Martin’s new D-28 Authentic 1937 Aged model Reminiscing about his first real guitar, Doc Watson once said, “That old Gibson J-35 I played was as good a guitar as I’ve ever played. It...
Martin’s new D-28 Authentic 1937 Aged model
Reminiscing about his first real guitar, Doc Watson once said, “That old Gibson J-35 I played was as good a guitar as I’ve ever played. It truly was. It was a good old well-used guitar with scratches and scuff marks on it. It had some ‘prestige,’ in other words.”
Originally meaning “illusion,” prestige was once a tool from a magician’s bag of tricks, not a luthier’s workshop. But prestige can be used to describe the increasingly popular process of relicing. Also known as distressing or aging, relicing is the practice of making instruments look old—even if they’re brand new.
But if you ask guitar maker Wayne Henderson to build you a copy of a 1937 Martin D-45—a Holy Grail guitar—you’d better not ask him to relic it. “To make it nice and pretty and then start beating it up?” asks Henderson, the subject of Allen St. John’s 2006 book Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument. “Some of them look pretty good and some look pretty bad...I’d have to have someone else do it.”
Henderson gets to the bottom of a fiery debate in the acoustic guitar world: to relic or not to relic? Building the past into an instrument means you need to look at history first.
“This relicing business has been around for a while. People have been antiquing violins for hundreds of years,” says Henderson in his thick Southern drawl. “I heard a story that [Niccolò] Paganini played a Stradivarius violin and he brought it to [19th-century French luthier Jean-Baptiste] Vuillaume to have repair work done. Vuillaume said it would take two weeks and Paganini reluctantly agreed. When he came back, Vuillaume had made an absolute copy of it. Paganini didn’t know