McIlroy A65c — cedar/claro with cutaway — #109

[usefultree]

Got the go ahead from the AGF moderati to mention my ca. 2002 McIlroy Guitars cedar/claro — which I listed on reverb.com earlier this week— the last of my unwinds.

https://reverb.com/item/1508484-mcil...ut-cutaway-109

A very early kit in the make and a prima facie of his ahead of the pack adroitness re the cedar/walnut makeup.

Custom specs include a 1 13/16" wide neck at the nut and a wood rosette — not a fan of abalone, a questionable signature of Irish lutherie by my lights, though I'm coming around*—which changes up the binding/perfling game and complement a bit. Very unique in the McIlroy cohort.

Upgrades include a cutaway, backstrip, and the McIlroy premier range, highly figured claro walnut — if you have an ear for it, there's a darkness to it and energy in the mids particular to the claro.

Haunting, haunted, warm, earthy, percussive, complex, immediate, singing, crisp, deep as hills — all that. The man knows what he's doing here.

$2550. Thanks!

[usefultree]

* — Aesthetically still prefer wood to abalone etc. (as the latter's become synonymous w. functionless, ornamental ostentation), though multiple rereadings of Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space have given me an appreciation for the historic significance of the shell. "Moreover, these facts of the imagination are related to allegories of very ancient origin. Jurgis Baltrusaitis recalls (bc. cit. p. 57) that 'as late as the Carolingian epoch, burial grounds often contained snail shells an allegory of a grave in which man will awaken.' And in Le bestiaire du Christ, p. 922, Charbonneaux-Lassay writes: 'Taken as a whole, with both its hard covering and its sentient organism, the shell, for the Ancients, was the symbol of the human being in its entirety, body and soul. In fact, ancient symbolics used the shell as a symbol for the human body, which encloses the soul in an outside envelope, while the soul quickens the entire being, represented by the organism of the mollusk. Thus, they said, the body becomes lifeless when the soul has left it, in the same way that the shell becomes incapable of moving when it is separated from the part that gives it life.' " Makes sense as a feature on a build that digs into Celtic lineage. Also think how they've found skeletons buried w. shells in coastal England, or the shell mounds in the Cali woods.

[JohnnyD123]

I do miss the A25c I had, which was #198, laden with Celtic knots on the fret markers.

[sayheyjeff]

Beautiful guitar and nice playing. Different timing and I might have driven to our place for this guitar and saved a trip to Boston for my Lowden last fall. Hope it sells locally so I might see it at an area AGF gathering. Best of luck with the sale.

Jeff