—David Menconi, Down on Copper line
Some years back, Woody Platt was at a festival with his former band Steep Canyon Rangers. Somebody was admiring Platt’s guitar – which looked weathered, old and broken-in enough to produce its rich sonic tone – and asked how old it was.
Platt laughed at the question, because the instrument was brand new. It had come from the Pre-War Guitars Co., a Hillsborough-based luthier that makes new guitars that look and sound decades old. Another North Carolina musician, Joe Newberry, calls them “The new old guitars of the future.”
“They’ve cracked the code on how to make new guitars sound like old guitars,” Platt says. “That’s what everybody longs for, that dry sound, and they have it right out of the box. You don’t even have to worry about them getting banged up because they already are!”
Co-owners Ben Maschal and Wes Lambe have been doing business as Pre-War Guitars for eight years, overseeing five employees in a workshop in Hillsborough “located conveniently behind the prison,” Lambe cracks. They also play in the band Crank Stallion, but making guitars is a more-than-full-time proposition.
Pre-War Guitars turns out about 200 instruments per year, each made almost entirely by hand. That’s an impressive amount of output, and yet they can barely keep up with demand.
“We have a two-year backlog of orders,” says Lambe, “so they do not sit around. Bob Taylor once wrote, ‘Guitars bad, money good.’ If you’ve got too many of them around, you’re not selling them fast enough.”
Word has gotten around enough for Pre-War Guitars to wind up in the hands of some big-name players, including Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Jackson Browne, bluegrass star Molly Tuttle and Kruger Brothers guitarist Uwe Kruger. Grammy-winning producer Joe Henry describes himself as “smitten” by the instruments.
There’s a Norman Blake Collection, a limited-edition model designed to honor the folk-guitar legend. And a growing number of prominent area musicians play Pre-Wars: Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz of Watchhouse, Chatham County Line’s Dave Wilson, and Joseph Terrell of Mipso.
“Mostly people come to us,” says Lambe. “They heard about us, or played one of our guitars somebody else has.”
Both proprietors are North Carolina natives who wound up in Orange County working in instrument repair and design when they began working together about a decade ago on projects including wood cabinets and instruments for the Asheville-based synthesizer company Moog. Eventually they transitioned out of repair work and into building new guitars that sound old, from scratch.
“The ‘pre-war’ thing is about capturing vibes,” says Maschal. “We’re not trying to make museum-grade replicas, but to get the vibe of an old guitar. By necessity, we use highly skilled people who can work quickly with hand tools. That’s how they’re made.”
As part of Pre-War’s design, the company offers a range of “Distress Levels” from “New Old Stock” to “The Road Warrior,” with special processes to age the wood enough to produce a mature sound. It’s a concept Maschal and Lambe hit on after they were hired to rebuild a 1937 Martin D-28 guitar.
“The owner brought it in pieces in a brown paper bag, splinters to put together,” says Lambe. “Reforming this thing gave us intimate knowledge of the inner workings of vintage instruments, which we kind of stumbled into. Guitars have to have the look to have the sound, the characteristic tonality. Since no one was making new versions, we decided to try making the old version. That was a nice hole in the marketplace to settle into.”
In terms of division of labor, Maschal gravitates toward cutting and carving while Lambe tends to do finishing work and assembly. Lambe is also the bookkeeper and Maschal the primary procurer of wood, “which involves cultivating relationships with shady people and pirates,” Maschal cracks. Their informal rule is that each of them has to work on every guitar before it leaves the workshop.
“It’s not done until we both have touched it,” says Maschal. “There have been rare instances where that didn’t happen, but it doesn’t feel right. The layperson would be surprised at how crude the process can look, how much of it is literally somebody using a sharp instrument or sandpaper.”
“We have 7,000 square feet and a couple hundred-thousand dollars worth of tools,” says Lambe, “and I spend seven-and-a-half hours a day using sandpaper on a stick.”
Hear Maschal and Lambe’s band Crank Stallion playing Aug. 16 at Hillsborough’s Yonder, or Sept. 12 at The Cave in Chapel Hill.
2019 Piedmont Laureate David Menconi’s latest book, “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music,” was published in 2023 by University of North Carolina Press
Whitley, M. (2024, August 1). Stars love Hillsborough’s pre-war Guitars Co., who make new guitars that look and sound decades old. Orange Co. Arts Commission. https://artsorange.org/stars-love-hillsboroughs-pre-war-guitars-co-who-make-new-guitars-that-look-and-sound-decades-old/
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