“Peter Frampton messaged me, ‘I don’t understand, this sounds better than my ’39!’” How Gibson’s Murphy Lab acoustics fooled a seasoned guitar connoisseur

Pick up a Gibson Murphy Lab guitar, and you probably won’t be the first one to be fooled into thinking that it’s genuinely vintage.

Masterminded by the godfather of guitar relic’ing, Tom Murphy, each Murphy Lab model is a testament to the team’s skill in expertly aging guitars. After first introducing the Murphy methodology to electric guitars, the firm later segued into the acoustic guitar space and continued to hoodwink even the most seasoned guitar connoisseurs.

“Tom Murphy created his finishes to make the electrics feel and look like road-worn instruments. Then Gibson said, ‘Hey, let’s do some acoustics this way, too,’” senior product development manager Robi Johns tells Guitarist.

“That was about four years ago. My initial thought was, ‘I don’t know if people are looking for beat-up acoustics.’ But we released five models with light aging in 2023.”

Turns out, these test models managed to capture many a guitarist’s imagination...

Marcus King and Drew Smithers Play All The New Gibson Murphy Lab Acoustic Models - YouTube

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“Now, I hear from the connoisseur artists: ‘I was down in Nashville and I ran into this Murphy Lab Light Aged Jumbo, and I can’t sleep any more because I just gotta have it. But they said they couldn’t sell it because it’s a display model. Please can you pull some strings so I can buy it?’”

He continues, “Last year, we announced the Murphy Lab Heavy Aged Acoustic Collection, and they’re just starting to hit the market. I actually said to Tom, ‘Thank you, you’ve created a time machine for us.’”

One such guitarist who was fooled by the Murphy Lab models was Peter Frampton, who requested his own custom build. “He has a 1939 L-00. He wanted an L-00 from the Murphy Lab because he’s heard these things are magic. So I put together the design for him. We used a Light Aged finish.”

Frampton's response after trying out his brand new (yet heavily relic'd) guitar? “I have his message on my phone: ‘Robi, I don’t understand, this sounds better than my ’39.’ I knew that he was right.”

As Johns succinctly puts it, “With all of the elements that we’re doing today, we’re finding out that the overall effect is that they might sound even better than the ones from that era.”

For more about Gibson Murphy Lab, plus new interviews with Joe Bonamassa and Chris Buck, pick up your own copy of issue 526 of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.