A Conversation with Joe Glaser

Joe Glaser has been repairing guitars professionally since the late 1970s, earning a reputation as one of the most respected—and innovative—figures in the instrument world. Based in Nashville, Glaser Instruments has become a somewhat behind-the-scenes hub for elite players, collectors, and builders, combining traditional repair expertise with cutting-edge tools and a deep respect for data.

We sat down with Joe for a wide-ranging conversation about the evolution of guitar repair, the myth of untouched instruments, the ethics of restoration, and why science is starting to play a much bigger role in how we understand vintage guitars today.

Getting Started in Guitar Repair

“I started doing repair in the late ’70s,” Joe says. “Maybe 1976. And there was no YouTube, no internet, not really any books—no essential literature. So, the only access to knowing what to do was either talking to somebody or looking at existing work and trying to figure out what you were seeing." He describes the field as both incredibly small and unusually intense. “If there were 300 guitar repair people in the world, I’d be surprised. Maybe 60. But to be one, you had to already be obsessed. An average guy didn’t just decide, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go to lutherie school and get rich.’ That didn’t exist. You had to be obsessed.”

That obsession, he says, came with a certain mindset. “No great art ever came out of well-adjusted, normal people. So you had to have some sort of burr in your sock.”

The small size of the field had its benefits. “The barrier to entry was high. If you got over it, you were probably skilled—or at least really curious. The guys who were good looked deeply into things. They studied violin work, acoustics, materials, and the physics of sound. You couldn’t just follow instructions—you had to figure things out.”

That curiosity was essential. Joe makes the point that even back then, when guitar repair was a fledgling industry, many repairs were simply not good enough. “You see guitars where someone put a door hinge on the back of a pre-war Martin to fix a headstock obviously assuming it is the best workable solution. That’s what happens when you don’t have curiosity—and you don’t set the bar very high.”

As the quality of repairs improved across the industry, Joe began challenging himself to see just how closely he could replicate a vintage appearance in restoration pieces.

Early in his career, Joe refinished a two-tone sunburst Stratocaster for a client. “I redid the body—not the neck—and I aged it just to see if I could make it look right,” he says.

The client later brought the guitar to a show, where two dealers handed it to George Gruhn for evaluation. “George looked it over,” Joe says, “and right there, someone else bought it thinking it was original. And I thought, oh no. I wasn’t even that good yet, and someone bought it.”

That moment stuck with him. “If I could do that, other people could surely do it better. Some of these guys were coming along that were incredibly precise and meticulous about how they aged instruments. I mean, look at the violin world! And that meant the whole vintage guitar market was going to be at risk at a certain point.”

He realized: refinishing was becoming a science. “If historic restoration is a science, then authentication ought to be a science too. It can’t just be, ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this.’ That whole ‘I can tell’ confidence? It’s based on intuition, not proof.”

Restoration, Risk, and the Call for Accountability

Joe saw the replica problem coming early. “At one of the ASIA conventions in the late ’80s, I proposed a panel on marking restorations. I figured, we’re at a point now where this stuff is getting real good. If we don’t draw a line now, we’re going to be looking back in twenty years trying to figure out what the hell we did, who did it, and why.”

He invited a panel of high-profile builders and finishers: Dan Erlewine, Tom Murphy, Seymour Duncan, and others. “I brought it up—said we need to start marking things. UV signatures, traceable identifiers, something. The pushback was both immediate and painful.”

“One guy said, ‘My client pays me $5,000 more not to mark a restoration.’ Another said, ‘Don’t worry, I leave a secret mark on every guitar. I’ll always be able to recognize it.’ And I said, great—unless you’re ready to fly out to every guitar store in the world, that’s not going to help anyone.”

The idea didn’t take. “Looking back, I wish we’d pushed harder. If we’d set a standard then, we’d all be better off now. But people weren’t ready. And the truth is, it came down to money.”

More recently, Joe recalled a conversation with a collector/repairman at a show in Bologna, Italy, talking about custom color Fender guitars.

“This guy—really nice guy—tells me, ‘No one can fool me. I know where all the little nail holes are. I know the secrets.’ He was convinced he couldn’t be tricked.”

Joe asked him a simple question.

“I said, ‘Okay. You do great refinishing work, right?’ He said yes. I said, ‘And you know how to match all the dimensions, all the aging, all the hardware?’ He said yes again. So I said, ‘All right. Say you make the perfect replica. You do everything right. Then, the next day, you hit your head and experience amnesia. Someone brings that guitar back to your shop—how would you know it wasn’t real?’”

Joe laughs, shaking his head. “He just stared at me. He had no answer.”

Ethics, Science, and the Plek Machine

Joe grew up in the Bay Area in a family steeped in medicine. “My mother and father were both physicians,” he says. “My dad spent a lot of his career raising money for medical research and working at foundations. So I grew up hearing about the fight between ethics and loose ethical behavior. I lost count of how many nights he came home frustrated, saying, ‘Goddammit, so-and-so is trying to fudge stuff, or whatever.’”

That environment made a deep impression. “I’m not a model citizen, but I do believe that the difference between right and wrong is just black and white if you perceive it.”

Joe talked about his time working at Stanford University and how that would later shape his guitar repair philosophy.

“I worked in the basement of the Stanford Medical School, soldering for this guy who was doing voice recognition software—in, like, 1970. It was wild,” Joe says. “I didn’t know much, but I could solder. What I learned down there was what smart really is—and what actual research looks like. Not just, ‘I think this, therefore it’s true,’ but actual criteria. You had to back things up. It was my first real exposure to how science gets done when it’s not bullshit.”

This early exposure to how technology and science can drive progress laid the foundation for Joe’s ongoing commitment to using innovation as a tool to enhance his craft, not replace it. A clear example of this mindset is his embrace of the Plek machine—a precision, computer-controlled tool that scans and levels guitar frets with micron-level accuracy to ensure exceptional playability and lasting accountability.

Joe was among the first to adopt the Plek in the early 2000s, a bold and, at the time, controversial decision. While many in the industry viewed the machine with suspicion, fearing it might diminish the role of skilled hands, Joe saw it as a way to refine and validate his work through data and precision.

“People freaked out,” he says. “Other shops were like, ‘I’m not letting a computer touch a guitar.’ They thought it was going to replace them. They thought it was cold and mechanical. But I didn’t see it that way at all.”

For Joe, it wasn’t about replacing human judgment—it was about testing and reinforcing it. “I looked at it and thought, this is just another set of eyes. A really precise set of eyes. It was like getting an X-ray before setting a bone.”

He put the machine to the test, quietly scanning guitars from top Nashville session players without telling them what he’d done. “I didn’t want to preload anybody. Just gave the guitars back and waited to hear what they said. The response was overwhelming. They all came back and said, ‘What the hell did you do to this thing? It plays amazing.’”

The machine gave him a kind of proof that was hard to argue with. “You’d scan a neck and realize—this isn’t just a feel thing. There’s a physics issue. And strings don’t lie. They’re simple, but they’ll find the high spots, the low spots. You can’t BS your way out of that.”

Still, the broader industry was slow to come around. “It was three or four years of total pushback,” he says. “Some of the well known service providers, feeling that their domain of expertise and magic power was about to vanish, circled their wagons, made up mythical stories of failure incidents, and tried to convince themselves and their customers that this was an uncontrollable technology. In the end, because truth typically prevails, most of the vocal PLEK deniers flipped and now talk about how they supported it all along and were ‘Only waiting til the bugs were worked out.’” People began to change their minds—not because of marketing, but because of experience. “Once people used it—once they had their own guitar scanned and saw the results—it was over. That’s what changed things. Not arguments. Just results.”

To Joe, that story sounds familiar.

“It’s the same with Vintage Verified,” he says. “You guys are doing what we couldn’t do 20 years ago. You’re bringing in real tools—from forensics, from art conservation, from aerospace—and applying them to guitars. And it’s not about replacing experience. It’s about supporting it.”

He shrugs. “If the data says the finish on an instrument wasn’t available until 50 years after the instrument was originally built—that’s not a vibe. That’s a fact.”

The Myth of Untouched Instruments

Joe feels that these new technologies have the possibility to reshape how people view vintage guitars.

“There’s this whole obsession with originality,” Joe says. “People want to believe a guitar is exactly as it left the factory in 1959, 1935, or whatever.”

But from decades of hands-on work, he knows that belief rarely matches reality. “Most of the guitars that we revere—and we’ve always thought were original—aren’t,” he says. “They’ve got… as you guys are finding out, they’ve got some little area of touch-up, a crack repair, etc.”

That doesn’t mean people have been deceptive, he says—it just means we haven’t had the tools to know better. “Some of it’s totally impossible to detect, unless you look at it with chemical analysis.”

Other industries, he notes, have already moved past this fantasy. “The violin world’s gotten over this. There are no great violins that haven’t been played… There’s, what, one Stradivarius that’s basically original?

He pauses, then grins. “You don’t get married and say, ‘I only want to marry somebody who’s had no work done to their teeth.’ It’s just not real.”

At this point in the conversation, Joe expands on the pressures that come with the vintage market.

“I’ve been working on vintage guitars for 50 years, and I know I’ve been fooled more than once. That’s just the ones I know about—there are surely others I haven’t picked up on. The vintage instrument business makes people act like they’re 100% sure, because if they admit mistakes, they look bad or risk damage to their reputation. Of course, it’s not easy to say you might have been wrong, and no one really wants to hear that said. In a sense, I was lucky—I never had to face that pressure, because I wasn’t in the business of authenticating or selling. But dealers are put in that position every day, and it’s a tough line to walk.”

That expectation, he says, creates pressure and distortion in the market. “We hold guitars to this weird standard, like the only good ones are the ones no one ever touched. But the truth is, most of these guitars were played. They were loved. They were used. They had the tuners changed. They were refretted. They lived lives.”

Joe is clear-eyed about the road ahead. “If someone’s putting serious money into a guitar, they deserve to know what they’re buying. Not everyone wants to know—but that’s not your fault. That’s on them.”

“In the art world, or with jewelry and cars, collectors have always been secretive—for a lot of reasons,” Joe says. “Part of it is security. Part of it is market control. But also, if something stays secret, it can’t be challenged. That’s the ostrich effect… keep your head in the sand and hope no one looks too closely.

“But secrets only hold until a guitar changes hands. Then the narrative has to be preserved—like, ‘The neck’s never been off this Strat, so don’t take it off.’ Or maybe it gets passed to someone naive, and a new ‘truth’ gets established. Wishful thinking only lasts so long.

“A dealer buddy of mine says, ‘Is it original? I’d like to think so.’ But once you’re selling—in a world where we now have empirical authentication, anything that isn’t authenticated becomes a risk. For the buyer and the seller.”

Joe believes the standard is shifting. “At some point, a six-figure guitar is going to come with a scan, a paper trail, like a Carfax for a ’59 Burst. That’s where we’re headed and, if there is nothing to hide, it absolutely should be.”

Still, he’s not nostalgic for the old ways. “This industry is young. It’s only 60 or 70 years old. We’re still figuring it out. But in the art world, they’ve already learned this stuff. They document everything. We’re just catching up.”

And that obsession with “clean” instruments? It’ll change too. “There is such a thing as an untouched guitar—but most of them aren’t. Most have been repaired or modified in some way. And that’s okay. Think about it: there are still the same number of guitars, the valuation just shifts a bit away from virginity and a little closer to Story. It’s not about whether something’s ever been worked on—it’s about knowing how, when, and why. That’s what Vintage Verified is trying to preserve: the truth.”

Secrets, Risk, and the Future of Authentication

Joe believes authentication should be a standard part of collecting. “People can avoid the truth for a while, but eventually everything gets sold. And when that happens, you want your facts straight.”

He recalls that while many well-known techs initially resisted the Plek most of them came around once they saw the results. “That’s the pattern—we resist, then adapt. Science doesn’t replace experience; it supports it. That’s what authentication does too.”

He closes with a comparison: “You can ignore a medical issue, read some forums, and hope for the best. Or you can get a real test. In guitars, like in art or antiques, the stakes are high. And when they are, real knowledge is worth the trouble.”