Pre-War Guitars Co.
Double Aught - In Distress Lvl 2 Guitar
Listed at Sound Pure · Durham, NC · Dealer ref #66862-Used
Tracked on Tonewood Atlas — view the full listing at Sound Pure’s site.
Photos hot-linked from Sound Pure’s site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Adirondack Spruce
- Back / Sides
- Mahogany
- Neck
- Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- 00
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- No
- Condition
- Preowned
About Pre-War Guitars Co.
Pre-War Guitars Co. operates out of Roxboro, North Carolina, founded in 2014 by Wes Lambe and Ben Maschal. The shop builds vintage-inspired acoustics using 1930s Martin construction conventions — dovetail neck joints, hot hide glue, torrefied tops and bracing — with one deliberate modern concession in the adjustable truss rod. What sets Pre-War apart is the finish. Every instrument leaves with an ultra-thin checked nitrocellulose lacquer at one of three distressing levels, from minimal "case-kept" handling marks (Level 1) through honest play-wear (Level 2) up to a full road-warrior treatment (Level 3). The aging isn't theater — Lambe and Maschal argue, and the recordings back them up, that a thin checked finish lets the top vibrate freely and produces a drier, more open voice than a polished new guitar can manage. Annual production caps around 150 instruments. The customer list runs from Tommy Emmanuel, Molly Tuttle, and Jackson Browne to David Grier, Zac Brown, the Steep Canyon Rangers, and Andrew Marlin — none of them paid endorsers, which is the kind of detail Pre-War puts on their website.
About Sound Pure
Sound Pure sits at 808 Washington Street in downtown Durham, North Carolina — on the same block as the Durham Athletic Ball Park made famous by the Kevin Costner film Bull Durham. The shop is unusual in scope: three businesses run as one integrated facility — a boutique guitar gallery, a professional recording-equipment retailer, and a multi-room recording studio (with a ~1,000 square foot live room and a 7-foot Steinway grand). The three sides feed each other in a way no other dealer in the atlas matches: a buyer considering a serious acoustic can demo the instrument through a real, mic'd-up recording chain made up of the same high-end gear Sound Pure also sells. The boutique acoustic shelf is one of the deepest in the atlas, anchored by Bourgeois, Collings, and Boucher each at scale, with meaningful Goodall, Lowden, Santa Cruz, and Iris alongside, plus rotating Larrivée, Fairbanks, Huss & Dalton, McPherson, Petros, and Beneteau. Sold listings remain visible on the public storefront for an extended period, so the brand range that passes through Sound Pure over time is wider than any single-day snapshot suggests — Furch, Gallagher, Pre-War, Preston Thompson, Tom Bills, and Tom Ribbecke have all rotated through. Sound Pure is owner-operated by recording professionals who built the studio infrastructure themselves and use it daily, and that engineering-first orientation runs through the gear curation. For boutique-acoustic buyers who care how an instrument records as much as how it plays, Sound Pure's three-way integration is genuinely distinctive.
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