A small book has pride of place on a stand in George Lowden’s office. It is called Making a Folk Guitar and it was written by the British luthier John Bailey during the revival of English folk music in the mid-1960s. The book may look unremarkable, but it has been the inspiration for master craftsman George Lowden since he began making guitars almost 50 years ago.
Lowden guitars are made for accomplished musicians who demand the perfect combination of design and sound. The company’s guitars are made meticulously by hand — and they are not cheap. This only adds to their cachet. They are the instrument of choice for many chart-topping musicians, including Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol and singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, who plays on a custom-built “Wee Lowden” designed to suit his distinctive playing style.
George Lowden likes pushing boundaries, and his experimentation with new shapes and innovative designs has made him one of the most respected and sought-after guitar makers in the world today. But he wears his success lightly. Soft-spoken and unassuming, Lowden still lives and works in County Down in his home country of Northern Ireland and is quietly proud that three of his children are now involved in the business.
Sheeran by Lowden
Signature Lowden guitars are produced in small numbers for the global market. There is always a waiting list and a top-of-the-range instrument can cost up to €20,000. Few young players could afford anything like this, and this has always gone against the grain for George Lowden, who would like to see more young people learning the instrument. The big challenge for him, however, was to work out how to produce a guitar that would cost less without compromising on the company’s traditional values.
Shooting the breeze with Ed Sheeran at a music festival in Texas a few years back, Lowden mentioned that he would like to make an entry-level guitar. This struck a chord with Sheeran, who expressed an interest in becoming involved if Lowden ever found a way to do it. Never a man to shy away from a challenge, George Lowden began looking at how to introduce some level of automation to reduce cost and significantly increase volume.
Ed Sheeran collaborated closely with the Lowden team from the beginning of the project and, following three intensive years of R&D, the Sheeran by Lowden range was launched in 2019. There are eight guitars in the new range and they cost between €700 and €1,000. “The idea of a signature guitar is not new. But the collaboration between Ed and the Lowden team went above and beyond existing partnerships to ensure that quality, playability, affordability and the celebrity factor were all equally balanced,” George Lowden says.
Sudden expansion
Producing the new range required a seismic shift in Lowden’s approach to guitar making, as it catapulted the company’s production volumes from under a thousand instruments a year to several thousand. This sudden expansion presented significant logistical and financial challenges for a business used to steady, organic growth. The company invested more than €2 million on research and development for the Sheeran project. It tripled the number of employees to 90 people, and its sales are also expected to triple over the next five years.
“It would be fair to say that the Sheeran project leapfrogged us into a pattern of growth that was much quicker than we were used to,” George Lowden says. “To make a range of more accessible guitars in Ireland required the introduction of far-reaching technology. We could have had the range made in the Far East, but they rely less on high-tech and more on low wages, so I didn’t want to go there. It would have been a lot easier, but I wanted to prove that it could be done here even though we have much higher production costs. To make that work meant developing new ways of doing things that have never been done before in guitar making.”
Lowden began looking around him for inspiration and found it in what might seem like an unusual place — the aerospace industry. Yet these two businesses have more in common than separates them. Specifically, both have precision as their starting point. Aerospace manufacturing offered the accuracy Lowden needed to make quality guitars at scale. Fortunately for the company, the expertise required to transfer the knowledge was readily available, as Northern Ireland has had a thriving aerospace industry for years.
Combining technologies
“The challenge for us was choosing the right technology and developing it for woodwork and guitars. That was the tricky bit,” Lowden says. “Most furniture today is made with computer-aided design and laser cutters. But if you go down the same road with musical instruments, you’re not necessarily going to do a good job because other criteria come into play. A musical instrument has to be capable of responding to a light touch. It has to be relaxed in structure. A piece of furniture doesn’t. It just has to be stable and look nice. A guitar has to be made in such a way that tensions and stresses are not built into it during the making process.”
George Lowden has always been interested in how computer-controlled machines work. About five years before the Sheeran project began, the company had started using a CNC (computer numerical control) machine to ensure absolute consistency with parts such as the bridge and the neck.
When Sheeran and Lowden decided to continue with the new range, they put together an interdisciplinary team of engineers and luthiers. Over a three-year period, they developed a customized production system that combined high-speed precision based on aerospace manufacturing with traditional handcrafting. The result is a proprietary and patent-pending technology with the capacity to produce between 30 and 40 Sheeran by Lowden guitars a day.
A changing role
The old and the new sit side by side in the Lowden workshop. Only three metres away from the high-tech production cell, a craftsman makes guitar struts by hand using a special Japanese chisel. Close by, there are two former aerospace engineers working the CAM and CAD systems.
“The assembly side of things is very high-tech in relation to the preparation and gluing of the parts,” George Lowden says. “We’re using vacuum a lot, as it’s a very gentle way of pressing parts together and, therefore, very suitable for guitar making. One of the key principles of musical-instrument making is to use as little pressure as possible to avoid introducing tension into the instrument.”
Now 69, George Lowden continues to be very hands-on in the business and has no plans to retire any time soon. However, he is currently mentoring the next generation of his family, who have already begun taking over from him. “I’m gradually changing my role and doing less of the business side of things,” he says. “I’m a craftsman and designer at heart, then a businessman and then a musician. You have to be a businessman because, if your business is good, it facilitates good guitar making and ongoing research and development. As far as being a musician … well, that comes way down the list because I’m still bad!”