Jeff Wells Joins Gearcheck as Advisor

We're pleased to welcome Jeff Wells, founder and curator of the Austin-Marie Collection and a longtime investment professional based in San Anselmo, California, as an advisor to Gearcheck.

Jeff brings a rare combination of classical performance training, deep scholarship in early European guitar history, and decades of professional experience in financial markets. He began studying classical guitar at age 12, earned a master's degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and was accepted into the PhD program at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University to study with the renowned teacher Aaron Shearer. Though he ultimately pursued a different path, he continued performing and recording for years and remains an active classical player.

In finance, Jeff has more than four decades of experience focused on fixed-income markets. He is a Senior Vice President and portfolio manager at Stifel, where he specializes in municipal, corporate, and government bonds, municipal credit analysis (including bankruptcies and Chapter 9 proceedings), long-term economic and equity market cycles, and discretionary portfolio management for wealth management and retirement income strategies. His practical understanding of valuation, risk, market cycles, and long-term asset stewardship informs every aspect of his approach to high-value instruments.

As a collector, Jeff has spent roughly twenty years building the Austin-Marie Collection into one of the most coherent and significant private holdings of historical guitars spanning the early 17th century through the end of the 19th century. The collection of more than 60 instruments focuses on leading makers across Italy, France, Spain, the Austro-German regions, England, and early America — prioritizing quality, provenance, and the central line of guitar development. Notable examples include a 1652 Alexandre Voboam (one of only four known), a circa 1625 Matteo Sellas, the 1785 Giovanni Battista Fabricatore (among the earliest extant six-string guitars), the earliest known Louis Panormo, and an 1834 C.F. Martin from the maker's first year in America.

The Austin-Marie Collection has been the subject of a major illustrated book series (with photography by David Bishop and scholarly contributions guided by Christopher Page and James Westbrook), featured in museum and gallery presentations, and loaned extensively. Twelve instruments from the collection appeared in the Musical Instrument Museum's Stradivarius and the Golden Age of Violins and Guitars exhibition, and Jeff has presented and hosted period-performance events at venues including the Marin Art and Garden Center, Belvedere Tiburon Library, and the MIM itself. The collection continues to serve as a resource for scholarship and public discussion at symposiums and educational gatherings.

Jeff is currently developing a pricing index for European vintage guitars — an important contribution to a market that has long lacked systematic, historically grounded valuation tools comparable to those available for later American instruments.

For Gearcheck, Jeff's perspective is especially valuable. His dual expertise in classical performance and rigorous collecting strengthens our work on provenance documentation and instrument storytelling. His financial background and ongoing pricing-index project directly support the platform's valuation, insurance, and market-insight tools. And his experience making a coherent historical collection accessible to scholars, performers, and the public aligns closely with Gearcheck's mission of organizing fragmented records into lasting, trustworthy digital histories for artists, collectors, estates, and builders.

We're grateful to have him with us. Visit austinmarieguitar.com.

Welcome, Jeff.

Every record. Every story.