Donal McGreevy cedar/cocobolo jumbo.

I took a chance on buying this guitar from a very new maker. Maybe some of you saw it up for sale on a different forum or on eBay.
First here are the details and the original pictures from Donal.

Soundboard: Cedar
Back & Sides: Cocobolo
Neck: Honduras Mahogany with Sycamore & Rosewood laminates
Fingerboard: Ebony
Bridge: Madagascar Rosewood
Bindings: Madagascar Rosewood
Purflings: Sycamore, Mahogany & Rosewood
Rosette: Black Tahitian Mother of Pearl with Rosewood & Sycamore
Head facing: Rio Rosewood 
Heal Cap: Rio Rosewood 
Tuners: Gold Gotoh 510’s with Black buttons
Finish: Satin (Nitrocellulose)
Case: Hiscox Pro II

Scale Length: 648mm
Nut width: 44mm
Saddle String Spacing: 56mm
Max Body depth: 124mm
Body Length: 495mm
Upper Bout width: 302mm
Lower Bout width: 418mm

Can't quite work out how to put pictures in and amongst the text so here's a link to Donal's original post on another forum:
www.acousticguitarforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=292050


So now here are my impressions of the guitar after one month's ownership.
Years ago I owned one of the early Japanese Lowden  guitars - one with a cedar top and mahogany back and sides. It was excellent and I was very happy with it, using it mostly for dropped tuning work with Battlefield Band. On a trip to Australia I was made an offer I couldn't refuse, to part exchange the guitar for Martin D 35. But I always missed that guitar and regretted trading it in.

Ever since then I have been keeping an eye open for a similar sounding guitar. I've also enjoyed in recent years buying guitars by new makers for two reasons. One is that the quality of guitar building has gone up and up over the years and it is very difficult to find a bad guitar these days. The other is that new makers need encouragement and their instruments are often at great prices.

This guitar has a very interesting background. I'm sure members of this group don't need telling what happened during the whole Lowden/Avalon history. We are left today with George Lowden making excellent but very expensive guitars, Avalon having gone bust perhaps as a result of getting too big too fast (just speculating there), and one of the Lowden luthiers Dermot McIlroy making a great name for himelf too. The other original Lowden luthier, Sam Irwin, has taken a very interesting step. He has started the Lagan Lutherie school, located in the original Lowden/Avalon premises, and his students are turning out some amazing work, influenced of course by the original Lowden designs.

Some of those students' work is easily good enough to sell commercially, and this is where Donal McGreevy comes in. He still has a day job and is currently making only his fourth guitar, but has taken to it so well that he is now setting up his own workshop as well as still using the school facilities.

So what about this particular guitar? The build quality is immaculate as you can see from the pictures. Materials used are first class. It's my guess that the students are actually working their way through the stocks of timber in the factory, or maybe Sam Irwin's experience of buying timber is helping them. The design is heavily influenced by Lowden, with a few tweaks introduced by Donal such as the increased distance of the soundhole from the bridge. This idea comes from Stefan Sobell. I don't quite know how it's done, getting an extra cm or so on this measurement without throwing out the whole geometry of the guitar.

But of course we all buy guitars for sound (don't we?). I think I do anyway. I already have a rosewood/spruce dreadnaught and a mahogany/adirondack  dreadnaught which give me the typical HD28 and D18 sounds in spades. What I was looking for was a sound with more evenness and a bit of mid presence (I love the middle ranges of all acoustic instruments, as anyone who has submitted to my sound engineering knows). This guitar emphasises the mids but does not give a boxy or honky sound. Conventional wisdom says that cedar tops give a mellow sound. I have to say that is not my experience and this one, like my original cedar Lowden, has loads of edge to cut through the band. It has good string separation, but chord playing still sounds like chords, instead of a load of individual notes fighting each other, something I've heard on some rosewood/spruce Lowdens. There are plenty of overtones here but not so many that they start fighting each other on a held chord. I've played it a lot over the month I've had it, mostly in standard tuning in noisy Irish sessions, and it has had lots of nice comments from the other musicians. But it really comes into its own in DADGAD tuning, fingerpicked, which is what my original Lowden also excelled at 30 years ago. In the end it is very hard to describe sound in words, so next week I hope to post some sound samples on my website.

I think we all keep hoping that we will one day find the one guitar which will do all we ask of it and play in any style. Dream on! What I have in this guitar I think, is a good all-rounder but which is better at some jobs than others - like all good guitars really! For the second attempt by a brand new maker it is outstanding, but then it comes out of the very same building as many classic guitars, and with one of the original luthiers giving advice every step of the way. A great combination of inspiration and experience. Donal McGreevy is already a superb maker even at this early stage, and I advise you to check him out. His McGreevy guitars website is still just a place-holder, but there is loads of info on facebook if you search for McGreevy guitars.

I've done this review on my ipad away from home and there have been a few quirks getting all this text in. Hope it reads OK when I post it. Here goes!