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Kunstwerke aus Maine
Born out of a genuine passion for phenomenal guitars, the history of Bourgeois Guitars tells a true self-made story. Illustrated with instruments your eyes won’t ever get tired of.
The whole story of Bourgeois Guitars
Dana Bourgeois and an experienced team of around 20 craftsmen produce around 400 guitars every year in a specially equipped workshop. Each one a work of art in its own right. In a historic mill from the 1850s, extraordinary instruments of sought-after designs are created in a wide variety of tonewood combinations for connoisseurs from all over the world who want to enjoy the feeling of owning an exquisite instrument that will one day become a family heirloom.
Once Dana Rice showed an OM with a smaller body that he had built. To his surprise, the master flatpicker showed more enthusiasm for the OM than for his dreadnoughts. He felt the overall sound was better and encouraged him to try a larger version of it.
Dana realized that contemporary flatpickers and jazz players were using every note on their fingerboards. Balance and clarity from string to string and note to note were as important for linear melodic improvisation as they were for polyphonic fingerstyle playing. With this realization, his pursuit of Rice's visionary challenge led to many turning points in the rich history of Bourgeois Guitars.
Initially, Dana endeavored to make the OM style accessible again to modern guitarists. He teamed up with fingerstyle artist and OM proponent Eric Schoenberg to build modern versions of the prized Martin OM-18s and OM-28s, which were only built between 1929 and 1933.
Today, the reborn Orchestral Model is a staple among almost all large and small manufacturers of steel-string acoustic guitars. In addition, the unique Schoenberg Soloist OM guitar with its groundbreaking minimal cutaway design soon inspired countless similar looking cutaways.
Dana soon applied his creative instincts to imagining how he could modify the iconic dreadnought to achieve a vintage sound. He focused on optimizing tonal balance, headroom and responsiveness. Through endless research of vintage pieces and experimentation, Dana found ways in guitar design to get the best out of both body shapes.
Some of the Bourgeois Guitars innovations
- A unique X-bracing system that leads to an improved balance between bass and treble on a large guitar. Only the braces on the bass side are scalloped, while the treble braces are tapered.
- The reintroduction of Adirondack spruce (red spruce) as tonewood, which comes from old-growth stands, still existing in northern Maine.
- A now-renowned method in which every top finds its optimal sound with proper flexibility through tap tuning. Dana's intonation method can be used successfully regardless of the body size and type of tonewood.
- A unique bolt-on neck design that allows the neck to be removed without drilling, cutting or steaming, paired with a modern, fully adjustable truss rod that mimics the tonal response of vintage guitars with a steel T-bar neck bracing.
- Further development of a little-known Finnish method of heat treating raw wood, known as torrefacation. This post-treatment of tonewoods for tops, backs, necks and braces produces an effect on the wood that is otherwise only achieved through natural ageing.
The combination of thermally cured wood, a hard, ultra-thin lacquer finish that has the crystalline tone of naturally aged nitrocellulose lacquer, and his other innovations create guitars with a vintage look, feel and sound that are anything but just another replica.
Each Bourgeois guitar is built with the same tireless attention to detail, using the finest tonewoods and relying on hand assembly. CNC machines are also used, but only when the precision of these computer-controlled milling and cutting tools exceeds what is possible with the human hand and eye. To this day, Dana meticulously oversees the top and back routing of each guitar and approves the selection of all tonewoods - skills that have become legendary in the world of acoustic guitar luthiery.
Many great acoustic guitarists have recorded and performed with Bourgeois Guitars. Built in Lewiston, Maine, the guitars have helped shape the sound of early masters like Doc Watson and Ricky Skaggs to today's greats like Bryan Sutton, Sierra Hull, Andy Falco, Courtney Hartman, Sean Watson and Ketch Secor for more than four decades.