Workshop: Lowden Guitars
Our travels this month take us to Downpatrick in Northern Ireland and the workshops of George Lowden, who has been building high-quality, innovative acoustic guitars since 1974…
Deep at the heart of his company’s busy complex is George Lowden’s private workshop where he builds very special acoustic guitars – although, these days, time constraints mean the waiting list for a Lowden hand-built by the man himself is an optimistic two to three years. On our visit to this hallowed enclave we were shown some works in progress where rare woods were being combined into beautiful, singular instruments, the headstocks of which bear a single ‘L’ – the mark of the master.
Elsewhere, an array of skilled luthiers are busy at work attending to the various stages of building customers’ orders from Lowden’s extensive range of instruments. Some installing the logo into the headstocks, some attending to binding, others fretting, testing, stringing up and finessing before the guitars are cased, packaged and sent off to their new owners. Soon everyone will be moving to a freshly built larger facility nearby, but, for now, it’s business as usual.
During the afternoon, we manage to find a window in George Lowden’s hectic schedule to sit down and talk guitars…
How do you find time to implement new ideas and designs into the catalogue? “Every year, I take a design retreat somewhere and go away on my own for a week or 10 days to think up some new models or ideas that I’ve had during the course of the year. I put those down on paper, first of all, and then I come back here and make the prototypes or have the prototypes made. It’s like a new model testbed process.
“In the last couple of years, we have introduced some new woods, which don’t require much design work from me. When we introduce a new wood, it’s more like me specifying how that wood should be treated, the thickness of the wood and the model that it might be best to be used on. When it comes to other design features, like introducing a guitar where the neck is joined at the 12th fret rather than the 14th fret, there are a lot of changes that have to take place there. The bridge position has changed in relation to the soundbox, so you have to change the bracing and then we have to experiment with the position of the braces, as well as the way they’re carved. The first one of those that I designed about two years ago, I actually designed two different bracing systems for the same guitar and we made prototypes up using both systems, and then made a judgement call on which we considered to be the best.”
Sounds like an interesting process… “That process is incredibly interesting to me, because, when you play the new guitar, whether it be with a new wood or a new position for the bridge or new voicing or the bracing being changed, you will get a difference in tone and it’s often very subtle. For me, as a guitar maker, I’m not only relying on my own ears but I’m relying on the players’ ears as well and asking them for their viewpoints. When players come in to visit us we would ask them to test. The feedback on the 12th-fret neck joint models, which we’ve now done on the F, the S and the Wee, has been very good. It seems to produce a smoother, slightly warmer tone.”
“As a guitar maker, I’m not only relying on my own ears but the players’ ears as well and asking them for their viewpoints”
So you would be moving the bridge to the widest point on the soundboard? “Exactly. Of course, acoustically, that’s a good thing. You can imagine a speaker where the cone was off-centre. It wouldn’t be ideal. Although, there’s a thought. You could have a speaker with the cone being off-centre and it might actually work better.
Who knows? Test those things. It might produce treble response better because it was closer to one side and better bass response because it’s further away from the other side. Who knows?”
Have you found that customers are now requesting certain features that they weren’t a few years ago? If so, what seems to be popular? “When I design a new feature, people see it and if they really like it then they start requesting it. For example, I believe we were the first company – as in a company rather than an individual luthier – to introduce a soundbox bevel. People seem to really like that. It’s just a nice-looking feature but also it is more comfortable.
“As a generalisation, what I’ve noticed is that the smaller guitar, particularly the S, has become more sought after in the last few years. Of course, the F, being our mid-sized model, is still our most popular model I would say, but certainly the S is coming up there now. The Wee has been very steady now in demand, partly probably because of Ed [Sheeran], I would say.”
Would you say it’s also a result of more efficient sound reinforcement where acoustic amplifiers and smaller PA systems are concerned? “What I’ve discovered is if you’re designing a guitar, which is going to be used predominantly on stage with a mediumvolume PA system or even a very loud sound system, as in big stadiums and so on, you shouldn’t really make the guitar the same way as if you were making one to be used mostly for recording or mostly at home. Getting that balance right, knowing what the guitar is for, changing the voicing so the guitar doesn’t overreact when it’s being used through a loud PA but also allowing it to respond enough so that it still sounds very acoustic. It’s a bit of an art, but I’m continually experimenting with that.”
What sort of feedback do you typically get from artists on what they need from their instruments? “A certain player’s manager said to me one time, ‘The problem with your guitars, for stages, is that they’re just too good.’ I was thinking, ‘What does he mean by that?’ I went away and thought about it and realised what he meant and talked to the sound man involved and redesigned the voicing on our Wee Lowden, in this case, and the results were so much better on stage. Equally, in the studio, that same guitar wouldn’t be the ultimate. It would still work quite well, but it wouldn’t be the ultimate. If you’re looking for the ultimate then you’ve got to voice the two guitars for different purposes.”
In layman’s terms, what sorts of differences would they be in terms of build? “I reduced the depth of the body and I stiffened up the soundboard quite a lot, and the result was surprisingly good. I wasn’t expecting it to be as good as it was. I thought I had possibly overdone it. I suppose the ultimate is if all players could
“If you’re designing a guitar for stadiums, you shouldn’t make it the same way as for recording use”
afford to have different guitars for different purposes; they would be able to get a real benefit from that.”
Over the last few years we’ve seen the rise of percussive acoustic players. Have you found you get requests for specially reinforced sections of top and suchlike? “I’m not sure that anybody’s actually requested us to design or make a guitar a lot thicker so that it wouldn’t crack when it was being treated like a drum. In the case of Thomas Leeb, he actually did ask me to design a little guard, if you like, for part of the front of the soundboard, not so that it would protect the soundboard but rather so that he would be able to get a nice scratchy sound from it.”
What can you tell us about Jon Gomm’s signature model? “Jon’s very much a case in point – although I did design the signature model for him with a two-piece top with a different wood on the inside than on the outside. It seemed to work very well, because the way of laminating the two pieces together meant that there was extra strength and stiffness through the joint itself. Yes, it seemed to work.”
So it was laminated for strength? “Yes. Actually, laminating wood is not a bad thing. It used to be considered that solid wood is the way to go completely for everything. I’ve changed my mind about that a little bit in that, yes, it is the best way to go sound-wise. That’s a generalisation, but we also have to think about the conservation of really rare woods as well, and you do use an awful lot less wood if you use a laminated construction. We have to think about conserving rare wood stocks. In the case of Jon Gomm’s guitar, I used Sitka spruce on the outside and cedar on the inside. It was an interesting experiment and it seemed to work very well.”
What about other trends, like fan-fretting, for instance? “When I considered the fan-fret option, for instance – designing a fan-fret never having played one – I had the view that, ‘Gosh, you’d have to learn how to play the guitar all over again, because the places where you put your fingers are different.’ In fact, what surprised me most [about fan-frets] when I did finish the first one was the fact that, within a couple of minutes, even for a very bad player like me, you didn’t have to think about it.”
It’s easier to play an F barre chord, we find, because your finger is naturally slanted in line with the fret… “Exactly. It really does work. From the tonal point of view, I was very interested to see what it would do, because, in theory, having a longer string-length at the bass side would deepen the bass. With the slightly shorter scale on the treble side, you should actually get a slightly more bell-like treble response. In fact, in my opinion, that’s what happened with the fan-fret. There are benefits tone-wise, I believe.”
“Laminating wood is not a bad thing… I’ve changed my mind in that it is the best way to go sound-wise”
There seem to be various degrees of fanfretting, from the slight to the extreme… “That’s to do with where you set what you might call the parallel fret. If you place it at the 9th fret then what you’re going to get is a bridge that isn’t slanted quite so much but
you’re going to get a top nut that’s slanted a lot. If you move it to a position where the parallel fret is laid at, say, the 6th fret or the 5th fret, then the top nut is not slanted as much but the bridge is slanted a little bit more.
“That choice governs the playability of the guitar as well as the look, to some extent. If the top nut is slanted too much, it’s too difficult for people to play barre chords. If it’s not slanted at all then you either have to make the guitar not very fan fretted, ie, not a big difference in scale length between the bass and the treble, or you have to actually slant the bridge an awful lot. There are all those choices that have to be made.”
Do you feel that acoustic guitar design is still very much a work in progress? “I feel, personally, that there are advances we, as guitar makers, can make and there are experiments that we can carry out. I have a whole lot of ideas, for example, that I would like to test out and, over the next few years, God willing, hopefully I will be able to test them out. I think there are ways in which we can improve what we’ve already got.” www.lowdenguitars.com