Lowden Guitars
F-35 Alpine Spruce/Madagascar Guitar - Used
Listed at Sound Pure · Durham, NC · Dealer ref #26518
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
- European Spruce
- Back / Sides
- Madagascar Rosewood
- Neck
- Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- F
- Scale length
- 25.59"
- Nut width
- 1 3/4"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- No
- 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.
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.
