Vintage Verified is a laboratory in Nashville that analyzes vintage guitars and does nothing else with them. It doesn't buy them, sell them, or put a value on them. It looks at finishes, plastics, and hardware, compares what it finds against a reference collection, and reports what the materials are. Its chief science officer is Dr. Tom Tague, an analytical chemist who co-authored the scientific study of the Salvator Mundi, the most expensive painting ever sold. A lab with that kind of scientist turning its analysis on guitars is what got me reading about the art world in the first place.

The question I want to work through isn't whether the science works or not. I'll take the chemists' word on chemistry. It's what having a third party like that around changes about the market the rest of us make a living in. The art world can tell us something about that, because it went through this about fifteen years ago.

M. Knoedler & Company sold art in New York for 165 years. It opened in 1846 and closed in November 2011, and it closed because about forty of the paintings it had sold were fakes, painted in a garage in Queens and passed off as the work of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

I went in expecting to find a market that came apart. That isn't what happened.

The Knoedler buyers weren't careless, and the gallery wasn't some fly-by-night operation. It was one of the oldest and most respected in the country. Scholars examined these paintings. People who had spent their entire careers studying these artists put their names to them and said they were real. More than sixty came through between 1994 and 2009, and the Justice Department put the total that buyers paid at over $80 million.

In 2007 a hedge fund manager named Pierre Lagrange paid Knoedler $17 million for a Jackson Pollock. When he went to sell it a few years later, Christie's and Sotheby's both turned it down. So he hired a lab, and the lab found yellow pigment in the paint that nobody manufactured until around 1970. Pollock died in 1956. Knoedler closed its doors the day after Lagrange handed the gallery that report.

What The Art Market Did Next

Prices for those painters never crashed. Six months after Knoedler closed, a Rothko sold at Christie's for $86.9 million, the most anyone had ever paid for one.

What changed was underneath. For decades, if you owned a Warhol, you sent your photographs and your paperwork to a committee of scholars who ruled yes or no. In 2012 that committee shut down, and not because it was wrong; it shut down because it had spent more than $10 million fighting off about ten lawsuits from people who didn't like the answer. The Basquiat and Lichtenstein committees folded for the same reason. Saying no in public turned out to be a liability nobody wanted to carry.

What moved in behind them was equipment. In 2016 Sotheby's bought Orion Analytical, the small lab whose founder had done much of the forensic work on the Knoedler fakes, and put him in charge of a science department under its own roof.

That one is worth sitting with, because Sotheby's sells the things its lab now tests. It's somewhat of a conflict of interest, and the art trade swallowed it because the alternative was nobody testing anything at all. Hold onto that. I'll come back to it.

How Uncertainty Throttles a Market

In 1970 an economist named George Akerlof published a paper about used cars called "The Market for Lemons." When the seller knows more about quality than the buyer, and the buyer has no way to close that gap, the buyer stops paying for quality he can't confirm. He pays for the average instead. The people holding the best cars won't sell at an average price, so they leave, and the average drops again. Akerlof won a shared Nobel Prize for his work in 2001.

Now apply this to a guitar. A buyer who can't tell a real burst from a very good replica or refinish stops paying burst money. He offers what the average is worth, because the average is all he can safely assume. The guys holding the honest ones don't sell at that price, so the honest ones come off the market, and the average he's bidding against drops once again.

Why The Best Ones Have The Most To Lose

The cheap stuff sells no matter what. A '67 Telecaster with honest wear is a nine or ten thousand dollar guitar whether or not anybody ever runs a test on it. Doubt costs it a little. There was never a big premium sitting on top of it to lose in the first place.

The six-figure guitars are a different problem. What you're paying for there isn't the wood. It's the fact that it's right: original finish, untouched solder, the neck date and the pot codes pointing at the same few months.

Some of that is simple, and none of it is secret. Dating a guitar is public knowledge. The serial number and the date stamps put it in a year, and anyone willing to spend an evening with the charts can do it without asking a soul. That's the part I've written up for whoever wants it: how to read a Gibson serial number, aFender serial number, or a Martin serial number and find the year yourself.

Knowing the year is the easy part. Knowing the guitar is the job. A serial number will sit on a refinished body or a parts guitar as happily as it sits on an honest one, so the date tells you what the guitar is claiming and not whether the claim is true. Sorting out the rest, whether the finish is original, whether the solder's been messed with, whether those parts left the factory together, is what a good dealer spends years learning to see, and most of what that dealer is worth to you is in that judgment. But there's a line past which even a trained eye is guessing. What I can't do on my bench is tell you the chemical makeup of the finish, and I can't 100% prove what I'm seeing to a buyer three states away looking at a photograph and taking my word for it.

And the finish is where the price actually lives. Jon Roncolato at Vintage Verified put a number on it in a Premier Guitar article this January. A pre-color chart custom color Stratocaster, he said, "is probably a $250,000 Strat, assuming the finish is original. If the finish is, in fact, not legitimate, then potentially you're looking at a $20,000 Strat." He’s right, and that's a scary number for something that’s relatively easy to reproduce.

Two hundred and thirty thousand dollars, riding on paint. And the paint gets harder to call every year. Gruhn wrote in 2008 that the best refinishers were already doing work "fully equivalent in quality to anything done by the Fender factory," and that old refinishes "look more and more like old original finishes as the years go by." They haven't gotten worse at it since.

A $10,000 Mistake And A $500,000 One Are Different Animals

At ten thousand dollars, being wrong is a bad quarter. You eat it, you learn something, you go back to work. Most of us have.

At half a million it's a different category of event, and the numbers at the top of the market just keep climbing. A 1959 Les Paul Standard with nobody famous attached to it made $585,000 at Julien's in November 2023. This past March the Jim Irsay Collection sold more than $93 million worth of instruments at Christie's, including David Gilmour's Black Strat at $14.55 million. That same guitar made just under $4 million in 2019. That's what six years did to the top of this market.

Nobody has ever bothered to fake a Musicmaster. The work goes where the money is, which means the guitars under the most pressure are exactly the ones the eye alone was never going to settle.

A Report Sells The Guitar, Too

Most of the arguments that you hear for authentication are about catching fakes, but there's money in the other direction too. A guitar that's right but can't be proven right sells like a guitar that might be wrong. That's the aforementioned “lemons” problem from the buyer's side of the counter. He can't see the difference between real and fake himself, so he prices in the chance he's getting fooled, and the honest guitar takes the discount anyway. The seller loses that money for no reason except that nobody could close the gap between what he knows and what the buyer can check.

A report closes that gap. When I can hand a buyer an independent analysis of the finish and the hardware, the guitar stops being my word against his nerves. He isn't betting that I'm honest and right and didn't miss anything. He's got a third party with nothing to gain from the sale telling him the materials are what they look like. For a lot of buyers that's the whole distance between wanting the guitar and writing the check.

On top of that, the report doesn't expire when the deal closes. The analysis stays with the instrument, so the next buyer inherits the same confidence, and the guitar carries it every time it changes hands.

What kills a big deal is usually hesitation, not price. It's a buyer who wants the guitar and believes it's right, and still calls me back three times before he commits. (or doesn’t.) A good dealer's word settles a lot of that, and mine has settled plenty. But the buyer knows that I'm the one who gets paid when he says yes, so my word can only do so much. A lab has no stake in whether he buys, and that's exactly why their word can instill so much confidence.

This Won't Stay Rare

Nobody is proposing a registry, where every guitar gets measured, catalogued, and issued a number. That would be miserable and it wouldn't work, and it’s not what Vintage Verified is proposing. But "only the rarest guitars will ever need this" is the wrong read, and the art world is the tell. In the years since Knoedler, material analysis on a serious painting went from exotic to expected, and a major work that changes hands without it is now the exception.

Guitars are just earlier on the same path, and I’d gladly bet that third party authentication will soon be a standard and expected part of the industry, and won’t just be for the top end of the market either. To someone shopping at the top, 8-10 thousand dollars is a rounding error and a bad call is the cost of doing business. To a working musician who saved for two years to own one real vintage guitar, it's a fortune with no cushion under it. He has the least room to be wrong, and right now he's the one buying on faith. A finish analysis from Vintage Verified starts at around five hundred dollars, and set against a guitar that took two years to save for, that isn't a cost, it's cheap insurance.

The big online marketplaces have already shown that this model scales. eBay routes high dollar watches to an independent authenticator before it reaches the buyer, along with handbags, sneakers, and trading cards, and it has worked well enough that eBay keeps adding categories. Right now, Reverb will refund you if a guitar turns out wrong, which is a fight after the fact. A built in and ubiquitous third party authentication might be in the cards for them now that the tools to do it finally exist.

What A Report Can't Do

Julian Radcliffe of the Art Loss Register said this about paintings and it holds for guitars: "Often science will help determine what a picture is not, rather than what it is." Consistent with 1959 is not proof of 1959, and any lab that lets you hear the second thing is doing sales, not science.

A report tells you what the materials, if those materials are consistent with the purported year of manufacture, and if there is any evidence of modification or repair to the instrument. It has no opinion on price, on whether the neck suits you, or on whether you're overpaying.

Which brings back the thing I asked you to hold. All of this works as long as the lab stays out of the buying and selling. The day an authenticator starts trading in the instruments it authenticates, the reports turn into sales copy. The art world took that trade in 2016 because it didn't have a better option. We have one, which is to insist on the separation now, while it's early.

What Gruhn Said In 2008

He said it eighteen years ago and I don't think enough people did anything with it: "Just as an art collector would not buy a Van Gogh painting without a receipt and certificate of authenticity, one should not buy a vintage guitar at a high price without proper documentation and certification from the seller."

The equipment to run an analysis existed even back then, it just wasn't systematic, and it wasn't anything you could hand to a buyer. It is now, and it doesn't take a museum budget to get an analysis. So at what level of the market does it make sense? There's no one number. It's wherever being wrong would actually hurt, which sits in a different place for a collector than for someone buying the only vintage guitar he'll ever own. I've read these guitars for twelve years and I still want more than my own eyes on the ones that matter. Knoedler's buyers had better eyes than mine looking at those paintings, and it didn't save them. Perhaps all it would have taken was the kind of analysis nobody thought to run.

Joe Dampt is the owner and lead appraiser at Joe's Vintage Guitars in Mesa, Arizona, where he's bought and sold vintage instruments for over twelve years. He has no affiliation with Vintage Verified and no financial interest in its business.