Over the years, our use of koa has ebbed and flowed in response to a variety of factors including availability, cost and our ability to source our preferred grades of wood to maintain a consistent aesthetic standard. The truth is that the breathtaking figuring people love in the koa used for our premium Koa Series is, genetically speaking, a minority, found in only a small percentage of koa trees.

Taylor’s growth into a large manufacturer has presented both challenges and opportunities when it comes to sourcing woods like koa. On one hand, our supply needs are greater than those of boutique-size guitar makers, which at times has made it more difficult for us to procure a consistent supply of premium-grade wood used for Koa Series models. In fact, for stretches in the mid-1990s and again in the early 2000s, we made the decision to pause our production of Koa Series guitars and use the wood more sparingly, and more strategically, depending on what was available. It was a time when Taylor offered more small-batch runs of limited-edition koa models (sometimes highly figured, other times more modest in appearance and offered at a more accessible price point) and, after the introduction of our hollowbody electric/acoustic T5, saved our best sets of koa for T5 Custom tops along with custom guitar orders.

Our Koa Series eventually returned to the Taylor line in 2007, and as the line has continued to grow and evolve, the expanded framework has given us a more diverse guitar ecosystem to work with koa — not only in terms of wood grades but with sizes of the guitar sets that can be cut. Think about the koa GS Mini and Baby Taylor models we currently offer. Those smaller guitars provide the perfect use for cuts of wood that aren’t large enough for other full-size models, allowing us to use more of what a koa tree has to offer.

Additionally, we use koa veneer for some of our layered-wood guitars. So in addition to cutting veneer for those GS Mini and Baby models (paired with solid koa tops), highly figured koa can be sliced into beautiful back and side veneer used for our koa 200 Deluxe Series guitars. Doing so gives guitar enthusiasts (and koa lovers) yet another access point to a beautiful koa guitar within our line.

A New Grade, a New Series

As we surveyed the beautifully striped variegation in some of the wood that was being cut, Andy was inspired to treat this koa in a different way and design an all-solid-wood koa guitar with a distinctive musical personality than our existing Koa Series.

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The figured koa sets we use for our Koa Series inform a more refined, luxurious aesthetic treatment. Visual elements like a shaded edgeburst and gloss-finish body elevate the beauty of the wood, while a maple Spring Vine inlay and maple top and fretboard/peghead purfling add elegant accents. (Builder’s Edition models take things a step further with a beveled armrest and sparkling abalone inlay and top edge trim.)

Sonically, Andy says, the Koa Series is voiced to produce an equivalent sound to match the elevated aesthetic.

“Our Koa Series guitars were voiced to reflect this ultra-refined, polished, smooth aesthetic,” he says. “They’re rich and sweet.”

“When you touch the body, you can feel the actual wood texture, the grain structure, the pores.”

By contrast, for this new striped koa — which we’re classifying as Select grade — Andy wanted to create a more organic aesthetic and coax a more direct, dynamic response from the wood.

“I was thinking about this guitar from the outside in,” he says. “I wanted to start by focusing on a tactile connection to the wood to emphasize the directness of the response — when you touch the body, you can feel the actual wood texture, the grain structure, the pores. There’s less between the player and the wood, to such a degree that the player feels the warmth of the wood surface.”

So rather than a gloss finish, Andy opted for an ultra-thin, open-pore matte finish. Beyond the tactile benefits, the thin finish plays an important role in voicing the guitar. (For more on the impact of finish on a guitar’s sound, see our sidebar.) He coupled this with a slight variation on the back bracing associated with our V-Class architecture. Together, the sound is a little livelier, a little less filtered, than the sound of our Koa Series guitars.

“These guitars retain the unique sweetness we associate with a guitar made from koa — especially that beautiful midrange — but with a more direct, punchy attack and natural response,” Andy says. “The thinness of this finish doesn’t contribute as much damping or compression. You’ll hear more of the tactile elements of your playing — more of your fingertips, a pick touching the strings, the subtle nuance of a guitarist’s natural sound. I think of this as a player-reflective version of a koa guitar — you get more control over what you sound like.”

Sitting in his workshop noodling on one of the new all-koa models he designed, Andy turns to a coffee analogy to describe the different sound compared to our Koa Series.

L-R: Builder’s Edition K24ce, 724ce

“A Koa Series guitar is like the a perfectly prepared cappuccino — so smooth, delicious, beautiful,” he says. “At the same time, it is inherently a mix of all the ingredients. These new koa guitars would be like your pour-over coffee — with amazing beans, well roasted and presented in the most direct way possible, for the purest koa experience. You get all the flavor, with minimal filtering. Together with the tactile sensation that’s so warm and inviting, you end up with an instrument that offers unique musical inspiration.”

Aesthetically, Andy wanted the guitar’s appointments to reflect the guitar’s musical personality.

“I wanted to retain traditional appointments, but with a focus on natural materials, so we selected rosewood binding and real shell for the inlay,” he says. “At the same time, I wanted the inlay to be unobtrusive and not too heavy in its ornamentation.”

The inlay design, christened Fountain, features mother-of-pearl in an elegant yet understated pattern. Other decorative details include Indian rosewood binding (with a bound soundhole), a paua shell rosette accented with rosewood and maple, rosewood and maple top edge trim, a dark-stained maple pickguard, and Taylor polished bronze tuners that visually harmonize with the color tones of the koa body.

The new guitars officially join the Taylor line at our 700 Series level, replacing our rosewood/spruce 700 Series models — with the exception of our Builder’s Edition 717e, which will retain its wood pairing of rosewood and torrefied spruce and other specifications. Initially, the new koa guitars will be offered in two body styles, both all-koa: the Grand Auditorium 724ce and Grand Concert 722ce. Andy felt it was the right positioning for another solid-wood koa collection within the line, and the change still leaves three other dedicated series featuring solid Indian rosewood (400, 800 and 900). Look for the new koa 700s online and in stores now.

Meet the Rest of the Taylor Koa Guitar Family

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Koa Series

Builder’s Edition K14ce, Builder’s Edition K24ce, K24ce, K26ce, K22ce, K22ce 12-Fret, GT K21e

Gorgeous figured koa, ultra-premium craftsmanship and a rich assortment of models make this a truly stunning collection. From the compact GT to a fun-to-play 12-fret to a pair of Builder’s Edition beauties, the Koa Series elegantly showcases a diverse array of musical personalities.

200 DLX Series

214ce-K DLX, 224ce-K DLX

Choose between a spruce top and a koa top on these Deluxe models, which feature beautiful layered koa back and sides, a gloss-finish body and a hardshell case.

200 Series

214ce-K, 214ce-K SB

Layered koa back and sides are paired with a spruce top featuring either a finish or a gorgeous shaded edgeburst around the entire body.

GS Mini

GS Mini-e Koa, GS Mini-e Koa Plus, GS Mini-e Koa Bass

Three koa models live within our popular GS Mini family, all sporting solid koa tops and layered koa back and sides. Our Plus models feature a shaded edgeburst body and our durable AeroCase, while the easy-to-play bass looks, feels and sounds amazing.

Baby Series

BTe-Koa

Super-portable and fun to play, our most compact koa guitar promises to make a visual statement wherever you go.

Artists, recording engineers and reviewers agreed, picking up on its fundamental tonal improvements: greater tonal output, sustain and harmonic agreement, or “in-tuneness,” between notes along the entire fretboard. In simpler terms, it made our guitars sound better. To critics and players, including many of you reading this who own V-Class guitars, V-Class was legit.

But the bigger promise of V-Class lay ahead. Master builder Andy Powers saw it as a liberating platform that not only enhanced the musicality of our guitars but would also enable him to voice individual models in ways that gave each a more distinctive musical personality. Ultimately, it would create a much more diverse palette of acoustic sounds for players to explore.

The ensuing four years have paid sweet sonic dividends and brought a steady transformation of the Taylor line. In addition to adapting V-Class to existing Taylor models, Andy used V-Class to voice a new body style, the Grand Pacific, a round-shoulder dreadnought that diverged from the tone profile associated with our flagship Grand Auditorium. Where the GA’s overall sound was more “modern” — clear and vibrant, with well-defined notes — the GP’s sound leaned more toward traditional dreadnought tone — a warm, seasoned voice, with notes that were broader in shape and blended into each other. V-Class also enabled the GP to produce clearer low-end power, cleaning up the muddiness that often plagued classic dreadnoughts in recording studios or live settings.

V-Class also inspired Andy to create our premium Builder’s Edition class of guitars. These instruments matched model-specific V-Class voicing with comfort-forward contouring refinements to enhance the feel and enable players to express themselves more freely. Builder’s Edition has since grown into a robust collection of nine distinctive models.

Then came the Grand Theater, or GT, which not only debuted a new body style but a new category of guitar, featuring a scale length (24-1/8 inches) that was shorter than our Grand Concert (24-7/8 inches). This time, Andy adapted his V-Class ideas for the guitar’s unique proportions and created C-Class^™ bracing, an asymmetrical pattern that allows the guitar to produce a stronger low-end response than a guitar of that size should be able to deliver. It spoke to players who wanted a guitar that married the nimble feel of a smaller guitar with a rich, full-voiced sound.

As our two newest body styles, both the Grand Pacific and GT have emerged as strong musical ambassadors within the Taylor line, reaching out to players in ways that other Taylor models haven’t. The Grand Pacific’s versatility matches that of our flagship Grand Auditorium. Meanwhile, the GT, still new-ish and in the process of being discovered, is on a clear upward trajectory as players discover its many virtues — how comfortable it is to play, how well it records, and how musically expressive it makes players feel.

So as we begin a new year, it won’t surprise you learn that the GP and GT factor prominently into our latest releases. Read on for our rundown of new models.

AD27e Flametop

A throwback look and sound channels an earthier Taylor vibe

Back and Sides: Solid Big Leaf Maple

Top: Solid Big Leaf Maple

Neck: Hard Rock Maple

Fretboard: Eucalyptus

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Sonically speaking, the most intriguing addition to the line is the AD27e Flametop, an all-maple Grand Pacific that bolsters the American Dream Series with a voice that’s unlike anything Taylor has ever offered. In the same way that the Grand Pacific body style marked a notable departure from the modern, high-fidelity sound our guitars have been known for, the Flametop pushes even deeper into that warm and dusky sonic terrain.

The guitar’s origin story is a confluence of musical ideas. For starters, Taylor has deepened our connection with artists in Nashville, Los Angeles and other music communities in recent years. Our artist relations team has spent more time talking to players about what they like and don’t like in an acoustic guitar for the types of music they’re making, and we’ve made a point of introducing many to the GP (and, more recently, the GT) as emblematic of Taylor’s more diversified acoustic menu.

Lately, more and more musicians across a range of genres have been drawn to acoustic sounds that aren’t so crystalline, but instead emphasize a warmer, woodier and in some cases grittier character.

Given the Grand Pacific’s nod to a more seasoned dreadnought sound, Andy Powers thought it would be interesting to use that body style to develop a different flavor with some of those slightly more tempered sonic characteristics, particularly in the top-end frequencies. He also thought the guitar would fit nicely into our American Dream Series, which tends to have an earthier, more organic, toned-down aesthetic, with simpler, workmanlike features to appeal to gigging musicians.

With wood selection, Andy was mindful of ongoing supply chain issues (due to the pandemic coupled with an uptick in consumer demand) and again subscribed to the “cooking with what’s in the pantry” approach that informed the development of the American Dream Series. In this case, we had stocks of maple. And in pursuit of the sound he wanted, Andy felt like maple could be used for the top as well as the guitar’s back and sides. Normally we wouldn’t use maple for an acoustic guitar top (it can be a bit squirrely as a soundboard), but with the V-Class architecture, Andy knew he’d be able to control the top movement enough to make it behave well sonically — especially in this case, where he didn’t want as vibrant a response.

Another strategic design decision in pursuit of that sound was the choice of uncoated D’Addario Nickel Bronze strings (.012-.053) for the guitar. The unique alloy combination helps bring a different sonic texture to the guitar.

“D’Addario calls it a nickel bronze because it has the color of a nickel-wound string, but it’s actually something that’s halfway between the two,” Andy explains. “The strings have a unique response when you put them on an acoustic guitar — they’re not dull sounding, but it’s not the same vibrant presence you expect from a brand-new set of bronze strings.”

As Andy details in our conversation with him elsewhere in this issue, the nickel bronze strings tend to filter out some of the high-frequency overtones to mellow out the response. Speaking from his own studio session experience, Andy likes his guitar strings to be a little seasoned before he records.

“I often want the vibrancy of the sound to be tempered a touch, so you’re hearing a little more wood, and a little less of the metal string,” he says.

Collectively, all the individual design decisions Andy made — body style, tonewoods, bracing nuances, string composition — give the AD27e Flametop a uniquely compelling voice within the Taylor line. It’s a drier, chunkier, more broken-in sound, or, as Andy puts it, “More lungs, less vocal cords.”

It’s a tone profile that’s more likely to appeal to players who normally don’t like “the Taylor sound” because they perceive it as too bright.

Andy compares the differences in tone, and the way players will react to the Flametop, to the way different photographic techniques can evoke different responses.

“Imagine a very high-definition photograph,” he says. “For example, I’ve looked at a lot of pictures of waves and surf photography. The colors are tack-sharp, the focus is on point, like you could see each individual water droplet. For years, that style of photography was upheld as the gold standard for an action shot of a surfer on a wave, because it’s technically difficult to achieve.

“Yet at times, I find myself most drawn to a photo where the colors are somewhat muted, or maybe it’s a little backlit and the focus is softer because somehow that conveyed the experience in a more meaningful and relatable way than what technically perfect focus would have,” he says. “It captures a different feeling.”

In the same way, Andy says, the choice of woods, designs, strings and picks are like different light and different focus on a photograph.

“There are times when you want vibrant, clear, high-definition detail, and there are times when a different sound will do a better job evoking the impression or emotion of what was going on,” he says. “It feels somehow more human that way. It’s the same with painting — some of the most evocative paintings suggest the emotion behind the scene more than they capture the realism of what’s there.”

It’s an interesting take, especially considering that the greater pitch accuracy enabled by V-Class bracing is immensely useful for recording applications, especially within the modern context of digital technology, where pitch can be controlled electronically and acoustic guitars can be the weak link in some respects. Yet we all know some of the most iconic, moving music is beautifully imperfect — and all the more human because of it. And guitarists love to discover guitars with unique, perhaps conventionally “flawed” sonic character, because those same attributes inspire them to respond and play in a different way.

“Those ‘flaws’ are relatable because as people, we’re all made up of flaws too,” Andy says. “I think that’s why it feels right. It feels like a kinship we can relate to, and that might be the perfect thing for the song that I want to play.”

Visually, Andy looked to match the AD27e Flametop’s sonic personality with a comparable aesthetic. Having a figured maple soundboard certainly sets the stage. He channeled the weathered character of a worn-in pair of boots or jeans with a new, dusky Woodsmoke finish, along with a shaded edgeburst and satin sheen on the top, back, sides and maple neck. Like other American Dream models, the Flametop features chamfered body edges, 4mm dot inlays in Italian acrylic, and onboard ES2 electronics (also available without electronics). The guitar ships in a Taylor AeroCase^™.

AD22e

A hardwood-top Grand Concert joins the American Dream Series

Back and Sides: Solid Sapele

Top: Solid Mahogany

Neck: Neo-tropical Mahogany

Fretboard: Eucalyptus

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Andy is a big fan of smaller-bodied guitars with hardwood tops, so he was happy to bring the mahogany-top Grand Concert to our American Dream Series.

“There’s something about the combination of a hardwood top on a relatively compact body,” he says. “They’re fun to play, they’re bluesy sounding, the controlled focus of the body makes it a super guitar to play fingerstyle music or jazz on, and they respond well to strumming chords too. The combination is really well-suited for a lot of different styles of music.”

The sapele/mahogany wood pairing will emphasize the fundamental to yield a dry, focused, woody sound with pleasing midrange punch when you want to dig in, especially with V-Class^® bracing under the hood. Comfort-centric features include chamfered body edges and a supple fretting feel thanks to the 24-7/8-inch scale length and D’Addario coated phosphor bronze light-gauge strings.

Other details include black top purfling, 4mm dot fretboard inlays in Italian acrylic, a single-ring rosette in contrasting maple and black, a faux tortoise pickguard, thin matte finish that preserves the natural feel of the wood and optimizes acoustic response, and nickel tuners. The guitar also features onboard ES2 electronics and includes a Taylor AeroCase.

GTe Blacktop

Walnut brings extra sonic girth to the GT voice

Back and Sides: Solid American Walnut

Top: Solid Spruce

Neck: Neo-tropical Mahogany

Fretboard: Eucalyptus

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Walnut is a tonewood we’ve used frequently over the years, and as we look to maintain a healthy, balanced portfolio of responsibly sourced species, it’s a wood that looks to find a more prominent place in the Taylor line. With the GTe Blacktop, we’re excited to offer another unique GT voice to the mix, and we simply couldn’t resist giving it our blacktop treatment.

Tonally, Andy finds it helpful to describe this walnut model in relation to its GT Urban Ash counterpart.

“In the context of the GT design, with the Urban Ash as the back and side wood, you’ll hear an almost flamenco guitar-like character,” he says. “It has a fast, vibrant attack. The ash is lightweight like mahogany is, and it can offer a dramatic, quick, wide-awake sound. The walnut is subtly denser, a touch heavier, so it’ll have a little more solid-sounding support in the lower register. The note profile won’t be quite as dramatic when it’s first struck, but it’ll have a little more strength. If the Urban Ash version is more like a flamenco guitar, the walnut version is more like a classical guitar, with broader, more serious weight behind the notes.”

As with our other GT models, the compact proportions and slinky handfeel make this an incredibly inviting guitar to play, and with our C-Class bracing, will fill a room with sound and amplify exceptionally well. Notable details include comfortable chamfered body edges, a contrasting maple/black rosette, 4mm dot fretboard inlays in Italian acrylic, a thin matte-finish body with a black top, and Taylor Mini nickel tuners. The guitar also features onboard ES2 electronics and ships with Taylor’s lightweight yet sturdy AeroCase.

GTe Mahogany

Raw, rootsy character makes this GT feel extra alive in your hands

Back and Sides: Solid Neo-Tropical Mahogany

Top: Solid Neo-Tropical Mahogany

Neck: Neo-Tropical Mahogany

Fretboard: Eucalyptus

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Our GT family is filling out nicely for 2022, especially with the addition of this all-mahogany edition. Brimming with bluesy mojo, it’s a guitar that’s equally happy being fingerpicked, flatpicked or strummed, with the mahogany top rounding out the initial attack to produce a woody, focused voice that’s evenly balanced across the frequency spectrum. The slinky feel, courtesy of the GT’s 24-1/8-inch scale length, makes chording and string bending blissfully easy on the fingers. It’s also a fun guitar to plug in, as the natural compression from the mahogany top translates into clear, natural amplified sound, courtesy of the onboard ES2 electronics.

The aesthetic is earthy and elemental, with our Urban Sienna stain (originally used on the GT Urban Ash) and a thin matte finish that accentuates the natural wood grain of the mahogany body and neck, which you can practically feel as you play. A eucalyptus fretboard, bridge and peghead overlay add subtle variegation, while chamfered body edges support the stripped-down appearance. Like its Blacktop sibling, the GTe Mahogany also incorporates a maple/black rosette, 4mm dot fretboard inlays in Italian acrylic, and Taylor Mini nickel tuners, and comes with our popular AeroCase.

GT 611e LTD

Inspired by the 618e, this maple GT makes its own bold statement

Back and Sides: Solid Figured Big Leaf Maple

Top: Solid Sitka Spruce

Neck: Hard Rock Maple

Fretboard: Smoky Crelicam Ebony

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As a limited-edition release, consider this GT model a bonus guitar to kick off 2022. Essentially, it’s a fun spinoff of our maple/spruce Grand Orchestra 618e, made more accessible via the GT’s compact proportions.

Andy was happy with the unique aesthetic presentation he gave the 618e when he redesigned it in 2020, featuring Antique Blonde color shading and his boldly distinctive Mission inlay design (which we explored in more detail in our cover story on inlay art last issue). Considering that the GT body style is derived from the Grand Orchestra’s curves, Andy couldn’t resist making a maple/spruce GT with the same look. While the sound won’t rival the huge voice of its bigger sibling, C-Class bracing gives this GT impressive sonic power and depth, plus the sporty handling that makes the GT so much fun to play.

“It feels like the bigness of a Grand Orchestra guitar scaled for us mortals,” Andy muses. “Then we can add in the fast handfeel, the slinkiness and everything we love about the GT, together with the visual impact of the 618.”

Like the 618, the Antique Blonde treatment brings subtle beauty to this guitar, from the faint edge shading around the top to the toasted golden undertones on the back and sides that accentuate maple’s beautiful figuring. Other appointment details borrowed from the 618e include maple binding with koa and ivoroid trim, a paua rosette with koa and ivoroid trim, a stained maple pickguard, and a gloss-finish body. The guitar also features Taylor Mini nickel tuners and ships with our AeroCase.

Look for all these guitars at a dealer near you.

“I cut hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of those inlays with a saw and a file,” he says, walking to a whiteboard on the wall. “I used to draw those, starting here at the bottom left,” and proceeds to draw the entire outline of the logo from memory, even though he hasn’t cut the inlay in decades. “It’s so impressed in my mind, I can start in that corner and go all the way around. I could almost close my eyes.”

Inlay design for guitars is a rich topic of conversation — an art form all its own, literally embedded within the art form of guitar making. Though the aesthetic approach can be beautifully minimalist, letting a guitar’s refined contours and tonewoods speak for themselves, most stories built around an “art of the inlay” theme inherently skew toward images of highly pictorial, narrative or ultra-personalized artwork that showcases singular inlay craftsmanship. If you appreciate that type of artistry, you’re probably familiar with the work of inlay maestros like Grit Laskin, Harvey Leach or Larry Robinson, or maybe the late Larry Sifel or Wendy Larrivée.

A laser cuts inlay components for the maple Spring Vine fretboard inlay featured on Koa Series models

“I remember watching Wendy engrave one of her court jesters from her blocks of pearl many years ago,” Bob says, marveling at her skills. “That kind of work has become something of a lost art.”

In Taylor’s case, trying to highlight 50 years of our inlay design in one article is, of course, a tall order, deserving of a hefty coffee table book. Beyond the sheer volume of inlays Taylor has created over the years, there are multiple storylines worth exploring. There is the evolution of our craftsmanship methods, which have progressed from Bob’s early days of hand-cutting pearl with a jeweler’s saw to the integration of CAD/CAM, CNC and laser technology into our current product development efforts. There are the aesthetic sensibilities that have taken form and been refined here at Taylor, along with styles that have changed with the times or by strategic choice. And there are the people who have brought their unique artistic points of view and skill sets to Taylor’s design team over the years, from Bob in tandem with his longtime creative partner, Larry Breedlove, to talented designer Pete Davies Jr., who created some of Taylor’s most visually striking inlays, to our current guitar architect, Andy Powers, whose thoughtful visual details create a harmonious marriage between a guitar’s musical personality and its aesthetic features.

The Protective Role of Inlays

In addition to the decorative appeal of inlay art, some inlays, such as a rosette, actually play a practical role in helping to protect an acoustic guitar from cracking.

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The Protective Role of Inlays

The Protective Role of Inlays

Having the soundhole cut into the top means that there is both exposed end grain (closest to the bridge and neck) and side or edge grain (closest to the sides of the guitar). The end grain surface will lose and gain moisture more rapidly than the edge grain surface. So inlaying a band of material around the hole prevents the different absorption rates from causing the top to crack in that area.

Inlaid purfling around the inside edge of the top of a guitar performs a similar role. It was the original purpose of purfling on violins. By contrast, a violin’s f-holes typically don’t have inlaid purfling because the shape is too complex. Consequently, most old violins display some degree of cracking, usually in the middle notches of the f-holes.

A Rich History of Inlay Art

To put Taylor’s approach to inlay design in perspective, it might help to provide a bit of context about the history of inlay art in the musical instrument world. The heritage of inlay art for steel-string acoustic guitars reflects a fascinating cross-pollination of different musical instrument traditions stretching back half a millennium. Through the centuries, the violin world experienced different ebbs and flows of ornamentation. During the Baroque period, for example, violins often featured extensive decorative details, but over time, that approach was heavily distilled so that inlays were typically not featured on a fingerboard. Instead, luthiers would focus on specific appointments like inlaid purfling.

“Purfling and edge treatment became the place where a maker would show their abilities,” says Taylor master guitar designer Andy Powers. “It became an exercise in how perfectly executed the purfling was, and the artistic flair of how you cut and fit the parts — the size, the proportion, the look of the joints between the pieces.”

With guitars, if you trace their development back to the tradition of lutes or ouds, you’ll see examples of heavily ornamented instruments. But instruments were also made with modest appointments for the folk musicians of each era.

Classical guitar makers took a page from the violin world and left the fingerboard unadorned, similarly focusing their inlay artistry on creating attractive purflings, while also crafting beautifully intricate rosette mosaics to demonstrate their refined skills.

In the U.S., banjo makers, especially those of the American Dixieland jazz era of the 1920s, adopted a more flamboyant approach to ornamentation, often with elaborate inlays, including in the fingerboard. That aesthetic would soon be embraced by steel-string acoustic guitar makers as a way of attracting banjo players. Companies at the forefront of that tradition included Gibson and Epiphone, which were building both banjos and guitars.

“Look at an early Gibson banjo or mandolin that was elaborately inlaid, and it’s easy to see there wasn’t a big step to start putting those inlay treatments on a guitar,” Andy says. “These inlays were done on flattop guitars to a certain degree, but both Gibson and Epiphone were heavily invested in building archtop guitars, which were more widely used by musicians crossing over from the banjo. Often, these guitars carried then-popular Art Deco visual themes, adopting the vibrant, flashy aesthetic of the Jazz Age. This desire for visual prominence was thought to further emphasize the guitar’s growing importance in a band.”

Engraved Victorian inlay featured on limited-edition 400 Series models

Taylor’s Inlay History

Back in Taylor’s earliest days in the mid-’70s, Bob Taylor says, adding inlays to a guitar was rewarding on two levels: It was a way for him to hone his chops as a young woodworking craftsman and to get a little more money for a guitar so the company could pay the rent.

“I could add an ab [abalone-edged] top and some other inlays to fancy up a guitar and turn a $600 guitar into a $900 guitar,” Bob says.

One of Bob’s early artistic influences with inlay design was banjo maker Greg Deering, whom Bob had met at the American Dream guitar shop where he got his start and Deering was working as a repairman. Deering would later work as a repairman in the early days of Taylor Guitars for a short time before founding Deering Banjos.

“I think my lucky strike was that Greg worked in the shop and then had a shop behind me,” Bob says, “because Greg is a fabulous inlay designer.”

Many of Bob’s early inlay ideas were inspired either by visual elements he saw in everyday life — such as a piece of Mexican tile, he says — or other traditional designs that tend to work well with guitars, like leaf, vine or other botanical themes.

“With this leaf sort of an idea, if you engrave it, it can look really good, and if you don’t, you’d work on the cuts,” he says. “In the early days when we would hand-saw, you could make deep cuts into the leaves. But when we first started doing CNC [cutting] work, initially we couldn’t do that anymore because they didn’t really have super good cutters for that sort of thing — they were pretty big in diameter, so you lost a lot of detail. But then cutters started getting better, so you started getting back some of that detail.”

Larry Breedlove Makes His Mark

In 1983, a skilled craftsman and luthier named Larry Breedlove started working at Taylor. His design collaborations with Bob over the next three decades would define the elegant aesthetic that people now intrinsically associate with Taylor guitars — from the supple curves of Taylor’s family of body styles to the shape of our iconic bridge to so many of Taylor’s inlays. Breedlove brought a uniquely organic, architectural and sculptural sensibility to the guitar form. His love of wood and innovative furniture design informed his aesthetic approach to acoustic guitar design.

“Larry was like a modern furniture builder,” Bob says. “He built furniture a little more angular but more in the vein of a Sam Maloof rocking chair,” Bob says. “His stuff was kind of organic like Gaudi, but it didn’t look like a branch. It was more sculpted and refined, somewhere between organic and mechanical. His shapes and ideas for form were really nice. And that aesthetic worked well for the types of inlays that we did. So we kind of modernized some of the old banjo inlays.”

Breedlove also took on a lot of the custom inlay design work that had started with Taylor’s Artist Series in the mid-1980s (including some envelope-pushing color finishes on guitars for the likes of Prince, Kenny Loggins and Jeff Cook from the band Alabama). Along the way, Breedlove started working with alternative inlay materials to expand his color palette.

New Tools, New Inlay Designs

The 1990s would prove to be a transformative decade for Taylor Guitars in many ways. For starters, acoustic guitars experienced a resurgence in popularity after a decade of commercial dormancy, thanks in part to the cable television show MTV Unplugged. After a decade dominated by synthesizers, electronic drums and hair metal, acoustic guitars became cool again, as rock acts stripped some of their hits down to intimate acoustic performances. And many rockers were happy to discover that the slim neck profile and easy playability of a Taylor neck felt similar to electric guitars. Other emerging artists like the Dave Matthews Band also made the acoustic guitar a centerpiece of their music (and it didn’t hurt that Taylor guitars became a mainstay of Matthews’ live shows in the ’90s and onward).

As our guitars were growing in popularity, Taylor was also bringing cutting-edge tools and technologies into the design, product development and manufacturing processes. Computer-controlled mills and laser technology introduced new levels of precision and consistency to guitar production. They also proved to be game-changing tools for inlay creation. Pearl or abalone shell inlays — and the pockets that would house them — could be cut more accurately with a CNC mill.

“With the advent of CNC,” Bob says, “we could design inlays that were a little nicer, a little fancier, for our more expensive guitars. Even if another vendor ended up cutting the inlays for us in some other location, we knew it would fit in the pocket we carved for it on a CNC. It was like ordering a carburetor for your car — you expect it to fit when you open the box and install it. Whereas before that, every inlay was almost like starting over.”

Lasers also opened the door to new inlay materials beyond traditional shell, including different woods and synthetic materials like Formica^® ColorCore^®. And because of the small diameter of a laser beam (.008 inch) and the accurate registration, lasers could also be used to etch detail into certain inlay materials like wood or acrylic to enhance their look.

In the mid-’90s, with the company hitting its stride, and bolstered by the successful debut of the Grand Auditorium, Taylor decided to put more creative resources into doing custom design and inlay work. By the tail end of the decade, Taylor’s ability to create visually compelling inlays for standard, limited-edition and custom models had grown significantly. And with Taylor actively cultivating relationships with popular artists, the years that followed saw the company embrace these new design tools to create a series of more pictorial-themed inlays for artist signature guitars, along with other visually themed limited-edition models.

One of the most elaborate story-themed inlay designs of that time was for the Cujo guitar (released in 1997), featuring figured walnut back and sides that came from a tree that had been removed from a farm in Northern California. The Cujo tie-in was that the tree appeared in scenes in the film adaptation of the Stephen King novel Cujo (1983), about a St. Bernard bitten by a rabid bat that ends up terrorizing a mother and her son. The inlay portrayed narrative elements of the story, including the dog, the bat, a barn and the walnut tree itself, incorporating a variety of wood, shell and other materials. The consistency of the technology used to create the inlays enabled us to create a run of 250 guitars.

Fretboard inlay for the Cujo Guitar

Another key Taylor inlay artist from that period was a young talent named Pete Davies Jr., who arrived at Taylor fresh out of design school in 1999 and brought an inherent knack for creating art that could be translated into visually compelling pictorial inlays. Longtime Taylor fans will recognize his work. His first inlay design was a koi fish inlay for our limited-edition “Living Jewels” Guitar, the first offering of what would become our Gallery Series. Colorful koi fish “swam” along the fretboard and around the soundhole of the figured maple/Sitka spruce guitar body, which had been stained blue to simulate water. For his inlay materials, Davies used synthetics: ColorCore, faux pearl, and a composite of ground turquoise, coral and stone mixed with resin. The guitar was visually stunning, as were the other Gallery Series models created. The Sea Turtle Guitar featured inlaid sea turtles in the fretboard and another turtle with a jellyfish inlaid into the blonde, figured maple back of the guitar body. A third limited edition from the collection, the Gray Whales Guitar, featured whale inlays and a striking rosette featuring a galleon ship that partly extended into the soundhole.

Koi fish inlays in the fretboard and around the soundhole

Fretboard inlays for the Sea Turtle Guitar

Inlays in the back of the Sea Turtle Guitar from the Gallery Series

Another intricate inlay designed by Davies adorned the Liberty Tree Guitar, crafted with wood from a 400-year-old tulip poplar tree that served as a gathering place for patriots in Annapolis, Maryland, during the American Revolution in 1776. Davies’ inlay scheme commemorates the tree’s historical significance with a depiction of the first post-revolution version of the American flag in the peghead, a scrolled, laser-etched depiction of the Declaration of Independence that extends from the fretboard onto the soundboard, and a rosette featuring 13 stars (representing each of the original colonies) and a Colonial-era banner that starts on the edge of the fretboard and unfurls across a portion of the rosette. Between the historical significance of the wood and the inlay art that honored it, the guitars were truly special.

Inlay and rosette for the Liberty Tree guitar

Running Horses inlay, featuring laser-cut koa and maple

Other custom designs originally created by Davies for limited-edition models include a flame inlay for our limited-edition Hot Rod Guitar (HR-LTD), inspired by old hot-rod cars, featuring inlaid flames (in wood) along the fretboard and around the soundhole; a beautiful inlay of horses in maple and koa for our Running Horses Guitar (RH-LTD); and a pelican inlay crafted from koa, walnut, satin wood and myrtle.

After a five-year run, Davies decided to leave the company to continue his career in 2004. (Sadly, he passed away in 2014 at the age of 37.)

Hand-cut custom inlay by Andy Powers before he joined Taylor

The all-black maple Jumbo Rick Nielsen Signature Model, made for Cheap Trick’s lead guitarist and featuring an exploding checkerboard inlay pattern

Forklift inlay on the Pallet Guitar

The Hot Rod Guitar, designed by Pete Davies Jr.

The Pelican Guitar, featuring pelican inlays designed by Pete Davies Jr., and laser-cut from pieces of koa, satin wood, walnut and myrtle wood

The John Denver Commemorative Model, featuring laser-cut inlay pieces of koa, maple, walnut and yellow heart

A Recommitment to Guitar Design

By the time Pete Davies Jr. left the company, Taylor had gone through a substantial period of growth. The company had also pushed the envelope artistically with a prolific outpouring of custom inlays for artists and a slew of other limited-edition guitar offerings. With Davies gone, Bob Taylor, Larry Breedlove and others on the product development team considered the path ahead and the pros and cons of continuing to invest in this aesthetic approach and operating a robust custom program.

“We had swelled that up, done some business, and it was great for a while, but I started to feel like we were getting stuck in that place,” Bob says. “We tried to make a business of it. There were a couple of people who wanted some really fancy, money-doesn’t-matter guitars. Even with what we charged, we didn’t really end up making money or offering enough value. And the opportunity cost was really high because we’d lose Larry into a custom-design black hole for months at a time.”

“I didn’t want Andy to be known as an inlay king here at Taylor. I wanted him to be known as a person who’s continuing to advance what a guitar can do.”

Bob Taylor

Meanwhile, Taylor continued to innovate with its guitar designs. In 2005, the company introduced the hollowbody electric/acoustic T5. The Grand Symphony body style, designed by Bob and Larry Breedlove, came a year later, followed by other designs that included an 8-string baritone, and in 2010, the GS Mini, also designed by Bob and Larry.

By that time, Bob had been talking to a talented local guitar maker named Andy Powers about joining the company and the role he would play as Taylor’s next-generation guitar designer. Andy signed on and officially started in January of 2011.

“With Andy’s arrival, we made a conscious decision that we were not going to concentrate on highly inlaid, bespoke guitars, where we try and develop a business of making custom guitars through inlay work,” Bob says. “Andy’s an incredible guitar builder, and I was ready for us to renew our focus on the quality of the guitar as a musical instrument rather than a piece of jewelry. So much energy can go toward maintaining the talent and management required to do inlaid works of art. We were in a time when we felt it was appropriate to make elegant inlays for our guitars and largely stay away from the thematics we’ve done in the past.”

One of the ironies, Bob adds, is that in addition to being a superb luthier, Andy is also a gifted inlay artist capable of highly pictorial themes.

“He’d do amazing inlays like tigers walking across the guitar,” he says. “But I didn’t want Andy to be known as an inlay king here at Taylor. I wanted him to be known as a person who’s making better guitars than we made at Taylor before he came, who is continuing to advance what a guitar can do, how long it can last. We both felt like that’s the best value we can offer our customers.”

Pickguard inlay for the Presentation Series

Andy’s Inlay Epiphany

Andy is proud of the custom inlay work he did on the guitars he built before joining Taylor. And for good reason. Not only is his portfolio visually stunning, the work was entirely hand-drawn and hand-cut.

An elaborate inlay of a tiger and dragon for a custom ukulele Andy Powers made prior to coming to Taylor

“The tradition of hand-cut inlay work was something I admired and enjoyed a great deal,” he says. “I was working with a jeweler’s saw and some tiny files. I may as well have been working in the 1700s.”

Based on the type of inlay work his customers wanted for their guitars, Andy sees parallels with contemporary tattoo artistry.

“Think about the variety of tattoos a person might get,” he says. “You see anything from the names of their children, depictions of their life stories, inspirations, mottos, beliefs. A lot of people approach inlay art in a similar vein — they want this one instrument to tell their story…some experience, some hardship, some success, some failure. I was pretty into that because I enjoy the human-interest aspect of this work.”

He also enjoyed the artistic challenge of finding a way to graphically depict a person’s story, and working within the constraints of the medium and the materials when done by hand. But Andy started to think differently about his approach to inlays after a visit at his shop from none other than the late Bill Collings from Collings Guitars.   

“Any inlay design should offer some indication of what the guitar will feel and sound like.”

Andy Powers

“He was looking at this guitar I was building for a customer,” Andy recalls. “I’d spent weeks working on this very elaborate inlay work, and I was proud of it. Bill turns to me after staring at this guitar and says, ‘This is exceptionally beautiful work. But if I were you, I would start thinking about who will own this guitar after this first player, because musicians are going to want to play this guitar for much longer than you think.’ We stood there in silence for a few minutes while I thought about it, before I responded. ‘So, in other words, you wouldn’t want to have somebody else’s mom’s name tattooed on your arm?’ And he said, ‘Exactly.’”

In the years that have followed, Andy says, that observation has proven to be true, as he watched guitars he built for clients go to their children.

“In one case, the player who ended up with the guitar told me, ‘I love the guitar, but it’s my dad’s story, not necessarily mine.’ That experience made me more interested in the traditional side of inlaid art and focusing on certain themes that are a little more universally appealing. Of course, the classic subjects — botanical motifs, some shapes that are more impressionistic — usually work.”

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It reminds Andy of a trip he took to Cremona, Italy, some years ago, where he had an opportunity to see a beautiful Stradivari violin up close.

“It had some heavily ornamented art, which was unusual,” he recalls. “Parts were hand-painted, elements were carved in and filled with contrasting mastic, so it wasn’t necessarily inlaid pieces but had a similar visual effect. It was a botanical kind of motif, and the lines felt as elegant today as they would have been back in the 1700s when it was done. I thought, now that’s a beautiful approach to ornamentation.”

Inside the Inlay Design Process

Andy powers walks through some of the steps in the process of developing an inlay for production, from pencil sketches to the finished product.

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Inside the Inlay Design Process

Inside the Inlay Design Process

Like a lot of Andy’s other guitar design work, he typically starts sketching his inlay ideas in pencil. (For anyone wondering, he’s a fan of Blackwing pencils.) Here, he walks through some of the steps in the process of developing an inlay for production.

“I’ll start with a few criteria about the guitar itself, so if I know this is a modern guitar, I might know that this inlay needs some points because I don’t want it to look too heavy. So I’ll sketch some different ideas and then start drawing revisions over it using tracing paper or vellum until I arrive at what’s essentially the form — something that has the right genetic DNA for the design. Eventually I’ll do some conversions in the computer. Once I have the proportions, the sizing, the curves, I’ll start working with it in a CAD/CAM format to create some fixed geometry from that sketch. 

“Once I have the geometry, I’ll often cut the inlays with machines myself. If I want it to be a shell part, sometimes I’ll work with [Taylor inlay programmer] Dave Jones and we’ll cut real shell. Often times I’ll use lasers because they’re pretty fast and easy. You can do mockups in materials that aren’t shell and aren’t so costly. You might do a mockup with a piece of plastic inlaid into a piece of wood, just to get the right curves and visual look. With machines, we want to see if the geometry runs well, whether the machine faults out, whether there are interruptions in your computer geometry, because creating guide curves for a CNC machine is an art form itself. Most people don’t know what a tool path like that is, but a machine can only create points and some form of geometric shape between them.

“By the time you’ve created a path that a machine can follow, you might have hundreds of individual segments of geometry, all linked together so the machine can make this part. It’s such a challenge, but I love it.”

Once the inlay design is finalized, Dave Jones from our product development team will do some additional work in CAD/CAM to stabilize the design, write any programs needed for the CNC mill or laser, and prepare it for production. Depending on the material and the design, some inlays are cut in-house while others — usually shell — are CNC-cut to precise specification by an outside company, either Precision Pearl or Pearl Works.

Programs also need to be written for a CNC mill to cut the pockets that will hold the inlays.

“We’ll build a separate set of geometry derived from the first set, Andy says. “There are some changes you have to make — it can’t be a perfect friction fit because a piece of wood needs enough clearance to swell or shrink. And remember that you can’t use a rotary tool to cut an inside corner. So if you have any sort of design work that comes to a point, you can’t cut that point. You have to cut outside of it. So you need to build in some separate geometry that gets you clearance there.”

If a new inlay is being introduced to production — especially one that’s more intricate or labor-intensive to install — Andy or Dave Jones will work with our production craftspeople to ensure that it’s a smooth, efficient execution.

“The most important thing with inlay installation work is really just staying present and being aware of what you’re doing at every moment in the process,” Jones says.

One inlay that requires extra care is the paua shell pickguard inlay on our Presentation Series.

“It’s challenging because it’s delicate,” Jones says. “That rosewood veneer for the pickguard is only 18 thousandths of an inch thick. The paua inlays are 20 thousandths — thin enough that they’re also cut on the laser. The pocketing has to be just right. And after inlay, it goes through more careful handling, and then finish and re-registration back at the laser to get a successfully completed product. The way it’s done is a testament to the level of commitment our craftspeople have to quality and to working together.”

Andy’s Approach to Inlay Design at Taylor

Andy echoes the point made by Bob Taylor that his creative focus at Taylor should be on foundational-level improvements to guitars rather than extreme customization. That said, part of that focus has led to an array of thoughtful new inlay designs within the context of Taylor’s standard guitar line.

Since his arrival at Taylor a decade ago and in his role as master guitar designer, Andy has been on a steady path of transforming virtually the entire Taylor guitar lineup, refining the feel, sound and look of most existing models and introducing many new designs as well. Regardless of the type of guitar, the aesthetic approach, he says, is fundamentally the same: It has to be a holistic design process in which the musical personality and the aesthetic treatment share a cohesive identity.

“If you look at any inlay design, it should offer some indication of what the guitar will feel and sound like,” he explains. “Shapes certainly matter. Materials matter. Visual weighting matters, like how bold or how subdued the visual strength of an inlay is.”

He uses the Grand Concert Builder’s Edition 912ce as an example.

“The smaller body tends to give it a more intimate, elegant feel,” he says. “Now imagine it with big, blocky mother-of-pearl inlays at every position. You’d have this massively shiny, reflective fingerboard, and it would be so visually heavy it would look like the guitar might fall right out of a stand. It wouldn’t be in balance with itself visually. But with the Belle Fleur inlay, there’s a balance of strength and delicacy with a little Art Nouveau, a little Art Deco, a little stylized impressionism in there. I see that and think, it looks like the rest of the guitar. It fits. It doesn’t have any one thing that overpowers something else. The types of curves used suggest the curves of the beveled cutaway and the armrest and the overall silhouette of the guitar. All of those elements go together.”

This inlay design philosophy can sometimes present challenges within the framework of the Taylor line. Each series in the line traditionally has shared a suite of appointments (and in most cases, the same back and side wood), yet different body styles within a series can have very different sonic personalities.

So, at times, Andy has exercised his creative license to design outside those constraints. His Builder’s Edition framework gave him one particular avenue to deviate from a series to create another class of “director’s cut” models. With the debut of the Grand Pacific, for example, Andy chose to craft the Builder’s Edition 517 and 717 with an appointment scheme that reflected the traditional heritage of dreadnought-style guitars and a different musical voicing for Taylor, so the two models shared an aesthetic sensibility and an inlay design with each other rather than with the 500 Series or 700 Series.

Anatomy of the Mission Inlay

At a glance, the Mission fretboard inlay suite featured in the Grand Orchestra 618e and 818e looks like a relatively straightforward design, but a closer inspection reveals nuanced details.

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Anatomy of the Mission Inlay

Anatomy of the Mission Inlay

For starters, the inlay incorporates two different materials: the interior portion is mother-of-pearl, which has a natural sheen, while the outer border is ivoroid.

“The ivoroid doesn’t have a reflective sheen,” Andy says. “It’s not the same silver-white color as the pearl, and it’s got a grain to it. The color differences are subtle, so you don’t see much distinction from afar, but the gradation of creamy off-white against an ebony fingerboard allows your eye to look deeper into the design and eases the contrast between the cool shine of that pearl and the warmth of an ebony background. It adds a level of visual complexity that you don’t even notice at first.”

Another noteworthy aspect of the design is the way Andy was able to overcome a limitation of CNC router bits using lasers.

“Using any sort of computer-guided cutting tool, you have to understand that there is no way to cut a sharp inside corner using a round cutter,” he explains. “If you’re cutting parts by hand in a traditional way, you can make a sharp inside corner because a saw blade that’s making a cut can leave a straight edge kerf. But with CNC, the closest you can get is a small radius in that corner that corresponds to a cutter.”

But a laser, he explains, can cut a sharp inside corner, as long as it can cut the through the material. (Lasers tend to have a harder time cutting through shell at certain thicknesses but can easily cut through materials like wood, acrylic or, in this case, ivoroid.)

“With the Mission inlay, if you look closely, you’ll see that the ivoroid, which has been laser-cut, has sharp corners,” Andy says. “The mother-of-pearl centerpiece has sharp outside corners that match, and have one small-radius inside corner. In this case, the inside radius benefits the design. We’re leveraging the unique ability of tools and the materials to do something that would be almost impossible to do by hand with any level of consistency. The width of the ivoroid band is ultra-consistent, within tenths of thousandths of an inch. These inside corners are always exactly where you intended them to be, and the radius is always exactly the right size. You couldn’t achieve that level of consistency by hand. I think this is my favorite block inlay design so far. It has so much visual boldness without feeling primitive.”

Another example (though not a Builder’s Edition design) was the redesign of the Grand Orchestra in 2020 to feature V-Class bracing and a new appointment scheme. The two retooled models, the 618e and 818e, feature a shared inlay, the Mission, which is different from the other inlays used with the 600 and 800 Series. Andy chose to design a block-style inlay as a visual reference for the guitar’s big, bold and powerful voice, but upon closer inspection, there is an additional level of subtle detailing in the inlay — the mother-of-pearl block in the center is actually surrounded by an outer ring of laser-cut ivoroid that offers a subtle element of gradation. (For more on the technical execution of that inlay design, see our sidebar.)

“It feels appropriate for a Grand Orchestra guitar,” Andy says. “It embodies how I’d describe the sound of a Grand Orchestra. It’s powerful, bold, domineering, but also with this level of complexity and refinement that belies its sheer size. You can use a piece of inlay — a position marker, a mere decoration — as a design opportunity for the guitar to affirm itself because all the elements tell a similar story. When you look at the completed instrument as a player, you intuitively understand that the parts blend harmoniously. To me, that’s a successful inlay. I’d like to think that a hundred years from now, a player could look at that guitar and somehow intuitively know it all works.”

It probably would sound pretty amazing, too.

In a future edition of Wood&Steel, Taylor’s Director of Natural Resource Sustainability, Scott Paul, will offer a closer look at our sourcing efforts relating to natural materials like mother-of-pearl and abalone.

Such was the case in October, when we unveiled our sporty Grand Theater — better known as the GT. As we detailed in our cover story last issue, master builder Andy Powers had observed a groundswell of interest among players for the compact proportions and nimble feel of smaller guitars, yet players didn’t want to skimp on sound. They wanted a stage- and studio-worthy instrument capable of producing rich, full-bodied tone.  

Andy had actually been kicking around design ideas on and off for a few years before Taylor committed to developing what became the GT last winter. From the beginning, he knew that one of the foundational design choices for this guitar, one that would help define both the feel and sound, would be the scale length of the strings (measured from the nut to the saddle). He set his sights on something shorter than the string length range of most modern acoustic guitars (“Most live in the world of somewhere around 25 inches,” he notes), but longer than the typical string length of what would be considered a travel guitar — up to about 23-1/2 inches (the scale length of our GS Mini). To most people, that in-between zone might seem negligible, but for Andy, it was prime real estate to create a new category of guitar with an inviting new feel and sound. In the end, Andy arrived at a scale length of 24-1/8 inches — the equivalent of capo-ing a guitar with a 25-1/2-inch scale length at the first fret. 

For the body proportions, he envisioned something larger than our popular GS Mini but slightly smaller than our Grand Concert. He borrowed the shapely curves of our biggest body style, the Grand Orchestra, but scaled them down and made the body shallower. 

C-Class bracing is a different mechanism to exaggerate the low-end response out of a relatively small guitar while still delivering the enhancements of the V-Class design.” 

The other critical ingredient was the internal bracing architecture. The challenge was to coax a full voice from the body’s compact proportions. One of the benefits of Andy’s innovative V-Class architecture, introduced in 2018, is its ability to improve the tonal output and produce a uniform response across the frequency spectrum. But due to the GT’s smaller proportions, he needed to resort to a bit of “acoustic alchemy,” as he puts it, in order to enhance the low-end frequencies. That led to an asymmetrical variant of his V-Class design, dubbed C-Class^™ bracing in honor of its cantilevered structural element. 

“It’s a different mechanism to exaggerate the low-end response out of a relatively small guitar,” Andy says, “while still delivering the enhancements of the V-Class design, like improved volume and intonation.” 

When integrated together, the unique design specifications of the GT place it in a category all its own, offering a uniquely appealing blend of playing comfort and sound. The scale length, in tandem with light-gauge (.012-.053) strings, yields a light, slinky tension profile. (It’s the same tension as a guitar with a scale length of 25-1/2 inches tuned down a half step.) The shorter scale length also means slightly condensed fret spacing, making more complicated chords easier to play. 

“It’s one of the easiest playing guitars I’ve ever had my hands on,” wrote Guitar Player magazine gear guru Art Thompson in his review of the GTe Urban Ash for the publication’s December edition, on his way to giving the guitar an Editors’ Pick Award. “It’s as light as a feather, yet so dynamic and expressive.”   

Among the other nuanced touches that contribute to the GT’s hand-friendly feel are a nut width of 1-23/32 inches, which splits the difference between the 1-3/4-inch and 1-11/16-inch nut widths used on other Taylor 6-strings, plus a new neck carve profile that caters to the GT’s unique scale length.   

“This profile has elements of our classic Taylor neck shape and offers a subtle nod to the compound-carve design we developed for the Grand Pacific,” Andy says. “Proportionally, it has a touch more depth and fullness in the player’s hand than you might assume for such a nimble guitar, but the subtle profile transition as you move from the nut to the heel has an appealing, balanced feel that makes playing seem effortless.” 

We get a steady stream of inquiries from folks — from beginners to mature players eager to reduce the stress on their hands and prolong the lifespan of a favorite hobby — looking for model recommendations that offer the easiest playability. Given its many hand-friendly features, the GT is, without question, a great option to explore. 

The Birth of Serious Fun 

When we launched the GT in October — our fastest-selling US model launch ever — one message we sent with our “serious fun” tag line was the fusion of easy handling and high performance we feel the GT embodies. Historically speaking, our GS Mini became arguably the most successful guitar we’ve ever offered in part because we were able to blend couch-friendly size with a surprisingly robust voice. Yet we knew there was room — and a desire among players — for another level of musical sophistication from a compact guitar. 

Our debut model, the GT Urban Ash, features solid Urban Ash back and sides with a solid spruce top, and comes with optional ES2 electronics. The choice of this species of ash (also known as Shamel or evergreen ash) was two-fold: We loved its mahogany-like tonal characteristics, and we saw this guitar as another exciting demonstration of our commitment to our urban wood initiative — using responsibly sourced wood from end-of-life trees slated for removal from municipal areas. 

We also wanted to make our first GT model broadly accessible to players, so we gave it modest appointments and introduced it in the same price range as our American Dream Series guitars, making it among the most affordable U.S.-made, all-solid-wood guitars in the Taylor line. 

So far, the guitar has been warmly embraced by reviewers and the artists who’ve had a chance to get their hands on it. 

Artist Spotlight: FINNEAS

Read our Q&A with award-winning songwriter and producer FINNEAS, among the first to play the new GT K21e.

Read the Q&A

As part of his “First Look” video series, Premier Guitar gear editor John Bohlinger shared his initial impressions of the GT and liked its “bluesy mojo.” He also picked up on the  “serious fun” duality of the guitar. 

“It seems like the kind of thing you could go disappear in the woods with for a few days and then go play a concert in an arena the next day,” he said after a test drive. 

For more early reactions to the GT Urban Ash guitar, see the “Review Riffs” section at the end of this story. 

New GT Models 

From its earliest stage of development, the GT offered great potential as another versatile framework for Andy to present other appealing tonewood voicings (and aesthetic treatments) within the Taylor line. In fact, we’ve officially adopted it as a member of our family of body shapes, assigning the numeral 1 to designate it within our model naming scheme when adding it to an existing Taylor series.  

To kick off 2021, we’re excited to expand the GT footprint with two new models: the rosewood/spruce GT 811e, which brings another rich voice to our 800 Series, and the all-koa GT K21e, which adds an enticing new musical personality to our Koa Series. 

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Watch guitar guru and music director Nicholas Veinoglou show off the tone and style of our two latest GT guitars.

Meet the GT 811e…   

Andy was eager to craft a GT guitar with the classic rosewood and Sitka spruce wood pairing.  

He compares working with the woods in this context to the way different chefs or regions use staple ingredients in a fresh way to place their own culinary imprint on a familiar dish.  

“With the GT 811, you’ll hear that familiar spruce and rosewood flattop guitar sound, but as a result of the GT’s fresh form and structure, the listening and playing experiences deliver a distinctly new dimension,” Andy says. “This iteration retains the slinky, ultra-easy handling and string feel, svelte body contours, and surprisingly broad GT voice we love, but it’s been shaped into a denser, harmonically saturated sound. The top responds quickly to even the most delicate articulation, and it’s buoyed by the deep and supportive sound rosewood is known for.”

Aesthetically, the guitar shares many standard 800 Series appointments, including maple binding with rosewood top trim, an abalone rosette, our Element inlay scheme in mother-of-pearl, a rosewood pickguard, and a gloss-finish body. Distinctions include C-Class bracing, an armrest-free body (due to the GT’s comfortably small form), and Taylor Mini tuners in smoked nickel (the Minis are more appropriate for the guitar’s smaller proportions, and their lighter weight keeps the guitar physically balanced). The GT 811e also features onboard ES2 electronics and comes with our attractive AeroCase, which players love for its blend of lightweight yet super-sturdy attributes.  

…And the GT K21e 

The all-koa edition of the GT introduces a unique harmony of aesthetic beauty, playing comfort, and sonic expression.  

“Tonally, this guitar is the perfect demonstration of the midrange balance and sweetness koa is known for,” Andy says. “It has a vibrantly focused sound, with a smoothly rounded attack. The balanced response is broadly useful for a player who will use it as a rhythm instrument, a fingerstyle guitar, or for an electric guitar-oriented playing style.” 

The models boast solid, figured koa top, back and sides, with a shaded edgeburst around the body and neck. Additional Koa Series appointments include maple binding and top purfling, an elegant maple Spring Vine inlay scheme, a 4.5-mil gloss-finish body, and Gotoh Mini 510 tuners in antique gold. It comes equipped with our ES2 pickup and includes Taylor’s AeroCase. 

One interesting tonal distinction between the new GT models and the original GT Urban Ash, beyond the different sonic flavors of the woods themselves, is the effect of the different finish treatments, as Andy explains. 

“The GT Urban Ash guitars wear an ultra-thin, water-based matte finish, which has a super-low damping factor, allowing a direct and organic overtone profile from these woods,” he says. “Both the 800 Series and Koa Series GT guitars are completed with our more traditional gloss Taylor finish, which subtly filters the characteristics of each piece of wood, refining the response.” 

Whichever GT model you find yourself gravitating toward, one thing is for certain: a great playing experience runs in the family. 

For more details on all Taylor GT models, including complete specifications, photos, video demos and more, visit taylorguitars.com and our digital edition of this issue. For model availability, contact your preferred Taylor dealer.