served as a contributing editor and advisor to both the Vintage Guitar Price Guide and the Blue Book of Guitars since 1999. He works as an expert appraiser for Heritage Auctions, has appeared as a consultant and appraiser on Antiques Roadshow and Pawn Stars, and spent over a decade as “The Guitar Guy” on CBS Radio’s Overnight America. His background sits at the exact intersection of what Gearcheck was built for: deep historical knowledge, rigorous appraisal standards, and a practical understanding of how high-value instruments move through the real world — ownership records, condition, provenance, and market value.
Advisor
Matthew Zeller, PhD
Matthew Zeller, PhD, is Curator for Europe at the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix. An organologist, musicologist, and trained violin bow maker, he holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Duke University and a master’s degree specializing in musical instrument history from the University of South Dakota. His research centers on the violin family — Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivari — and he is a recognized leader in historical metrology and the use of ultraviolet fluorescence, X-ray, and CT scanning in organological research. At MIM he curated the major 2024–2025 exhibition Stradivarius and the Golden Age of Violins and Guitars, and he co-founded the Organology Study Group of the American Musicological Society. For Gearcheck, Matt’s expertise strengthens the platform’s core mission: treating high-value instruments as both living tools and cultural artifacts that deserve precise documentation, secure provenance records, and thoughtful storytelling.
Advisor
Jeff Wells
Jeff Wells is founder and curator of the Austin-Marie Collection, a longtime investment professional based in San Anselmo, California, and a trained classical guitarist. He earned a master’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and has more than four decades of experience in fixed-income markets as a Senior Vice President and portfolio manager at Stifel. As a collector, he has spent roughly twenty years building one of the most significant private holdings of historical guitars from the early 17th through the end of the 19th century. The Austin-Marie Collection has been featured in museum exhibitions and scholarly publications, including twelve instruments in MIM’s Stradivarius and the Golden Age of Violins and Guitars. Jeff is currently developing a pricing index for European vintage guitars, directly supporting Gearcheck’s valuation and market-insight tools.
Advisor
James Westbrook
Dr. James Westbrook is a distinguished British organologist and guitar historian who has spent decades advancing the serious study of the guitar as both a musical instrument and a material object. He lectures widely — including for the American Musical Instrument Society, the Guild of American Luthiers, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music — serves on the research staff at the University of Cambridge Music Faculty, and co-chairs the Cambridge Consortium for Guitar Research with Christopher Page. His work centers on the careful examination of construction, materials, makers, and the historical paths instruments take through time.
Advisor
Jim Messina
Jim Messina is a musician, songwriter, and producer whose work with Buffalo Springfield, Poco, and Loggins and Messina shaped the sound of American rock and country-rock. His decades of hands-on experience with historic instruments and the craft of recording inform Gearcheck's work with artists and collectors.
Advisor
Jason Verlinde
Jason Verlinde is publisher and co-founder of The Fretboard Journal. For more than twenty years he has built one of the most respected voices in guitar culture, prioritizing depth over hype and focusing on the builders, players, history, and communities that surround the instrument. Through the magazine, its podcasts (including The Truth About Vintage Amps), and the annual Fretboard Summit, he has championed careful storytelling, craftsmanship, and the lasting relationships people form with their instruments.
Advisor
Trevor Boone
Trevor Boone is the owner of Seattle's Emerald City Guitars, the shop his father founded in Pioneer Square in 1996. Under his leadership it has become one of the most respected high-end vintage guitar businesses in the country, dealing in original 1950s and 1960s Gibson Les Paul "Bursts" and rare Fenders while investing heavily in documenting the lives of the instruments it handles. A working musician himself, he approaches these guitars first as tools for making music and second as collectibles, building a more transparent, internet-native model for the vintage market.
Advisor
Gregg Miner
Gregg Miner is the widely recognized authority on the harp guitar and curator of the Miner Museum of Vintage, Exotic & Just Plain Unusual Musical Instruments. A collector, scholar, recording artist, and performer, his work sits at the intersection of rigorous historical research, hands-on instrument knowledge, and a lifelong passion for the stories these objects carry. He is best known for defining the modern organological categorization of the harp guitar family, creating and maintaining Harpguitars.net (the central online repository for the instrument's history, builders, players, and repertoire), founding the Harp Guitar Music label, and co-founding the non-profit Harp Guitar Foundation. His private collection—often referred to as the Miner Museum—spans hundreds of rare, hybrid, and historically significant plucked-string instruments, many of which he has restored, documented, and performed on across a series of recordings that introduce these instruments to wider audiences. A self-taught multi-instrumentalist who later studied classical and jazz guitar, Miner has spent decades hunting, researching, and preserving instruments that fall outside mainstream collecting categories. His approach prioritizes primary research, careful physical examination, and the careful reconstruction of provenance—exactly the kind of detailed, evidence-based work that turns scattered objects into coherent cultural records. He has lectured widely, contributed to reference works including The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, and curated major public exhibitions on the harp guitar. For Gearcheck, Miner's perspective strengthens our commitment to treating high-value and historically significant instruments as both living tools and cultural artifacts. His deep experience with documentation, historical measurement, condition analysis, and the patient recovery of instrument stories directly informs how we help collectors, artists, estates, and institutions create durable, verifiable digital records.
Advisor
Kerry Keane
Kerry Keane is one of the world's leading authorities on fine and historically significant musical instruments. A trained instrument maker and lifelong guitarist, he has spent more than four decades at the intersection of craftsmanship, scholarship, provenance, appraisal, and the international collecting market. After serving as Head of Musical Instruments at Skinner, he joined Christie's in 1999 as International Department Head and Specialist for Musical Instruments, where he continues today as a Consultant. Landmark sales under his guidance include the 2006 Antonio Stradivari 'Hammer' violin ($3.544 million), the 2019 David Gilmour Guitar Collection ($21.5 million, then the highest musical-instrument sale in history), and the 2026 Jim Irsay Collection (approximately $94.5 million, setting 28 world records). As a USPAP Certified Appraiser and longtime Antiques Roadshow specialist, he brings deep expertise in determining what information matters when important instruments change hands. For Gearcheck, Keane's perspective will help shape the standards and tools that collectors, dealers, appraisers, builders, and institutions need to preserve instrument history for the future.
Advisor
Ty Danco
Ty Danco is a former fintech entrepreneur with experience in blockchain and data collection. A member of the 1980 and 1984 US Winter Olympic teams, he has served on several NGO boards, including the Amateur Athletic Union, the United States Olympic Foundation, and the American Legacy Foundation. He currently serves as chair of The Archtop Foundation, which enthusiastically uses Gearcheck to manage, organize and track its collection, which is lent out to musicians via its annual Brooklyn Guitar Feast event.
Advisor
Carly Smith
Carly Smith is the Curator at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky. With fifteen years of museum experience and a master's degree focused on Public History, Smith specializes in bluegrass music history, preservation, and exhibition design. Her primary research centers on bluegrass, old-time string music, North American folk, country music, and the acoustic instruments for the genres. Recently, Smith curated an exhibition highlighting Jerry Garcia's bluegrass career and catalog of banjos and other related instruments. For Gearcheck, Smith contributes knowledge of historical bluegrass instruments and a connection between museums and private collections, strengthening provenance.
Advisor
John Bohlinger
John Bohlinger is a Nashville multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, and writer. Born in Billings, Montana, he came up playing guitar and later pedal steel, mandolin, dobro, bass, and harmonica, then spent decades as a working sideman and television music director: house band on NBC's Nashville Star, music director for the CMT Music Awards (2009–2024), and similar chairs on GAC, USA Network, and PBS specials. Onstage and in the studio he has backed artists including Sheryl Crow, Miranda Lambert, Joe Walsh, Little Big Town, Kacey Musgraves, and the Beach Boys. Since 2013 he has been Premier Guitar's Nashville video correspondent—Rig Rundowns, review demos, and the back-page "Last Call" column on what it actually costs to keep instruments, gigs, and a living in the same room. He co-edited A Guitar and a Pen. His own collection is the working kit of a player who tours, records, and modifies: vintage pieces next to tools that have to survive a gig. He advises Gearcheck from that side of the bench—how a player actually documents a guitar between sessions, repairs, loans, and mods, and why the story only holds if the record is private, portable, and complete enough that you still know what you own when the notebook and the old hard drive are gone.
Advisor
Lillian Werbin
Lillian Werbin is CEO, president, and co-owner of Elderly Instruments in Lansing, Michigan, the roots-music retailer her father co-founded in 1972. She joined in 2014 after a PR degree at Western Michigan, worked every desk from warehouse to management, and now leads the shop while keeping its original brief: a community store that serves musicians and their instruments for a lifetime. Elderly was named America's Top Small Business in 2023. Werbin also serves on boards including Bluegrass Pride and the IBMA Foundation and co-directs Midwest Banjo Camp, Midwest Ukulele Camp, and The Banjo Gathering. She advises Gearcheck on how provenance and collection records should work in the real trade—buy, sell, trade, consign, appraise, and repair—so an instrument's story stays useful to shops, players, and collectors as it moves through a life, not only when it sits in a vault.
Advisor
Frederick W. Oster
Fred Oster is founder and co-owner of Vintage Instruments and Frederick W. Oster Fine Violins in Philadelphia, shops he established in 1974 and now runs with Catherine Jacobs in an 1882 mansion on the Avenue of the Arts. The rooms hold what he set out to sell from the start: old instruments he believed in—violin-family pieces, vintage guitars, banjos, mandolins, ukuleles, and earlier winds and brass—bought, sold, restored, and appraised under one roof. He came up in the folk boom on guitar, mandolin, and five-string banjo, then turned that habit into a shop after a short try at retail in North Jersey. He later headed Christie's New York musical-instruments department (1981–87), consulted for Sotheby's and Phillips, and has appraised on PBS's Antiques Roadshow since 1996. His standing in early American guitars, especially prewar and nineteenth-century Martins, is as much a matter of the instruments he has handled as of the records he keeps on them. He advises Gearcheck on authentication, appraisal, and how a lasting instrument record should read to dealers, auction houses, and collectors—the facts that travel with a violin or a Martin when it changes hands, and the difference between a story and a document that will stand.