As the luthier behind Bourgeois Guitars, Dana Bourgeois has been a major force in the advancement of contemporary steel-string guitar design. But he has also long been keen on collaborating with others. Dana was a founding partner in Schoenberg Guitars, and he has built prototypes and small-production runs for several other companies. In 2019, he partnered with Eastman Guitars and the collaboration has produced a line of Touchstone guitars that became available earlier this year. We were impressed with the Touchstone OM Vintage/TS when we checked it out recently, and Bourgeois recently provided us with the dreadnought version of the instrument to take for a spin in the Peghead Nation video studio. 

Before going into the specifics of the D Vintage/TS, let’s take a brief look at how Touchstone series guitars are built: Bourgeois selects, braces, and voices the guitar’s tops at its shop in Lewiston, Maine. The assembled tops are then shipped to Eastman’s Chinese factory in batches of 40. Rather than simply using the Bourgeois tops on an existing Eastman design, the instruments are built like fully US-made Bourgeois guitars. This includes Bourgeois’s original bolt-on neck design, a steep peghead angle, and various internal construction details. The D Vintage/TS features X-braces with scalloping only on the bass side. After the building process is completed, the guitars are returned to Lewiston, where they’re set up and fine-tuned alongside other Bourgeois guitars.

The D Vintage/TS is built with an Alaskan Sitka spruce top and Indian rosewood back and sides, both of which were of excellent quality. Like the Touchstone OM we checked out, the dreadnought’s craftsmanship and fit and finish are at an incredibly high level. Although the guitar includes Bourgeois’s forward-thinking construction elements, it also includes familiar style-28 appointments: herringbone purfling, ivoroid binding, diamonds-and-squares position markers in the ebony fingerboard, etc. 

Bourgeois dreadnoughts are known for their balanced tonality and a refined, fundamentally vintage-style character, and the D Vintage/TS is no exception. Strumming chords produces a clear voice that avoids the cloudiness that can be an issue with some rosewood dreadnoughts, and flatpicking single-note lines offers great string-to-string balance. The guitar has the punch and volume you expect from a good dreadnought, and an excellent setup makes it fun to play. 

Overall, the D Vintage/TS not only lives up to the anticipation of the collaboration between Bourgeois and Eastman, it represents a superb value in the mid-priced dreadnought field. Players who have been wanting a Bourgeois but have come up short on required funds should take note, as these Touchstone models have the stuff to become picker favorites!

SPECS: Dreadnought body with 14-fret neck. Solid Alaskan Sitka spruce top. Hand-voiced Adirondack spruce X-bracing. Indian rosewood back and sides. Mahogany neck. Ebony fretboard and bridge. 25.5-inch scale. 1²³/₃₂-inch nut width. 2.2-inch string-spacing at saddle. Nickel Schaller Grand Tune tuners. Made in the USA and China. $3,299 list/$2,969 street. Bourgeoisguitars.com 

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