GEORGE LOWDEN
George Lowden made his first guitar at the age of 10, way back in the summer of 1961. Now, the company he founded has placed instruments into the hands of some of the world’s most innovative players. We meet him to find out more
Alist of Lowden acoustic artists reads like a roll call of some of the finest instrumentalists and songwriters operating in music today: Thomas Leeb, Pierre Bensusan and Richard Thompson spring readily to mind, but there are, of course, many more.
We settled back for a chat with George about the current goings on at his Downpatrick workshop and the first topic to come up was the foremost burning issue among guitar makers at present, namely the new CITES restrictions on the import and export of rosewoods – one of the staple timbers for acoustic guitars worldwide.
“I actually think it’s important that we go down this road from the point of view of restricting the use of some of these woods that have been overused,” says George. “We should be trying to use a lot more woods from wider sources in order to spread the load – woods from temperate forests like walnut, for example. Using other woods that haven’t been used so much before now like chechen, which comes from Central America and is not restricted. Santos rosewood – well, it’s called ‘rosewood’ but actually it’s pau ferro… There are many, many more of them that are very good and produce very good results tonally.”
We mention that Lowden has a reputation for using many different tonewoods in its instruments, cocobolo being a case in point. “Cocobolo is restricted, but we also have a lot of other woods that we use. We’re still using a huge amount of walnut, which is in plentiful supply. We’re also experimenting with cherry – again, plentiful supply. We’re even experimenting with cherry for necks and it works very well and it’s also pretty stable and a good alternative to mahogany. Mahogany is another wood, like rosewood, that’s overused, so we’re trying to restrict our use of it and, who knows, maybe in the next two or three years we may be only using cherry for necks. The thing is, there’s the traditional expectation out there.”
Redefining Tradition
This could be the tallest hurdle to overcome: the fact that acoustic makers have been telling us for years that rosewood – Brazilian rosewood, in particular – is top dog when it comes to the back and sides in their instruments. “We’ve become known for using all kinds of unusual wood combinations,” George counters. “Ziricote back and sides, for example, and so it hasn’t been so hard for us. We’re still looking for new woods and we’re going to introduce even more. I think if you get those guitars on the wall of the shops, people start taking them down and playing them. They start to realise, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard of this wood before, but just listen to it.’”
Has George any favourite wood combinations? “One of my favourites is African blackwood for the back and sides. It’s very dense, but it’s a very fine texture and produces guitars that are very loud and the tone is very clear and defined. If you pair it up with a cedar top, the volume is incredible – really astounding. Then if you pair it up with a sinker redwood top, the sound becomes a little bit warmer and more complex than with the cedar. Those are two of my favourites at the moment.”
While we’re on the subject of using exotic wood combinations, one of Lowden’s current enterprises is the use of oak from Bushmills whiskey barrels. How did that come about? “We have only done, I believe, eight of them using Bushmills cask whiskey barrel wood in the past,” says George. “We decided to use the cask wood for the inlays and use bog oak – about 5,000 years old – for the back and sides, and then we’ve used sinker redwood for the top. Sinker redwood is wood that’s been lying under the bottom of a river for 150 years or whatever. So it has almost got to the point where it’s beginning to petrify. It’s light, but it’s very strong and stiff and the bog oak, of course, has some similar characteristics because it’s been lying in a bog for 5,000 years.
“The wood is almost black in colour, so very unusual – but you still get that ray figure that you see in oak so often. Tonally, it’s very warm. Give it a few months to loosen up and the tone just gets better and better. We finished the first one about four weeks ago and now it’s really started to
come out and it’s very strong, very loud, but extremely warm.”
What is the romance for using wood that has been submerged in liquid – river water or whiskey – for a long period of time? “I can only go on what people tell me, which is the mineralisation that takes place in the wood often gives those very dark colours, so when you’re looking at redwood, for example, these really dark streaks get into the wood from the mineralisation process, but also the leeching out of the resins and so on that takes place. Typically, for redwood, when you dry it out, it’s quite stiff and has that bell-like tap tone, so you have the expectation that when you tune the guitar up it’s going to be very similar. In my experience, I have not been disappointed. It just has that ability to vibrate maybe that bit more quickly because it’s stiffer, and also, because it’s light weight, the degree of excursion when you pluck the string gives it a little bit extra volume as well.
“But these are subtleties, it’s not like day and night in comparison to normal woods that haven’t been subjected to a hundred years under the water. But it is discernible.”
And bog oak is a good companion for the sinker redwood? “When it comes to oak that’s been down there for 5,000 years, it’s a similar process, because eventually that wood would become part of the rock strata, but I don’t know how many thousands of years that would take!”
Steady Growth
Are there any more exciting projects on the drawing board at present? “I can’t go into the details of what we’re considering at the moment, but I can say that one of the biggest challenges for us is that we don’t want to become a big company. We just want to become a good company and we want to keep on improving. That’s the priority, rather than a fast growth. We want to keep the growth very slow. So as we’re planning new models, maybe new ranges even, we keep that uppermost in our minds – that we want to grow at a sustainable rate. We just want to make things better. Listen to the players, listen to what they say to us and try to incorporate those ideas and those things that we can do better to the guitars.” www.lowdenguitars.com