This guitar is Aria’s version of Doc Watson famous Gallagher "Old Hoss" Dreadnought guitar that he used throughout his amazing career. This guitar has the distinctive features of an original Gallagher guitar from its original shape tortoise shell pickguard to its unique headstock and logo restyled from a G to an A.
The guitar features a herringbone bound solid spruce top and solid Indian rosewood back and sides. Bound mahogany neck with rosewood fingerboard and snowflake inlays. The guitar is incredibly light (1.9kg) and responsive and is really well suited for both flatpicking and fingerpicking. A very loud but balanced guitar with good action that plays cleanly all the way up the neck. In my opinion, this guitar sits nicely between a Martin and Gibson acoustic sound. Very loud and full with a surprising amount of clarity and high end for a larger bodied instrument. It can easily compete with any Martin or Gibson Dreadnought that I have played and heard.
The guitar is in great shape for a 50 year old instrument but has a fair amount of dings and dents around the body. There are no cracks, structural issues or damage that affect the playability of the instrument, though. I tried to add pictures to show as many of the blemishes as possible. The guitar is all original with the exception of the tuners, they were replaced at some point but the replacements are high quality.
