McNally Guitars

The origin story Ciaran McNally tells starts at fifteen, when his own first guitar began giving him mild electric shocks. A simple ground-wire resolder fixed it and set him on the path; guitar number one came together on his kitchen table at sixteen. From there the training arc moved through both major lutherie programs in the British Isles — first evening, intensive, and apprentice courses at the Lagan Lutherie School in Belfast, then a diploma in Musical Instruments at London Metropolitan's College of Furniture — and then through a senior craftsman role at George Lowden in Northern Ireland and a production manager role at Atkin Guitars in Canterbury, England. By the time McNally went fully independent in 2020 he had spent years inside the production lifecycle of thousands of high-end instruments at two of the most respected acoustic shops in the region, with around thirty guitars of his own already built on the side. The McNally voice is a deliberate hybrid: the warmth and complexity of Celtic-tradition guitars (Lowden being the canonical reference for that lineage) combined with the fundamental clarity, definition, and projection associated with the best American steel-strings. Guitar World's 2024 review of the entry-level S-32 — a small-body short-scale folk-size in Sitka-over-rosewood — credited McNally with having actually delivered on the stated mission, calling it a model that carries the build quality and voice of a fully fledged professional instrument. The S-32 in particular surprised the reviewer with its volume and projection, a side effect of McNally having quietly recalibrated body depths across the range so that his small-body sits at the depth of a typical OM, giving the compact instruments more of the resonance and dynamic range buyers usually trade away when they downsize. The McNally catalog runs in two tiers. The Foundation series is the entry point — five body shapes (parlour, small, OM, dreadnought, jumbo), three top woods, three back-and-side options, two nut widths and a finish choice, all at a single price point that holds across the range. Above that sits fully bespoke work, where appointments, materials, and proportions are negotiated case by case. Every guitar ships with a tree-planting certificate through a partnership with Tree-Nation, a small acknowledgement that the tonewood economy depends on forests staying intact. McNally is one of the rare single-luthier shops that supplies dealers directly, which makes finding one through a curated specialty shop a realistic path rather than years-long waitlist.