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| Ten Thousand Motels |
N.Ireland Man Strikes Chord with Rock Connoisseurs
By Kevin Smith
DOWNPATRICK, Northern Ireland (Reuters) - When Belfast's George Lowden built a rudimentary guitar at the age of 10, little did he know that one day some of the world's biggest rock stars would be lining up to pay top dollar for his work.
"It had nails for frets and fishing line for strings and I pranced around the garden pretending I was one of The Beatles," said Lowden, now a graying 52-year-old father of five, as he whittled a sliver of rare tropical wood in his workshop.
At his home, deep in the Northern Irish countryside, Lowden produces the Rolls-Royce of acoustic guitars for a customer list that reads like a Who's Who of rock music: Eric Clapton , Bob Dylan , U2's The Edge, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, and Northern Ireland's own Van Morrison , among others.
The guitars are cherished by fans for their pure, "open" sound, "fast response" and good looks. They have even spawned their own Web site, the Cult of Lowden, where fans pick over the finer points of the instruments in near-obsessive detail.
Lowden cheerfully admits that when he first started making his own guitars in the early 1970s he "hadn't a clue" what he was doing.
"I got hold of a 'how to' book, some wood, and just got started."
There followed a painstaking process of trial and error.
"I had to learn everything the hard way, but when you learn that way, it sticks," Lowden said.
"Every guitar I made I changed the design for the next one -- new body shapes, new bracing designs inside, changing the thickness of the wood and so on."
Working from a room in his apartment, Lowden financed his endeavors by selling his early efforts to friends and local musicians, before arriving at a design that became the template for a series of instruments still in production.
In 1976 he got his first real break, when a friend walked into a folk music shop in Paris carrying a Lowden guitar.
"They tested it against their own stock and immediately ordered six up-front and four a month thereafter," Lowden recalled. "I was in business."
He hired and trained a handful of apprentices and increased his output, working for several years from a tiny studio on Northern Ireland's east coast.
By 1980 his guitars were attracting fresh attention from abroad, and on the advice of some music business friends, Lowden licensed his designs to a small company in Japan, which for five years turned out top-notch instruments to his specifications.
The arrangement ended when the 1980s vogue for electronic music caused a slump in the acoustic guitar market, but it introduced Lowden to the superior quality of Japanese tools, which he has used ever since: "It's the laminated steel," he explained. "Centuries of Samurai tradition."
Lowden then set up a factory in Northern Ireland, producing fewer than 1,000 guitars a year but competing at the high end of the market with sector leaders such as U.S. giants Martin, Taylor and Guild.
Lowden still relishes the challenge he set himself as a child and takes around 10 orders a year from aficionados who want an instrument hand-crafted by the man himself.
These guitars are highly prized, compared by some to violins made by Stradivarius, and that's reflected in both the waiting time -- currently two-and-a-half years -- and the price.
A top-of-the-range guitar made to order by Lowden costs $17,000 -- up to five times the price of a factory-built Lowden and a far cry from the $85 he got for his prototypes.
Happiest in his workshop with just the whisper of a dehumidifier unit for company, he constructs each of the made-to-order guitars from hand-carved woods such as walnut, rosewood, cedar, and other more exotic timber such as Hawaiian koa, chosen for their tonal and aesthetic qualities.
Each custom-made model is distinguished by the buyer's choice of motif on the fingerboard -- fish or butterflies, for example, inlaid in silver, mother-of-pearl or abalone shell.
Randy Hall, proprietor of Specialty Guitars near Washington, D.C., explained why, as well as selling Lowdens, he is the proud owner of at least 10.
"They have a really unique sound due to their design and build, a lot of harmonic overtones and richness -- I always use the analogy of a Celtic harp or a hammered dulcimer," he said.
"Some guitars you really have to attack, to overplay, but with these you can underplay and get the sound you want. They also look absolutely gorgeous."
The master guitar maker does not play the guitar himself, saying designing and building them takes all his time and effort.
"When I was in my teens I fancied myself as Ireland's answer to Eric Clapton, but disillusionment set in fairly quickly," he said with a wry smile.
"All I ever really wanted was to build the best guitars possible."
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