“Tony Rice said, ‘This is the sound you should be going for – you just need to put it in a bigger package’”: How Dana Bourgeois led the OM-style guitar renaissance and turned Bourgeois Guitars into a guitar craftsmanship powerhouse

Portrait of Dana Bourgeois.

Bourgeois Guitars is responsible for crafting around 500 of the highest-quality guitars on the market. Dana Bourgeois, the luthier behind the company, is now known for the OM-style guitar renaissance and for contributing to advancements in acoustic guitar design and voicing. However, his success has been decades in the making, with a culture of tools and craftsmanship firmly rooted in his family.

His dad was an amateur woodworker, while his grandfather was a machinist. It wasn’t until college, however, and a chance encounter with Irving Sloane’s book Classic Guitar Construction, that Bourgeois took an interest in what had surrounded him his whole life.