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When George Lowden started making guitars in 1973, there was no one in Ireland to train him. So he read the only manual he could find, drew a shape on a piece of paper, and started building. "Of course, it was out of proportion," he says almost 30 years later, sitting in the showroom of the Lowden guitar factory. "I saw that as soon as I’d finished the guitar. So I tweaked the design a little bit and kept on tweaking for the next three years until I’d gotten what I wanted: a guitar with a lot of projection and at the same time a lot of sweetness and subtlety to the tone it produced."

Seven years later, Lowden followed his O Series design with a tighter, punchier F Series for flatpickers and a smaller, lighter S Series. The bodies of all his instruments are typically made of cedar, walnut, and mahogany. More exotic options include koa, flamed maple, and Brazilian rosewood. All include Lowden’s most important design features: Sitka spruce soundboards made from wood that has been split, not sawn; two- or five-piece necks for greater stability; a hybrid bracing system that uses X-bracing as well as a classical fan pattern; scalloped braces that are stiffest at the center and more flexible at the ends; and separate saddles for bass and treble strings. They’re all part of Lowden’s objective: maximum strength and minimum weight.

With a tone that Lowden describes as "wilder and looser" than that of most American instruments, his guitars have become the perfect instrument for Irish trad musicians like Paul Brady and Donal Lunny, as well as a wide variety of other players, including Pierre Bensusan, Eric Clapton, Vince Gill, Alex de Grassi, and John Jennings. "You can hear that looseness, that freedom in the tone," says Lowden, "where the notes seem to flow together yet remain distinct at the same time."

Located in Newtonards, just ten miles east of Belfast, the Lowden Guitar Company completes 25–30 guitars each week. The work is largely done by hand, even the jobs like brace tapering, where Lowden sees no practical advantage over machine work. He calls the factory "typically Irish and very low-tech," with ordinary woodworking machines modified for guitar production and household objects providing solutions to complex problems. In one example, a bicycle inner tube is attached to a press to apply even pressure as the top and bottom of the guitar is glued to the sides.

After licensing his designs to a Japanese firm in the early ’80s, Lowden moved his factory back to Ireland in 1985, where it’s been ever since. (The U.S. contact address is Lowden Guitar Company,14950 F.A.A Boulevard, Fort Worth, TX 76155; [800] 872-5856; fax [817] 685-5699. To see the guitars at the Lowden Web site, go to www.lowdenguitars.com.) For the past ten years, he spent most of his time at home custom-building classical guitars sold under the name George Lowden. But now, at 47, he’s retaken control of Lowden Guitars and will once again be overseeing day-to-day production at the factory. He’s excited about the change and eager to introduce fresh ideas to the company’s world-class line of instruments. "Because I wasn’t trained by another luthier, I was naive enough to experiment right from the beginning," he explains. "And there’s a lot more that I can do. There’s a lot more that luthiers all over the world can do to develop lighter, stronger guitars. I think there’s a long way to go for all of us."

Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, March 1999 No. 75.

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