James Westbrook Joins Gearcheck as Advisor

We are pleased to welcome Dr. James Westbrook, the distinguished British organologist and guitar historian, as an advisor to Gearcheck.

Westbrook has spent decades advancing the serious study of the guitar as both a musical instrument and a material object. A graduate in music performance and a longtime tutor, he has lectured widely — including for the American Musical Instrument Society, the Guild of American Luthiers, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music — and serves on the research staff at the University of Cambridge Music Faculty. He co-chairs the Cambridge Consortium for Guitar Research with Christopher Page, a collaboration that has produced significant scholarship on the instrument's history and culture in Europe.

He is the author of Guitars through the Ages and The Century that Shaped the Guitar, co-author of The Complete Illustrated Book of the Acoustic Guitar, and most recently the author of the landmark study Guitar Making in Nineteenth-Century London: Louis Panormo and his Contemporaries. He also co-edited The Great Vogue for the Guitar in Western Europe and contributed to Peter Szego's Inventing the American Guitar: The Pre-Civil War Innovations of C.F. Martin and His Contemporaries. His writings and lectures for the Guild of American Luthiers have further extended his influence among makers and researchers.

His practical experience is equally deep. He has served as a specialist and consultant for major auction houses, including Bonhams and Brompton's, organized successful guitar sales and valuation days, and was consulted for the first Eric Clapton Guitar Auction at Christie's. In 2001 he established The Guitar Museum, focused on the nineteenth-century instrument, which has become a resource for students and scholars examining rare guitars and related manuscripts.

Welcome, James.

Westbrook's work centers on the careful examination of construction, materials, makers, and the historical paths instruments take through time. That perspective aligns closely with Gearcheck's purpose: creating organized, durable, and trustworthy records so that the provenance and stories of significant instruments can be preserved with integrity. His expertise strengthens our commitment to treating these objects as cultural artifacts whose histories deserve the same rigor applied in museums and scholarly research.

We are grateful to have him on the advisory board and look forward to the insight he brings.

Every record. Every story.