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Add to Cart$26,000.00
Beauregard Acoustic Guitars — Quebec's Master of Two Traditions
Mario Beauregard began building guitars in the early 1990s while working sales and repairs at Tom Lee Music in Vancouver, learning the craft alongside luthier Robert D'Crivouir before a grant from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec sent him to the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery in Phoenix. There he met Ervin Somogyi in a master class, and Somogyi liked what he heard enough to invite him to Oakland for an extended study period. During the week Mario worked alongside Somogyi, absorbing the voicing philosophy and structural principles that define the Somogyi school. On weekends he drove to Santa Rosa to study archtop construction with the late Taku Sakashta, one of the most revered archtop builders of his generation. He then spent four years as the designer in the research and development department at Lasido, Robert Godin's manufacturing operation, before going fully independent.
The result of that education is a builder who excels at both flattop steel-string and archtop guitar construction, a combination the Music Emporium noted is possessed by very few luthiers in the world. He builds today from his one-man shop in the picturesque town of St-Denis-sur-Richelieu, outside Montreal, entirely by hand with no CNC machines and no production jigs, each instrument a direct expression of his understanding of tone, playability, and the acoustic properties of the materials he has spent decades selecting and storing.
Steel Strings, Archtops, and the Space Between
Mario's steel-string acoustic work draws directly from the Somogyi tradition: highly responsive tops with wide dynamic range, extraordinary tonal balance, and the kind of immediate, living acoustic character that players describe as present from the first chord. Tonewoods across the steel-string lineup have included Italian spruce, Western Red Cedar, and Adirondack spruce tops over African Blackwood, Indian rosewood, and maple back and sides, with snakewood bindings, abalone rosettes, and Gotoh 510 tuners with exotic wood buttons as standard appointments.
The MB archtop, drawn from the lessons of his Sakashta apprenticeship, is a fully hollow body instrument with a hand-carved spruce top and maple back and sides, ebony fingerboard, bridge, tailpiece, and pickguard, and a honey amber finish that the Music Emporium described as wonderfully subtle. It is among the most musically refined archtop instruments produced by an independent luthier in North America, and one of the rarest.
A Builder Called Definitively One of the Leaders
Michel Pellerin, one of Quebec's most celebrated luthiers, has called Mario definitively one of the leaders of the new generation of guitar builders. That assessment, offered by a peer who understands exactly what the standard requires, says everything about where Mario Beauregard sits in the world of boutique lutherie.
Browse our available Beauregard inventory, and reach out to discuss a custom commission directly.