Pre-War Guitars Co.

The shop came together in 2014 when Wes Lambe and Ben Maschal joined forces in North Carolina, working from nearly opposite directions. Lambe had spent the previous two decades hand-building fan-fret seven- and eight-string guitars, baritone acoustics, tenor guitars, and the Moog Custom Shop guitars and lapsteels — his customer list already included David Crosby, Pat Metheny, Charlie Hunter, Sean Lennon, Trent Reznor, and Nels Cline. Maschal had taken a more conventional path: Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery in 2001, a Charlotte repair shop, then a stretch at Mandolin Central in Siler City alongside vintage-instrument guru Tony Williamson, studying the finest 1930s instruments at very close range. The two had different portfolios but a shared obsession with the magical tone of those 1930s guitars, and Pre-War was the bench where they'd put the obsession to work. Aging acoustics isn't a gimmick at Pre-War; it's structural to the sound. Lambe explains the spray-booth tradeoff plainly: when you're not aiming for a glassy showroom finish, you can shoot a much thinner coat of lacquer, then relieve the surface tension by checking it. The result is a top that breathes the way 80-year-old wood does — open, dry, settled — without waiting 80 years. Maschal puts the underlying philosophy in working-class terms borrowed from the era they're emulating: "Back in Nazareth in the '30s, these were instruments made by highly skilled people working fast — German carpenters who were working through the Great Depression and who had to get X number done that week or they were going back to the coal mine." Pre-War tries to capture that build-fast-but-build-right sensibility, not the modern luthier's instinct to fuss every detail until the instrument sounds, in Maschal's words, "as uptight as you were when you made it." Pre-War offers three distress levels. Level One ("New Old Stock") is collector-grade — thin aged-and-checked lacquer with only minimal handling marks, the look of a vintage guitar that spent its life in a case under a bed. Level Two ("Well Loved, Well Played") adds authentic play wear around the soundhole, light marks at the elbow, and some back wear — the way a guitar looks after decades of regular care. Level Three ("The Road Warrior") is the full sixty-years-on-tour treatment. None of the distressing touches anything that affects how the guitar plays; every instrument leaves the shop with a fresh neck-set, nut, saddle, re-fret, and setup. The customer roster — Tommy Emmanuel, Molly Tuttle, Jackson Browne, David Grier, Zac Brown, Brothers Osborne, the Steep Canyon Rangers, Joe Henry, Mipso, the Kruger Brothers, Watchhouse, and David Grisman — is a who's-who of contemporary acoustic players, and Pre-War notes on their website that no one in that list is a paid endorser. Lambe also co-owns Hybrid Guitars with jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter, building fan-fret hybrid jazz guitars on the side; Pre-War caps annual production around 150 instruments to keep the build queue measured but the wait reasonable.