McPherson Guitars
MG 4.5 XP Guitar - Used
Listed at Sound Pure · Durham, NC · Dealer ref #612
Tracked on Tonewood Atlas — view the full listing at Sound Pure’s site.
Photos hot-linked from Sound Pure’s site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Adirondack Spruce
- Back / Sides
- Macassar Ebony
- Neck
- Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- Grand Auditorium
- Scale length
- 25.5"
- Nut width
- 1 3/4"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Condition
- Preowned
McPherson Guitars
McPherson Guitars builds in Sparta, Wisconsin, where Matt McPherson (also the founder and CEO of Mathews Archery, headquartered in the same town) began chasing a revolutionary acoustic design in the late 1990s. The shop has produced heirloom-quality wooden flat-tops in limited numbers since 2001, hand-built by a small team of luthiers, and more recently has extended the same design principles to a carbon-fiber line that's earned its own following. Tonewood Atlas tracks the wood-body MG , Camrielle, and Custom lines at McPherson's upper tiers — the part of the catalog where individual top and back/sides selection and high-tier construction define each build. The signature design language carries across the wood line: an offset asymmetrical soundhole, a cantilevered neck that lets the top vibrate without the fretboard extension damping it, and a built-in LR Baggs system tuned for amplified performance that stays close to the instrument's natural voice. The carbon-fiber Sable and Touring models sit outside our boutique-acoustic scope by design; if those interest you, McPherson's own site is the right starting point.
Sound Pure
Sound Pure sits at 808 Washington Street in downtown Durham, North Carolina — on the same block as the Durham Athletic Ball Park made famous by the Kevin Costner film Bull Durham. The shop is unusual in scope: three businesses run as one integrated facility — a boutique guitar gallery, a professional recording-equipment retailer, and a multi-room recording studio (with a ~1,000 square foot live room and a 7-foot Steinway grand). The three sides feed each other in a way no other dealer in the atlas matches: a buyer considering a serious acoustic can demo the instrument through a real, mic'd-up recording chain made up of the same high-end gear Sound Pure also sells. The boutique acoustic shelf is one of the deepest in the atlas, anchored by Bourgeois, Collings, and Boucher each at scale, with meaningful Goodall, Lowden, Santa Cruz, and Iris alongside, plus rotating Larrivée, Fairbanks, Huss & Dalton, McPherson, Petros, and Beneteau. Sold listings remain visible on the public storefront for an extended period, so the brand range that passes through Sound Pure over time is wider than any single-day snapshot suggests — Furch, Gallagher, Pre-War, Preston Thompson, Tom Bills, and Tom Ribbecke have all rotated through. Sound Pure is owner-operated by recording professionals who built the studio infrastructure themselves and use it daily, and that engineering-first orientation runs through the gear curation. For boutique-acoustic buyers who care how an instrument records as much as how it plays, Sound Pure's three-way integration is genuinely distinctive.
