Ragged Glory
WHEN THE FENDER Custom Shop unveiled the first two guitars in its Relic series at the 1995 winter NAMM convention, it pioneered an aesthetic that thoroughly permeated the high-end electric guitar-building world. Today, you almost have to specify that you would prefer the finish and hardware not to be distressed when you order a boutique axe.
Yet, when North Carolina luthiers Wes Lambe and Ben Maschal decided to launch Pre-War Guitars in 2014, nearly 20 years after Fender’s first steps, no one had introduced aging into the acoustic guitar-building space. “We’d never really seen anyone do it,” Maschal says. “So we decided, ‘Let’s do a
