Bourgeois Soloist OMC 50th Anniversary

A fantastic cutaway OM that celebrates Dana Bourgeois’s 50th year of building guitars.

March 12, 2025

50 years ago, Dana Bourgeois built his first guitar on a desk in his Bowdoin College dorm room. Inspired by Irving Sloane’s popular book, Classic Guitar Construction, he joined scores of other crafty young folkies who tried their hands in building their own instruments in the early 1970s. But in Dana’s case, the experience wouldn’t be a one-off. Instead it was the beginning of a life dedicated to building some of the finest flattop steel-string guitars ever made. To celebrate the occasion, Bourgeois is releasing a limited edition of 25 50th Anniversary guitars this year, all featuring the same woods and appointments, and available in Bourgeois’s OMC, 000, OMSC, LDBO-14, and Piccolo Parlor styles. Dana already showed us the first of the batch, a Soloist OMC, at the recent 2025 NAMM show (check out our video of him talking about the guitar), and we were honored to be able to demo the same guitar in the Peghead Nation video studio.

The Soloist model represents an important period in Dana’s career, making it a logical choice for the first of the 50th-Anniversary guitars to be built. Originally designed in collaboration with Eric Schoenberg in the mid-1980s, the Soloist was an effort to build a vintage-style OM with modern features (including a cutaway), wood combinations that Martin didn’t use, and voicing that was optimized for fingerstyle playing. The concept was a great success for both Schoenberg and Bourgeois. Although their official partnership ended in the early ’90s, both continued offering guitars in the style. Their efforts helped make the OM a viable design option for other manufacturers, including Martin, who had not built the model since the 1930s.

The Soloist OMC 50th Anniversary continues the tradition of offering “players’” guitars combining superb materials with restrained appointments. Bourgeois 50th-Anniversary guitars are all built with Macassar ebony back and sides and Italian bearclaw spruce tops. On our demo guitar, these woods were as stunning as they come. The ebony features a gorgeous range of hues and figure, and the top displays even color, perfectly bookmatched grain, and dramatic, though not over-the-top bearclaw figures. The guitar’s fingerboard and pyramid bridge are made from ebony whose striping compliments the back and sides, and black ebony binding and wooden purfling enhance the instrument’s organic vibe. While there is no elaborate inlay, Bourgeois did come up with a very special 50th-Anniversary touch: The fingerboard’s position markers, which Bourgeois calls “Ghost Squares and Diamonds,” are made from 14k gold, and a matching inlay is found on the heel cap.

Soloist-style OMs are my personal favorite guitars, and I’ve played many examples built by Bourgeois, Schoenberg, and others. There is no question that this 50th-Anniversary edition is among the best of them: It offers everything you hope for in a refined, modern OM. The guitar has an amazing dynamic range that delivers great complexity when played softly, yet really growls when digging in harder. Even brand-new, this was one of the loudest contemporary OMs I’ve played. It is balanced throughout its range, and has a tonal richness that impresses at the first pluck, but doesn’t overwhelm complex passages with too many overtones. The guitar’s neck is thinner than most vintage examples, and has a slight V-profile, making it a fusion of old and new, while keeping the roomy string-spacing that is an inherent part of the OM design.

Dana Bourgeois and his team should be very proud of their accomplishments, and this Soloist OMC 50th Anniversary is a fabulous example of Dana’s leadership role in modern lutherie, and confirmation that Bourgeois Guitars continues to build at the very highest level possible.

Bourgeois Soloist OMC 50th Anniversary