21/01/2010

Artist Guitar Blog #1: Mat Martin & Kirsty McGee - Part 1

Mat Martin & Kirsty McGee are guitar nuts, as many of you are, and here we give them ample room to wax lyrical about their personal loves when it comes to six-strings (and four: see part two)

We both play Lowden guitars. There are others we love, of course. Kirsty has owned beautiful guitars by Taylor and by Atkin in the past, and we have played Martins that have made us very happy. We know several makers and think their work is exquisite.

But there's something about a Lowden. Something that makes you look around your home to see what you could sell.

We both play S models - Kirsty has an S12 (Cedar and Mahogany) from the early '90s and a recent S23 (Cedar and Claro Walnut), Mat an S23 custom that was built in the 1980s. The customisation is a significantly wider fretboard which was built for someone else (unknown to us) but could have been built for Mat's giant hands and preference for heavy strings (piano-wound Roto .013s).

The body shape of the S models is so elegant, and the sound they produce is astonishingly well balanced and full for a small bodied guitar. They are also strikingly versatile. Kirsty is a schizophrenic player these days, switching from delicate finger picking to hammering the hell out of the thing in two-step shuffle mode, whereas Mat insists on playing mainly flat picked stuff with a really heavy carved pick, gypsy jazz style. The S models sound great for all of these things.

Two of our Lowdens came to us from Cornwall - via a good friend and fantastic player down there. Kirsty was living in Penzance at the time she got hers, Mat had to hitch-hike down from the North West with the price of a Lowden in cash in his back pocket. That's how much we like these guitars.

We have played other things though - funnily enough Mat's guitar part on 'Killer Wasps' (The Kansas Sessions - 2008) was played on a Vanden 00 with Maple back and sides and really light strings. He tried a whole bunch of guitars for that as we'd not been able to bring his on the flight (he was playing mainly banjos and tenor guitar on that record), including Kirsty's S12 and Mike West's Collings, but the Vanden took it by a country mile. To this day the only thing we know about Vanden is that he is based in Scotland, and doubtless has a first name, but we're not sure what it is. On listening to the record you can hear the 'clacky' (no other word for it) sound of the loose light strings against that heavy jazz pick. It has great character.

The necks of Lowden guitars shouldn't be overlooked, either. There's something about that 5-piece construction that not only looks beautiful but is incredibly stable and versatile. They also have a contour that feels at once full and chunky yet elegant and never inhibiting.

The other thing you have to love about Lowden is how connected they are to their instruments. When all the changes in ownership of the Lowden name had died down a few years back we called them up to check our insurance valuations. Not only did they invite us to visit them next time we were in Northern Ireland but they remembered the individual instruments from serial numbers and brief descriptions. One of them (the one they remembered best) is almost twenty years old!

Incidentally, the electric guitar you can hear James Steel from The Brute Chorus playing on the new Hobopop Collective album is a 1950s Harmony Rocket played through a handmade Dickinson amp.

Check their site for lots more about the duo...

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