“The dimensions of the Mini inherently have constraints on what you can coax from the design,” Andy says. “It’s a great guitar for its size, but you can’t make it sound significantly bigger until you make the strings longer.”

It’s the same truth that Bob Taylor discovered years ago when looking to turbocharge the Baby Taylor, our original travel-size guitar, to infuse it with a bigger, fuller voice.

“Usually we find that within the confines of an existing design, no matter how much we hotrod that, it doesn’t change it very much,” Bob said in a Wood&Steel story back in 2010 — a story detailing how Bob’s initial redesign efforts with the Baby led to the birth of the GS Mini. Bob eventually realized he would need a longer fret scale and a bigger body, and the rest is history. The GS Mini has gone on to become one of the most popular guitars Taylor has ever made.

But Bob also understands the Mini’s sonic limitations based on its size.

“If I were to describe the Mini’s tone, I would say it’s fun, it’s legit,” Bob says. “But if you play a GS Mini for a long time and then you pick up an Academy 10, which is a bigger guitar, you’re like, ‘Oh, wow.’”

Travel-Size vs. Full-Size

If you think about the classification of steel-string acoustic guitars by overall size, they are generally separated into two basic categories: full-size and travel-size, the latter obviously named for their extra portability. One of the delineating factors is the string length, a.k.a. scale length or fret scale — basically the measure of the string length from the nut to the saddle, which represents the maximum vibrating length of the unfretted open string.

In general, travel guitars have a shorter scale length that ranges up to about 23-1/2 inches, which happens to be the scale length of the GS Mini. Full-size or full-scale guitars usually have a scale length between 24-3/4 and 25-1/2 inches. Taylor’s standard full-scale guitars come in two scale lengths: 24-7/8 inches for our Grand Concert models and the redesigned Grand Symphony, and 25-1/2 inches for our other models, which sits at the longer end of the typical scale length range.

If you’ve paid attention to the guitar designs Andy has introduced since his arrival at Taylor nearly a decade ago, you might have noticed that one area he has explored with successful results has been our hand-friendly 12-fret Grand Concert models. (Our Grand Concert has been our smallest “full-size” body style.) Updated for the modern era, their combination of a small body with shorter 12-fret neck and 24-7/8-inch scale length adds up to a guitar that’s easy to hold in your lap, with a lower string tension and a fret span that’s slightly reduced, making fretting easier.

Since their release, our 12-fret guitars have become an increasingly popular option among players, especially those looking to reduce the stress on their fretting hand. But those guitars also pump out a lively tonal response, especially in the midrange frequencies, thanks in part to the location of the bridge closer to the center of the lower bout.

Andy has also leveraged the strengths of our 12-fret/Grand Concert design platform to introduce more player-friendly 12-string models, like the 562ce, 362ce and recent Builder’s Edition 652ce, which took our already established reputation for making the easiest-playing 12-strings in the industry to another standard of comfort and musical utility.

All along the way, Andy has also been thinking about that middle zone between travel-size and full-size, and the possibilities of a guitar with proportions that sit somewhere between the size and scale of the GS Mini and the Grand Concert.

“I looked at the unexplored areas between conventional travel and long scale lengths, and it seemed obvious that something was missing there,” he says. “It felt like a whole other size category was hidden from existence. I wanted to make something that was big enough to sound good, yet small enough to take comfort and playability to a fun new level,” he says.

A New Mid-Length Scale

Shaping a New Body Style

With the guitar’s scale length defined, Andy set out to design a new body style with a set of proportions between the GS Mini and Grand Concert. He envisioned a non-cutaway shape and borrowed the curves of Taylor’s large Grand Orchestra body, scaling them down appropriately. While the width of the lower bout (15”) is the same as the Grand Concert, the body length (18-1/2”) is an inch shorter, and the body depth (3-3/4” measured at the soundhole) is shallower than the GC (4-3/8”).

The body was named the Grand Theater to align with the “Grand” naming convention shared by our other standard body styles. But around the Taylor campus, calling it the GT seemed to suit the fun, inviting, youthful musical personality associated with the guitar.

New C-Class^™ Bracing

To voice the GT, Andy leveraged the same foundational concepts that informed his innovative V-Class bracing architecture, namely the interplay of stiffness parallel to the strings to produce long-sustaining notes, and flexibility to produce pleasing volume. But with the slightly smaller body size, he wanted to manipulate the frequency response more, so he took a different approach, designing an asymmetrical bracing pattern.

“V-Class is intended to be very linear in how it responds over the whole register,” he explains. “Every note you play has a remarkably uniform characteristic. Working with this perfectly proportioned smaller body and string length, however, I wanted a more asymmetrical sonic response. With the asymmetrical architecture, I can exaggerate the guitar’s lower frequency response. It’s typically a challenge to make a small body respond well on the low end of the frequency spectrum — it doesn’t have as large a surface area to flex and move the air required. Using this altered bracing pattern, the response belies the overall smaller size, seriously upping the fun factor.”

Because the architecture employs a cantilevered design concept to voice the guitar, we named it C-Class bracing.

Debuting with Urban Ash

Both Andy and Bob Taylor saw the launch of this new guitar as another great opportunity to affirm our long-term commitment to using Urban Ash, a tonewood we introduced earlier this year on our Builder’s Edition 324ce and on our new Grand Symphony 326ce, which also debuts in this issue. Responsibly sourced from Shamel ash trees scheduled for removal from municipal areas in Southern California, this ash’s tonal properties rival those of high-quality Honduran mahogany — dry, woody and clear, with pleasing midrange warmth.

It’s a wood Bob Taylor has fondly taken to calling the golden retriever of tonewoods.

“This ash just wants to please you,” he says. “It dries easily, cuts easily, bends easily, sands easily, machines easily, and performs really well musically,” he says. “Everything about it is perfect.”

The solid ash back and sides are paired with a solid spruce top. Like our new American Dream guitars, the fretboard, peghead overlay and bridge feature durable and attractive smoked eucalyptus. Astute observers will notice that the size of the bridge has been scaled down to be appropriate for the GT body.

We’re launching the new guitar model as the GT Urban Ash, with the option of our onboard ES2 electronics. Also like its American Dream model counterparts, the GT will make its debut at the most accessible price point among our US-made guitars — in the range of our 200 Deluxe Series guitars, which make the GT and American Dream our best-priced all-solid wood, US-made guitars.

Appointments for the GT Urban Ash include Italian acrylic Pinnacle fretboard inlays, a three-ring koa rosette, black top purfling, Urban Sienna stain on the ash back and sides, a super-thin 2-mil matte finish, Taylor nickel mini tuners, and our lightweight but super-durable AeroCase^™.

Andy and our product development group see great potential for the GT, with the possibility of releasing models in other series across the Taylor line in the near future.

The Feel: “Just Right”

As a guitar that was essentially engineered from the ground up — featuring a new scale length, body shape, neck dimensions and bracing — the magic of the GT is the integration of those elements into a unique harmony of feel and sound. From its design beginnings, Andy’s pursuit of another category of guitar that lived in the sweet spot between a travel- and full-scale instrument gave it a certain “just-right” identity around the Taylor campus. In fact, its official code name among the product development group was “Project Goldilocks.”

Strung with light-gauge strings (.012-.053), the GT has the same string tension as if you tuned a guitar with a 25-1/2” scale length down a half step (E-flat to E-flat). The reduced tension feels like the guitar is strung with a set of 11s (Custom Light, .011-.052), making every note feel slinkier, yet you still get the power and punch out of a larger string.

The reduced fret spacing of the shorter scale length also makes some of those more complicated chords easier to play.

“When you try to finger a complex chord that spans several frets, you can actually do it on this guitar, where many guitars would make it a struggle,” Andy says. “Even for somebody with a long finger reach, this fret spacing is comfortable, just like playing higher on the fingerboard. It’s physically easy to press the strings down with the lower string tension, and the closer fret spacing offers better dexterity.”

Another unique neck specification compared to other Taylor models is a nut width of 1-23/32 inches — wider than 1-11/16 and narrower than 1-3/4, providing comfortable string spacing. That, together with the compact neck-to-body relationship, naturally brings your hands a little closer together, which makes forming barre chords less stressful on the wrist of your fretting hand.

As much as Andy enjoys nerding out about the design elements that imbue the GT with its unique musical identity (and appreciates that many Taylor enthusiasts also love getting the inside scoop on the design nuances), he’d much rather hand the guitar to someone and simply encourage them to play it. Like the GS Mini, the GT’s comfortable feel gives it an inviting accessibility, while the sounds it makes will give any working musician a tool that inspires them in a new way.

“A player doesn’t necessarily need to know how or why this guitar works to enjoy it any more than they need to know all the technical mechanics of a car in order to enjoy driving it someplace,” Andy says. “The important thing is to simply pick up the guitar and play it.”

Artist Love

Jay Parkin from the Taylor marketing team, who manages our content creation and also co-hosts our From the Factory podcast and our weekly streaming video show Taylor Primetime on Taylor’s YouTube channel, has been working with our Director of Artist Relations, Tim Godwin, to get the GT into the hands of artists over the last several months. Across the board, players love the overall feel, the responsiveness, and the tonal output.

“This guitar is so great because I absolutely love the sound of a huge acoustic, but I’m a tiny person,” said Los Angeles singer-songwriter Sara Niemietz. “This fits perfectly, it plays fast, and it sounds real.”

Lead vocalist/guitarist Chris Conley from the rock band Saves the Day texted Jay: “Why is this thing so perfect? I can’t stop playing it. Like, I can’t.”

Keith Goodwin from the band Good Old War texted this: “OH MY FREAKING GOODNESS. I’ve never played a guitar like this in my life.”

Los Angeles-based guitarist Nicholas Veinoglou, who works as a musical director, songwriter and educator, and tours both nationally and internationally with Jordan Fisher and Atlantic Records recording artist Bazzi, swooned over the guitar after having a chance to play it.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever had a guitar feel so at home in my hands right out of the box,” he said. “This reminds me of why I started to play guitar.”

Jay formed his own impression after having a chance to record the guitar a few times for some video content.

“This is the perfect guitar for recording,” he says. “It sounds so unbelievably big, yet focused at the same time.”

Audio engineer and cinematographer Gabriel O’Brien, who penned the piece on recording an acoustic guitar in this issue, has been playing and recording with it.

“It plays so easily,” he says. “It delivers all the things people wish for in a premium GS Mini — lighter strings, wider nut, solid wood, slightly longer scale — but that’s what makes the GT very much its own thing. I’ve been mixing it for other videos and it records really well. I’ve been keeping it by my mixing desk and taking guitar breaks regularly with it. In fact, I love the tone so much I decided to re-record my guitar parts on another project with it.”

Look for the new Taylor GT Urban Ash at authorized Taylor dealers starting in October. You can also learn more about the development of the GT in our From the Factory video podcast.

After nearly half a century, the takeaways, Kurt and Bob have learned, are that neither the good times nor the bad times last forever, and that the right mix of passion and gritty determination will propel you through the roughest stretches. “When we were a small company and broke, we worked hard and never quit no matter how hopeless it seemed,” he says. “We just put our heads down and kept working, brainstorming, trying. We didn’t have a foundation to build upon. We had to invent everything and look for bright ideas to respond to the marketplace. And we had some real emergencies along the way, where we had one shot to get it right or fail and not survive. That ability to respond to adversity has gotten baked into our DNA as a company.”

The nature of their journey has given Bob and Kurt a profound respect for the working musicians of the world, who travel a parallel path that also demands adaptability and hard-shelled resilience in pursuit of their passion in order to survive. That same sense of kinship also extends to fellow instrument makers and proprietors of independent music shops, and really anyone who has pursued their dream with tenacity. Though Taylor is a larger company now, with a deeper pool of talent and resources at its disposal, master guitar designer Andy Powers, now also an ownership partner, says one of the strengths of Taylor’s culture is that we can still think like a small shop.

“One of the reasons I love working with Bob and Kurt is the way they have maintained that scrappy, fearless mentality of an upstart,” he says. “They’ve built a heritage of working hard through the good days, the mundane days, and the hard ones.” Of course, the juggernaut of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its sweeping global disruption, has introduced a whole different scale of hardship and complexity to navigate. And yet Bob, Kurt, and Andy, together with other Taylor leaders, have again turned to the Taylor playbook in times of adversity: batten down the hatches, get creative, and design solutions that serve the needs of our partners in the music community.

Working with our Wood Suppliers

The disruptive nature of the pandemic also presented challenges for Taylor to manage with our wood suppliers. For one thing, we work with suppliers that range from very small to very large, and each situation can call for a unique solution. The smaller suppliers are often more vulnerable, explains our Director of Wood Operations and Sourcing, Charlie Redden. “Many of our wood suppliers have only two or three customers who buy from them once per year,” he says. “When a small village in Central America relies on one or two customers — and we rely on them — the partnership needs close attention during a time like this.” 

Another challenge came from the way the pandemic threw our supply chain rhythm out of sync because it brought an abrupt halt to our manufacturing operation, yet in many cases our wood purchasing commitments are locked in for a year or longer. And often the livelihoods of those suppliers are at stake. “We’re finding creative ways to buy just enough wood to keep our critical suppliers in business while maintaining a healthy inventory level of wood for Taylor,” Redden says. “And if we can also help our suppliers by connecting them with other market opportunities like the furniture, hobby wood or construction industries to offset the fact that we’re not buying as much wood during this time, we’re happy to do that.”

Helping Artists Adapt

The massive disruption to the music industry has forced artists to get creative in new ways. Some working guitarists have leaned into giving online lessons, while other artists have turned to social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Twitch to post or livestream their performances. Those who’ve built a faithful fanbase have found small ways to leverage social media to monetize their virtual performances, in some cases via paid livestream concerts and in other cases with a virtual tip jar. We’ve lent our support to Taylor artists however we can, mainly by using our social media platforms to promote their livestreams and other performances to Taylor fans. We’ve been putting together a weekly calendar of all the planned livestreams from the Taylor artist family on our Live From Home Digest, located in the blog section of our website. You can check back each week for new artist streams from across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and beyond.

Taylor Director of Artist Relations Tim Godwin says that despite the serious financial challenges so many artists currently face, some have found a silver lining and discovered other benefits during these surreal times. “Some have used the time to woodshed and hone their chops, or focus on writing new material, or explore new ways to share music with listeners from home,” Godwin says. “Others, myself included, have been remotely collaborating more frequently with musician friends. The reality is that many players, for better or worse, are more available at the moment, so in some cases they’re able to finally dig into creative projects they’ve been putting off for a long time. And they’re finding the experience really rewarding.” Other established artists have been serving up virtual performances from home in support of charities. For music fans spending more time at home themselves, the performances offer a refreshingly intimate and down-to-earth connection to their favorite artists. Godwin says that more than ever, this shared experience has underscored the sense of community in the music world, both among people in the industry and between artists and audiences. 

“I’ve been seeing more acts of empathy and kindness between people,” he says. “At a time like this, it gives music, and musicians, a greater sense of purpose. It’s still entertainment, but it’s more than that. It’s a way of engaging people and helping them feel connected even when they’re physically apart. “Even in my role with Taylor, I’ve found that people are more available to talk right now,” Godwin adds. “Whether it’s an artist or someone else who works in the industry, we have more time to discuss partnering on interesting projects and planning ahead.”

Bob and Andy Get to Work

Although Taylor’s guitar production was put on temporary hiatus, behind the scenes, a lot was going on. Bob Taylor and Andy Powers have responded to the challenge of the moment by working together with renewed vigor on several projects, their design instincts heightened and synchronized as they creatively fed off each other. “Andy and I both thrive on creative thinking,” Bob says. “We’re both builders and problem solvers. When we feel like our backs are against the wall, we love to innovate our way out of problems, and because there’s more at stake, we work faster.”

For his part, Andy always has an array of guitar designs simmering on the back burner, waiting for the right time to be brought to life. The current reality, coupled with the uncertainty ahead, he says, has provided the stimulus to push several projects forward. “We’re working on these projects for the benefit of everyone — our employees, our dealers and suppliers, and of course, players,” he says. “We’re taking everything into account and using all of our resources to calibrate everything we make for this time we’re living in.” While we’re not at liberty to reveal our coming designs just yet, Andy says they’ll be imbued with a renewed sense of purpose. In the product development meetings held via teleconference in April, both Andy and Bob were more energized than ever as they discussed the next wave of products we plan to introduce. “While some might say that we just make guitars, I believe we do something far more than that,” Andy says. “We can help create a bright spot of hope, of relief, and a way to share our experiences in the form of another song.”

New Safety Protocols

During Taylor’s factory shutdown, our executive and management teams oversaw the comprehensive overhaul of our on-site safety protocols in both El Cajon and Tecate, following the official guidelines of state and local health officials. This included implementing strict social distancing within the factories, increasing cleaning regimens, and mandating the use of personal protective equipment for anyone on campus. Non-contact infrared forehead thermometers also will be used to take employees’ temperatures before they enter the building for work.

Other modifications include safe spacing between workstations, including and Plexiglas shielding (fabricated in-house) where appropriate, along with safe spacing arrangements in the kitchens and break areas. At our Tecate factory, we leveraged our sewing capabilities there — we make many of our own gig bags — to begin producing face covers. “We’re using them onsite in both our Tecate and El Cajon locations,” says Taylor’s VP of Manufacturing, Chris Wellons. “We’ve also donated several thousand face covers.” We were authorized to reestablish some factory operations on a limited basis in May with a small group of craftspeople (all participating voluntarily), with a return to full-time factory operations starting May 18.

One of the important goals of adapting our work environment to the new realities is preserving the company culture, says VP of Product Development Ed Granero, a member of Taylor’s executive team along with Wellons. “We’ve fostered a collaborative, hard-working, ‘open-door’ culture here,” Granero says. “Our strength is in working as a team. As we move into this next iteration of our work life, we will find new ways to work as a team and still accomplish our goals. As our production folks return to work, our safety measures are an important step toward building trust as we all begin working together again.” 

Granero notes that while guitars might not be considered “essential,” the people at Taylor absolutely are. “The people here are as hard-working, as innovative, and as dedicated as anyone else you will find anywhere,” he says. Both Granero and Wellons also wanted to acknowledge all those at Taylor who helped keep our “pilot light lit” at the factory during the production hiatus. Wellons was effusive in his praise for the way people from multiple departments, from Human Resources to Facilities, came together to implement the new protocols. “I just want to extend a huge thank-you to all of our employees involved in the planning, coordination, and, most of all, execution of these plans on-site,” he shared in a note to the company. “We deeply appreciate the courage and dedication everyone has shown during what has been an unprecedented and unsettling time.” 

The Path Ahead

As this new normal begins to take shape, Kurt draws from his and Bob’s past experiences as he looks ahead. “We’re figuring out how to navigate these latest choppy waters,” he says. “We’ve got incredible leadership and creativity here, and we’ve got amazing employees. I have complete confidence that we’ll come through this as an even stronger company. “One of the many things I love about our company culture is the way we all support each other as we work together toward a common goal, especially in difficult times,” he says. “Some of my proudest moments here have been the ways we all have pitched in to respond to adversity as a group. While these current circumstances might seem unique, the same holds true. Bob and Andy shared with our employees that there’s no group of people they’d rather face this latest challenge alongside. I would echo that sentiment and expand it to include the broader music community of retailers and suppliers we’re privileged to be a part of.”    

Q&A with Taylor Co-founder and CEO Kurt Listug