Steve Miklas

“OK, then. You ask: What’s all this buzz about Aged Tone? We here at AMW are fairly simple folk. We like our potatoes mashed and our chicken fried. And we like our guitars old. We are highly skeptical of all those new-fangled gadgets, gizmos, and magic potions that claim to improve a guitar’s tone. We do not doubt that they do *something* but we’ve never been ones to attach electric vibrators to our guitars, or set them on stands in front of loudspeakers and blast them all afternoon with Z.Z.Top music. Not that there is anything wrong with those behaviors, but we’ve just always thought the best way to “age” a guitar is to play the darned thing. Face it, old guitars sound better, and folks in the guitar industry are forever trying to find a secret elixir, a time machine, and all manner of things to try to get these shiny new guitars to sound 60 years old – to sound “aged”. Most of the claims we have heard over the years have smelled like Snake Oil to us, but old dogs CAN be taught new tricks and we are here to testify: Dana Bourgeois’ new “Aged Tone” guitars are the real deal. Count us among the converted. Long story short: Dana’s expertly voiced tops are heated (“roasted”, cooked”, “baked”, “thermally cured” – choose your verb) in an oxygen-free kiln until they turn a golden brown. The wood stiffens, and gets lighter in weight while it goes through some structual and tonal transformation. Then the guitars are finished with an ultra-thin and hard cyanoacrylate finish and constructed with hide glue. Fast forward to our showroom and your ears: The guitars have an explosively resonant fullness that goes beyond “volume”. They have the “quickness” and “presence” of a vintage guitar. Now: Let us caution you. NO, this does not mean Dana is building a clone of any kind. He is very much his own man. In fact, what he is building are guitars that we imagine sound like 70-year old Bourgeois guitars, were there such a thing. They are LOUD, but volume isn’t everything. (Note to banjo players: When someone approaches you in a jam and says “Wow, that sure is a LOUD banjo”, he is not paying you a compliment – he is asking you to turn the darned thing down.) These guitars have that “mature” way of delivering volume without needing to be played hard. They have room filling resonance, depth, and and presence, without any hint of shrillness.“