McNally Guitars

The origin story Ciaran McNally tells starts at fifteen, when his own first guitar began giving him mild electric shocks. A simple ground-wire resolder fixed it and set him on the path; guitar number one came together on his kitchen table at sixteen. From there the training arc moved through both major lutherie programs in the British Isles — first evening, intensive, and apprentice courses at the Lagan Lutherie School in Belfast, then a diploma in Musical Instruments at London Metropolitan's College of Furniture — and then through a senior craftsman role at George Lowden in Northern Ireland and a production manager role at Atkin Guitars in Canterbury, England.

The origin story Ciaran McNally tells starts at fifteen, when his own first guitar began giving him mild electric shocks. A simple ground-wire resolder fixed it and set him on the path; guitar number one came together on his kitchen table at sixteen. From there the training arc moved through both major lutherie programs in the British Isles — first evening, intensive, and apprentice courses at the Lagan Lutherie School in Belfast, then a diploma in Musical Instruments at London Metropolitan's College of Furniture — and then through a senior craftsman role at George Lowden in Northern Ireland and a production manager role at Atkin Guitars in Canterbury, England. By the time McNally went fully independent in 2020 he had spent years inside the production lifecycle of thousands of high-end instruments at two of the most respected acoustic shops in the region, with around thirty guitars of his own already built on the side. The McNally voice is a deliberate hybrid: the warmth and complexity of Celtic-tradition guitars (Lowden being the canonical reference for that lineage) combined with the fundamental clarity, definition, and projection associated with the best American steel-strings. Guitar World's 2024 review of the entry-level S-32 — a small-body short-scale folk-size in Sitka-over-rosewood — credited McNally with having actually delivered on the stated mission, calling it a model that carries the build quality and voice of a fully fledged professional instrument.