🔒Made in Maine: Lewiston guitar maker hitting the high notes

A maze of rooms strums with energy as workers craft high-end acoustic guitars by hand inside a former textile mill that Bourgeois Guitars calls home. Workers cut sheets of wood to shape, put them together and bend long, curved wooden pieces that connect the tops to the backs of the instruments. Guitar necks and headboards are built and assembled, and fretboards are slotted and fretted. Along the way, the pieces are meticulously hand sanded, carefully finished with thin coatings of lacquer or polyurethane and buffed to a desired shine. Tuning pegs, special engravings and strings are tended to before, finally, the finished products are ready for a final inspection. When they pass muster, they are given seal-of-approval labels that are numbered and hand-signed by company founder Dana Bourgeois himself and adhered to the inside of the guitars. Bourgeois Guitars has made more than 12,000 guitars since Bourgeois made his first one more than 50 years ago while attending Bowdoin College. Building guitars of this quality is a meticulous time-consuming process; it takes 14 weeks to build a single one from start to finish. In the end, the rich complex sound of these instruments put them in high demand among guitar aficionados around the world. His customers include some of the top country, bluegrass and folk musicians around, such as Ricky Skaggs, Doc Watson, Luke Bryan, Natalie Maines, Amy Allen and dozens of others. To ensure the proper tone of each guitar, Bourgeois or his master luthier — an artisan skilled in making stringed instruments — “hand-voice” the wood used for the guitar tops, or soundboards, by tapping and flexing the wood to evaluate the sound quality. While giving a tour of his plant, Bourgeois holds a piece of wood up to his ear and taps different parts of it to evaluate the different notes that emerge. “Selecting the wood and ‘voicing’ the top and back are the most critical steps in making our guitars,” Bourgeois says. “That’s what differentiates us from mass-produced guitars.”

Sourcing wood

Bourgeois Guitars has about 30 employees in Lewiston split between its manufacturing plant and a sawmill it acquired two years ago to supply red spruce, the predominant wood used in its guitar tops. The manufacturing process begins in the wood room, where raw pieces of wood are stacked on shelves. Besides red spruce, there’s a variety of spruce, cedar, maple, mahogany, koa and Brazilian rosewood that go into different models of Bourgeois guitars. In another room, the tops, backs and sides are outlined on sheets of wood and cut to precision with a CNC, or computer numerical control, machine. Other rooms feature the body department, the finish department and the final assembly room. Throughout, climate-control humidifiers hiss and bright lights shine onto workbenches to help workers with their precision work. You can smell slight whiffs of glue where parts are glued together, and the buffers, belt-sanders and CNC machines with their built-in vacuums whirr when in operation. Guitars, guitar parts and guitar cases hang on walls and from hooks and are resting on shelves to remind you that this place is all about one thing: guitars. The average retail price for a Bourgeois Guitar comes in at around $7,000. Bourgeois has made two guitars that sold for close to $100,000 apiece, one to a collector in the United States and the other to a buyer in China. Each guitar had about $25,000 worth of gold engraved into it. At full capacity, the Lewiston plant makes about 400 to 500 guitars a year. It also voices and builds another 1,000 or so guitar tops each year that are sent to a plant in Beijing, China, where Bourgeois-trained luthiers assemble them. That plant is owned by Eastman Music Co., which partnered with Bourgeois Guitars in 2019, allowing Bourgeois to develop a market for lower-cost guitars. The Lewiston-made guitars are sold in about 40 stores across the U.S. and others in Europe, China, Japan, Korea and Australia. When Bourgeois visited guitar stores in Japan last year, people who owned his guitars came out to meet him. Some asked him to autograph their guitars with a silver Sharpie. “Nobody recognizes me” in Maine, he says. “But in Tokyo, I was a rock star.”