Top Notch

We talk to Dana Bourgeois about the new Touchstone range, the importance of tuning in a guitar top, and what lies in the future for the series

- David Mead

The alliance between Eastman and Bourgeois might mean that a great percentage of Touchstone construction is done in China, but it’s carried out under Dana Bourgeois’ strict supervision. Furthermore, his team in Maine is responsible for selecting, carving and generally engineering the guitars’ tops and carrying out the final setup when the completed guitars are returned to the Bourgeois workshop. We ask Dana how this arrangement works in a practical sense, beginning with the forming of the tops.

What role does the top play on an acoustic guitar?

“Well, in a nutshell, the way a guitar works is that we excite the strings of the guitar with the pick or fingers, the strings move the bridge, the bridge moves the top, and the top essentially pumps air that disturbs our eardrums, and that’s how we hear music. A common description of a fine guitar is that it has a piano-like tone. Well, what does that mean? It has a complex tone. And that means that the top is actually able to vibrate in all the different ways that strings are able to vibrate. And if it can’t, then it actually acts as a filter. The worst thing would be a top that vibrated at one frequency – then we would have the equivalent of a tuning fork, which is a very sterile musical instrument.