Maine Lines

The latest in Bourgeois' Touchstone range has shades of Gibson's J-45. Will it live up to expectations and carve a legendary niche all its own?

- Words David Mead

The Touchstone acoustic series is an alliance that's oceans apart between Eastman's facility in Beijing, China, and the workshop of Dana Bourgeois in Lewiston, Maine, USA.

And if anyone is unfamiliar with his name, Dana is one of the world's foremost luthiers and his guitars sell at a premium price. The Touchstone Series came about when the Eastman guitar company - no slouches at turning out very high-quality acoustics under its own name - came aboard and a whole new streamlined production process was put into place.

It works like this: Dana and his team source, brace and voice the guitars' tops in Maine and ship batches of them over to Eastman's workshops in China. There, the backs, necks and so on are put together in accordance with a strict brief from Bourgeois back in the USA. Quality control is tight, with every process carefully monitored to ensure that each instrument is of the best possible quality. Certainly, when we reviewed a pair of Bourgeois/ Touchstone acoustics in issue 501, we were mightily impressed by the overall sound and build quality, the OM scoring 9/10 and the dreadnought getting full marks with a straight 10.

Of course, Eastman and Bourgeois joining forces in this way means that instruments can be manufactured more cost-effectively, making it possible to buy into one of the top brands at a greatly reduced cost. Dana Bourgeois is rightly proud of the quality that this partnership has achieved – and you’ll note that it is the Bourgeois brand name that sits atop the headstock on these instruments, rather than Touchstone or Eastman.