STRING AUTHORITY

The permanent record for guitars, their stories, and the people who document them.

String Authority is an early-stage public research project exploring a missing infrastructure layer in the guitar ecosystem: how instruments are identified, documented, and remembered over time. The writing below reflects active thinking around that problem, alongside a working preview of the system being built.

Latest Articles

12/25/25: How Public Documentation Recovers Stolen Guitars

What happens when instruments become visible enough that a crowd can do what databases cannot.

12/11/25: Greeny: When Provenance Works

Most "famous" guitars trade on mythology and a single murky photograph. Greeny is different.

12/11/25: The Lore Layer

A verifiable, digital record of an instrument's cultural history that ensures provenance survives market transactions.

Key ideas behind String Authority

Historic auctions can reset price expectations for an entire era of guitars, not just the instruments in the sale.
For collector-grade instruments, the story often becomes as important as originality or specifications.
Provenance is fragile; without structure, details about ownership and modifications are usually lost within one or two ownership changes.
The people who document guitars — reviewers, historians, luthiers — deserve permanent attribution for their expertise.
Expertise disappears when people retire, sell their shops, or move on. The system should capture what they know before it's lost.

Help shape the standard

We're building infrastructure for how guitar knowledge survives.
That requires input from the people who live it: collectors, dealers, builders, luthiers, content creators, photographers, and historians.

We're conducting 20-minute conversations to understand your world.

What you track
What you wish existed
What breaks
Your expertise shapes what this becomes.

Connect with us Learn how you can contribute →

No pitch. No spam. Just a conversation about guitars and the systems that should exist around them.

We're currently interviewing collectors, dealers, and experts to shape the registry. Tell us about your guitar story.

About String Authority

String Authority is a project by Mariano Rozanski, a software engineer and product leader building tools for guitar provenance, lore, and documentation. Guitar Times is the weekly news digest of String Authority, curating important stories, auctions, and releases from across the guitar world.