We congratulate our Honorary Member Jeffrey Wells who gave a presentation in November associated with an exhibition entitled Stradivarius and the Golden Age of Violins and Guitars at the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix, Arizona. There were approximately seventy instruments on display in this year-long exhibition, twelve of which were on loan from Jeff’s own collection https://austinmarieguitars.com. The talk was given on Saturday and Sunday in the series of performances and presentations arranged for the opening week of the exhibition. Jeff traced the guitar’s history from the Renaissance four-course gittern to the consolidation of a six single string configuration in the nineteenth century and considered the 1581 Dias at the Royal College of Music in London which he compared to the instrument (a guitar or a vihuela?) of around 1590 at the MIM, attributed to Dias. With special reference to Amat, Jeff also considered the guitar’s role in leaving behind the ecclesiastical modes of medieval and Renaissance music theory and the emergence of a new kind of harmonic thinking. The four great makers of the seventeenth century five-course guitar were all reviewed, together with the transition from courses to single strings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Jeff noted Sanguino’s change from five to six courses and the way the Spanish were latecomers to the six-string arrangement (Augustine Caro’s 1803 instrument being the earliest example of six individual strings on a Spanish-made guitar). The talk closed in the first half of the nineteenth century when six strings became the standard disposition.