Lowden Guitars
O-32C Original Series Cutaway Acoustic Guitar, 2005 [USED]
Listed at The Twelfth Fret · Toronto, ON
Tracked on Tonewood Atlas — view the full listing at The Twelfth Fret’s site.
Photos hot-linked from The Twelfth Fret’s site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Sitka Spruce
- Back / Sides
- East Indian Rosewood
- Neck
- 5 Piece
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- O
- Scale length
- 25.6"
- Nut width
- 1.76"
- Frets to body
- 12
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- Yes
- Condition
- Preowned
Lowden Guitars
Lowden Guitars are built in Downpatrick, County Down, Northern Ireland — the work of George Lowden, who turned professional in 1974 and has spent fifty years refining a voice unlike anything else in the acoustic world: shimmering, harmonically layered, with a long singing sustain. Much of that character traces to choices George arrived at early — his "dolphin" strut profiles and A-frame bracing, a five-piece neck, a soundbox designed from the physics up rather than after the American dreadnought — and the result is a guitar players recognise instantly. Lowden was fingerstyle shorthand long before Ed Sheeran carried one onto arena stages; Pierre Bensusan, Alex de Grassi, Richard Thompson, and Paul Brady are among those who've made a Lowden their own. Since 2004 it has been a family firm, with George's sons now in the workshop.
The Twelfth Fret
The Twelfth Fret has been a Toronto institution since 1977, when Grant MacNeill and Dan Charman opened it on Kingston Road; they moved to their current east-end Danforth Avenue building in 2000. The shop describes itself as "instrument builders who also sell guitars" — a six-luthier workshop is the spine of the business, and the retail catalog grew around it. Boutique acoustics arrived in the 1990s, and today's catalog leans heavy on Canadian-made Boucher and Larrivée Master Series alongside Collings, Huss & Dalton, Lowden, and Bourgeois — a rare in-person destination for Quebec and Ontario boutique builds.
