Naked Ambition

Taylor has tried it, Collings is very successful at it and now Lowden is having a go at crossing over to the electric side of guitar design. We take a look…

 

- Dave Burrluck

George Lowden actually made his first electric back in 1969 but not as a professional guitar maker: that came nearly a decade later. “That’s right, the first one I made as a professional would have been about 41 years ago,” George considers. “It’s something I never thought I’d do again; it wasn’t on my mind. It was actually [Lowden user] Ed Sheeran who gave me a bit of a nudge. It’s the way these things often work. Professional players, famous or not, the interaction between them and myself is really important. Sometimes ideas that would sit on the shelf get taken down and dusted off and that’s what happened here really.

“It took me a year and a half, there was a lot to think about, but then I went away to Portugal for a week to design this guitar – I do that, I’ll kind of go for walks and things and get my head clearer whenever I’m designing something. It came out a lot better than I thought it would. I know I’m biased,” he laughs, “but I wasn’t really expecting it. I didn’t know what to expect.” It’s to Lowden’s credit that the resulting GL-10 is far from yet another ’Burst imitator. Yes, it’s a single-cutaway and has twin humbuckers, an inset tune-o-magic style bridge and a three-way toggle switch but that’s where any resemblance ends. It’s designed around a 630mm (24.8 inch) scale, standard on Lowden’s S-style, and placed between industry standards, Gibson and PRS.