Lowden Guitars
O-34c+ Adirondack Spruce & Koa
Listed at Sylvan Music · Santa Cruz, CA
Tracked on Tonewood Atlas — view the full listing at Sylvan Music’s site.
Photos hot-linked from Sylvan Music’s site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Adirondack Spruce
- Back / Sides
- Koa
- Neck
- 5 Piece
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- O
- Scale length
- 25.5"
- Nut width
- 1 3/4"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- No
- Condition
- New
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.
Sylvan Music
Sylvan Music has been on Mission Street in Santa Cruz since 1993 — a quietly remarkable shop opened in 1984 by Albert Markasky, who still builds and repairs in the back room. Albert's lineage is part of the shop's character: he apprenticed under David Morse in 1980, then rented a one-car garage with Jeff Traugott in 1983 before Jeff left to join Richard Hoover at the Santa Cruz Guitar Company. That Sylvan-to-SCGC thread is a real piece of the Santa Cruz boutique-acoustic story, and the shop's continuing SCGC relationship shows in the inventory: the active Santa Cruz Guitar Company shelf is the deepest single-dealer SC catalog in the atlas, spanning OMs, D Customs, signature models, 50th Anniversary builds, and Custom Shop work. Goodall and Iris each carry a meaningful stack of in-stock boutique acoustics; rotating Lowden inventory rounds it out. The broader catalog runs much wider — Larrivée, Taylor, Duesenberg, Nash, Weber Mandolins, Dusty Strings, plus banjos, dulcimers, violins, and two vintage rooms — but Tonewood Atlas's scope intersects the boutique-acoustic shelf. For California boutique-acoustic shoppers, especially anyone tracking Santa Cruz Guitar Company inventory, Sylvan is the deepest in-person SC catalog on the West Coast plus a meaningful Goodall + Iris destination.
