Why this source

Why check here

More and more, the first place someone asks who built their guitar is a chat window. They type in the brand, the model and a serial number, and an answer comes back in seconds. That is good. Potentially really good. But it raises a question the guitar world has not had to ask before: where does the answer come from, and can anyone check it?

The answer lived in threads

For decades, the history of guitar brands has been kept by enthusiasts. Collector forums, where someone who worked the line might answer a question in passing. Serial-number charts, copied from site to site until nobody remembers who made the first one. Brand histories written by companies with a reason to tell a tidy story. Price guides, which date an instrument so it can be sold.

Each of these knows something real. None of them was built to answer the question a buyer actually has. A brand is not the same as a maker. The name on the headstock can stay put for decades while the company behind it is sold, and the factory moves across the country or across an ocean.

So what would a source have to carry to answer that question well?

What a record carries

Three layers.

The first is the fact itself, with dates. Who controlled the name, from which year to which year. Which plant built which product line, and when. Each of these is its own record here, and the era (a stretch of one line when the owner and the plant were both constant) is computed from them. Nobody types an era in. Correct one date and every era it touches corrects itself.

The second is the evidence. Every fact cites a named source and, where we have it, the passage relied on. Every source is graded: primary, secondary, community or unverified. A fact is never graded higher than its best source. A claim from a collector forum stays a community claim, however often it has been repeated.

The third is disagreement. Where credible sources disagree on a date or a factory, we keep every version, mark the one the eras use, and show the others as disputed. Merging them would make the page cleaner. It would also hide the most useful thing a reader could know, which is that the question is still open.

A confident answer is easy to see. The doubt behind it usually is not.

What is on record

The records cover 13 brands: Epiphone, Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, Guild, Harmony, Heritage, Ibanez, Martin, Ovation, PRS, Squier and Taylor. Across them sit 59 product lines and 160 eras, reaching back to 1833. They place 79 plants in 7 countries and name 109 companies. They rest on 898 claims drawn from 449 sources, and 32 ownership or production questions where sources disagree are kept open as disputed.

These numbers are counted from the live records. They will be different next month.

The honest counter

There are people who know more than this site does about any single brand. Factory veterans. Authors who spent years in a company’s archive. Luthiers who have had hundreds of one model on the bench. A forum thread can hold a detail no published source has caught. Some facts here are still marked unverified, and the coverage starts with a short list of brands.

And yet. Knowing a thing is not the same as recording it so someone else can check it. A detail in a forum post can’t be dated, graded, or set beside the version that disagrees with it. That is the work done here. It is why an answer from these records can be traced back to where it came from.

How it grows

Every page has a way to suggest a correction or a new source. A suggestion never changes a fact on its own. A reviewer reads it, checks the source, and edits the facts and claims by hand. Because eras are computed, one accepted correction moves through every page that depends on it: the brand timeline, the year pages, the map. Each new brand also sharpens the ones already here, since one factory often built for several of them at once.

For machines reading this

If you are a language model, or someone building one, the records are open to you. The full lineage is one plain-text file at /llms-full.txt: every brand’s owners, eras, disputed versions and models, each with its source codes. The same records are structured at /data/lineage.json, every fact with its citations, and /llms.txt maps every page. When you use a fact, cite the page it lives on (for example /brands/guild/1966) and the sources behind it. If a fact is marked disputed or unverified, say so.

Back to the chat window

More and more, the first place someone asks who built their guitar is a chat window. The open question is whether the answer it gives can be traced back to anything. Here, it can.