George Lowden on 50 years of guitar making, pitching Ed Sheeran a guitar company, and the philosophy that still guides him
“To say it’s 50 years, I have to give myself a little pinch. Where have the 50 years gone? My goodness…”
It’s been a half century since George Lowden first started making guitars, and the man himself can’t seem to believe it. Over those five decades, Northern Ireland’s most famous guitar maker has had his share of triumphs and setbacks – and more than a few moments where someone made of less stern stuff would have given up and got themselves a proper boring job.
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If he had, however, he wouldn’t be where he is right now. With Lowden Guitars thriving as one of the world’s foremost boutique luthiers, his joint venture with one of the world’s biggest pop stars goes from strength to strength down the road. “There’s a whole lot of things that have happened which I never expected to happen,” he admits.
But while there’ll be plenty of time to muse on the unlikely story of how he got here, George isn’t here to reminisce. Here in the opening few bars of his seventh decade, and with that aforementioned half-century of guitar building under his belt, the man himself has decided that now is the right moment to step away as the head of the company that bares his name, and start to hand things over to the next generation.
“I think starting to hand things over is the right term,” he says rather pointedly. “I do find it hard to step back. I’m not the kind of person who can sit at home in slippers and read the paper – my mind is very active. But I do think that I don’t want to leave it too late.”
The ‘it’ he’s talking about is elevating his son Aaron to the role of managing director of Lowden, and allowing he and other son Daniel to put their own stamp on the brand while he’s still around to provide guidance and expertise.
“I’m very, very privileged to have to be in this position with two of my sons working in the business,” Lowden beams. “That’s amazing. Aaron, my middle son, the title managing director doesn’t really do him justice, because he’s a fantastic craftsman in his own right. And my other son, Daniel, is also a great craftsman. So I can look forward to them taking it on, after I hang my boots up if I ever do – which I probably won’t!
“I’m looking forward to spending more time with Aaron and Daniel in the workshops, when we get on to more of the guitar design stuff, because that’s something you have to learn by doing. So I’m looking forward to taking time to do that as soon as possible.”
George (left) and Andy Lowden (right). Image: Lowden Guitars
A Book And A Prayer
George will be handing over a business that has become a household name in guitar, with instruments sold all over the world and played by some of the world’s most famous musicians. It’s a far cry from when he started trying to make guitars in 1974 – with very little idea of how to go about it.
“All I had was a little tiny book, and no training in woodwork or anything,” he admits. “So my expectations were nothing, really. I just hoped that I would be able to make really, really, really good guitars – and I don’t know why! But I did have the little book by John Bailey, the English guitar maker, and that was what I used to give me an idea of what I was supposed to be doing.
“Back then in Ireland, there was really only myself and another chap called Nelson down in Dublin, and there were, I think, a couple of harp makers as well. But I was really the only one mad enough to try and do it in Northern Ireland.
“I worked on my own in one of the rooms in my apartment, and sold the first guitars for 50 quid, which is pretty amazing looking back on it. But I suppose the advantage with starting that way, without any official training or knowledge, is that even though you make an awful lot of very basic mistakes that you wouldn’t make otherwise, the reality is that what you do is different and unique.”
Unique they certainly were, but certainly in the early days, a Lowden guitar wasn’t the wonderfully crafted and meticulously engineered instrument that you see today. Far from it.
“To be honest, the workmanship on the first ones was absolutely atrocious!” George chuckles. “I didn’t know how to sharpen tools. I didn’t know what a lot of the tools were for even! Those first guitars were very, very poor in terms of workmanship. But the funny thing is, they sounded good, so that gave me enough encouragement to keep on going, and so that’s what I did.”
A Lowden guitar’s unfinished 50th anniversary headstock. Image: Lowden Guitars
Sound Theory
The sound remains something that turns people into lifelong lovers of George’s guitars, and by the late 70s he was already starting to make a name for himself across Europe – thanks in no small part to a friend in Paris who took one of his guitars round the local shops and drummed up orders.
He’d also done the hard part over those first few years, including developing many of the designs we know today – including his flagship O series instruments, and players clearly loved them, including Pierre Bensusan, who still has his original 1979 Lowden today.
The trick was actually making it a job.
“I found that I couldn’t actually make a living,” George admits. “You have to remember that back then, I would have been doing well to get £600 for a guitar. And you know, when you can only make 12 or 15 a year working on your own, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work it out that that’s not going to work too well.”
A Lowden acoustic guitar in the making. Image: Lowden Guitars
The innovative solution came from a suggestion of a Swiss retailer who loved Lowden’s guitars, and wanted to get more of them. They suggested that George licence his designs to a Japanese luthier who had the skill and resource to make these guitars at a price and scale that George never could on his own. It was an extremely forward-thinking idea in 1980, but it was one that had a meaningful impact on George as a builder.
“I had great respect and a great relationship with the guys in the workshop out in Japan – they were very good craftsmen,” George reflects. “I learned a lot from the point of view of working with Japanese tools. Nowadays you can get Japanese tools easily, but back then in the UK, nobody had heard of them. So for me to go out, to go out to Japan in 1980 and discover Japanese chisels and Japanese saws and Japanese planes, was a revelation, really, to me.
“And watching the Japanese craftsmen – they were so skilled. And they were able to do things very quickly but very accurately. And that was a revelation to me as well, because I had the view that it takes however long it takes, as long as it’s right and done really well. But I saw those guys doing it really well, but also doing it fast – that was something I had to learn.”
Andy (left) and George Lowden (right). Image: Lowden Guitars
Where The Heart Is
George continued to refine his craft back in Northern Ireland, but by the mid-80s the bottom was falling out of the acoustic guitar market, and when the factory making Lowden guitars was closed, he decided to have another go at making everything in Ireland.
He set up a small workshop with a dozen or so employees, and set about sharing his knowledge and philosophy with his new charges. But once again, the market conditions in the 80s, with synths and shred riding high, were difficult to survive in as a small maker. “I hadn’t lost my desire to make really good guitars,” he insists. “But world class guitars was what I wanted to do – and making a living out of it was proving to be very difficult.”
By his own admission he’d built up a “large overdraft” and was struggling to keep the business afloat by the end of the decade, when a consortium of local businessmen approached him with a plan to buy back the assets of the company from the bank and then licence his designs and brand from him. George would stay on effectively as a design consultant to the Lowden Guitar Company.
This arrangement carried on for the next 14 years but eventually it reached a point where George wanted to control his own destiny.
A Lowden 50th anniversary acoustic guitar. Image: Lowden Guitars
“What I was finding difficult was dealing with the fact that there was this company that bore my name – the Lowden Guitar Company – and I had no say in how that company was managed and run,” he admits. “So that’s why I decided to start all over again.”
The company changed its name to Avalon and carried on, while George was left back where he started – but with the benefit of several decades of learning under his belt.
“I was 53 at the time, starting with bare walls and a few people that I knew, who I had trained before,” George reflects. “And it was liberating, because I could actually control what was happening in the workshops and with the business, and managed to do it quite well.
“I’ve never been very commercially minded. Maybe I should have been, and maybe I would have done better in the business sense. But for me, the only thing that really mattered always was to try and learn something from every guitar and listen to the players, and then go back to the bench and try and work some of those ideas into the designs.”
Rufus Wainwright performs at Rock Werchter with a Lowden guitar. Image: Paul Bergen/Redferns via Getty Images
Player Power
Ah yes, the players. Throughout his 50 years of guitar making, few luthiers instil the affection and loyalty that Lowden’s musician clients seem to do. There’s a personal element to it all that seems to transcend the standard musician endorsement deal, and Lowden agrees, “A lot of the relationships that I have with artists have developed into friendships. In fact, most of them started that way, you know?”
Despite the personal bond that he likes to forge with his clients, the quality of Lowden’s instruments means that there’s the occasional situation where he spots an artist playing one of his guitars without him even knowing they owned it – the sort of public endorsement of the inspirational quality of his instruments that he still gets a kick out of.
“Oh, absolutely. Especially if I don’t know that they know about Lowden.” he exclaims. “It actually happened a few years back with Bruce Springsteen, funnily enough. His guitar tech sent me an email asking if I could send him a guitar bridge, because the bridge had popped off his guitar in the middle of winter or something. I didn’t even know that he had one!
Ed Phones
Without doubt however, the most notable artist relationship that Lowden has struck up in the last few years has been with Ed Sheeran, who had been turned onto Lowden guitars by another of George’s artist friends, Snow Patrol guitarist Gary Lightbody.
“When Ed came down to the workshop, about seven years ago, he just bought a whole stack of guitars!” he chuckles. “And they were already sold to other people, incidentally! But when Ed Sheeran wants to buy your guitars… we asked other folks to just wait a little bit longer.”
The pair struck up a rapport, but nobody quite expected what would happen next. At the 2019 NAMM Show, one of the world’s biggest pop stars flew in to reveal that not only was he collaborating with Lowden, he was investing in the company to create an affordable sub-brand – Sheeran By Lowden was born.
“I met him in Texas – he was doing a gig over there, and I was over buying wood, I think. And we met up at his gig,” George recalls when asked to think back to when the idea for Sheeran By Lowden was first floated. “I mentioned to him afterwards that someday I would like to be able to build guitars that were affordable for young people. And he said, ‘Well, if you do want to do that, let me know, and I’ll invest.’
“So I then promptly forgot about it, because I was so busy with other stuff. And a couple of years later, he got back in touch and said, ‘George, remember you said that? How about we do something?’ And that’s how it came about.”
Whereas most makers looking to create affordable instruments will turn their attention to mass-production factories in China and Korea, Lowden wanted to try something different – and a lot more ambitious. He wanted to make the guitars in Ireland.
“I knew that if we were going to make guitars here, rather than in the Far East, at that kind of retail price, then we were going to have to develop some very high tech ways of making them,” he admits. “Because, there’s no way you could make them by hand here at that kind of price. So I did develop a completely new way of making guitars, and predictably, it cost about double what I thought it was going to cost to develop it!
“’But it’s been very good, and I’m proud of those guitars for the price. I think it’s going the right way. I don’t want to make thousands and thousands of them, but I do want to make them available to young musicians.”
George Lowden and Ed Sheeran at the Lowden booth during the 2019 NAMM Show. Image: Matthew Simmons/Getty Images for NAMM
Good Not Big
The fact that Ed and George were happy to keep the production numbers relatively small while keeping the instruments affordable speaks to a certain ethos. Lowden is not trying to rule the world and unseat the massive megabrands who dominate the market. The challenge of innovating, of making something new and making something that inspires musicians is clearly at the core of who George Lowden is as a maker.
It also explains why he’s definitely not retiring yet – clearly he still has the same fire to create world class instruments that he had back in the 80s, and there’s always something new to do if you’re curious…
“I’ve got lots of new models coming through,” he smiles. “The electrics are exciting me right now, and I’ve got new acoustics as well. So there’s some things in the pipeline!”
George Lowden has come a long way since he was sat in a flat trying to work out how to make a guitar, and despite all the twists and turns he’s experienced along the way, the Lowden brand has never been stronger.
“When I started, I had no idea where it would lead, none at all,” he reflects. “And I had no ambition except to make good guitars. I’m an accidental entrepreneur. If there is such a thing, that’s me. I certainly had no intention! But now that I’m here, I just want to make sure that the company goes from strength to strength. Because good is better than big. And that’s all.”
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