Ed. Note: This article originally ran in our summer 2016 edition. Since we recently released batches of special-edition 6-string and 8-string baritone guitars, we thought we’d republish it for readers who may have missed it the first time.

When I saw a Taylor 8-string baritone guitar for the first time, I thought, it’s so weird … and so perfect for me. I saw this magnificent instrument as something new and very specialized, without hope for a wider playing audience. Once I got one home, I realized that it was also born from the luthier’s tradition of small evolutionary steps. As a result, this logical design makes the 8-string baritone — and the slightly less eccentric 6-string baritone — not only a unique instrument, but one that any guitarist can be comfortable with almost immediately. 

Tuning

When I had a chance to ask Bob Taylor who he thought that guitar was made for, I was delighted that his answer doubled my appreciation for the instrument. “It’s for old guys who can’t hit the high notes in ‘Have You Ever Seen The Rain’ anymore,” he quipped. And there you have it: a simple way to play your favorite song but still sing melodies that are otherwise out of your range. No more transposing or retuning; just pick up that baritone, strum a C chord shape, and out comes a glorious G. And that high A note — found in far too many John Fogerty songs, not to mention Journey, The Who, Eagles, et al. — becomes a much more comfortable E. (If this pitch and singing jargon is new to you, check out my “Hit Your Mark” singing lesson in the Spring 2013 issue of Wood&Steel.)

I realize that Bob was only being half-serious in his comment — if anyone knows that there are innumerable uses for the baritone it’s Mr. Taylor himself — but there is also a lot of truth in his jest. Guitar-playing singer-songwriters tend to favor “guitar-friendly” keys (G, A, E and C, for example), which means many of them end up singing a lot of “high” notes that the average guitar hobbyist just can’t hit without some professional vocal training. What the baritone allows the average player/singer to do is to play songs, strumming the original chord shapes, but the chords that are heard are a fourth lower, thus giving the recreational player a better chance of staying in key vocally.

A normal guitar only allows you to go up in pitch with a capo. The baritone, by being tuned a fourth lower, actually allows you go up and down in pitch.

“This is all great,” I hear you saying, “but what if I don’t need to go a fourth lower? Maybe I just need a whole step lower. Or I don’t need it lower at all, I just like the sound of the 8-string.” Well, the answer to these questions is so simple that some people call the solution a “cheater.” Yes, I’m talking about a capo. (I’ve found that the Kyser 12-string capo works best.)

Unlike a normal guitar, which only allows you to go up in pitch with a capo, the baritone, by being tuned a fourth lower, actually allows you go up and down in pitch. All you have to do to get a baritone into standard tuning is to put that capo at the 5th fret. Play a G chord; a G chord is what you hear. But if you want to jam out with a Van Halen song in Eb, don’t retune; just drop the capo one fret, strum E, and out comes Eb. Or say you want to play along with the original version of “Yesterday” by The Beatles. Drop that capo two frets — “Yesterday” sounds in F, but McCartney played it out of G, tuned down a whole step. Is Hendrix’s “Hear My Train a Comin’” more your speed? Capo the baritone at the first fret and I wish you luck (Hendrix was tuned down two whole steps!). As you can see, the versatility of the low tuning alone is enough to encourage one’s interest in the baritone. But wait, there’s more….

Texture, Tone and Faux Bass

One of the other many virtues of the baritone’s lower tuning is the sonic manifestation of chords and single-notes that place the baritone’s sound in between a standard guitar and a bass…or as I like to think of it, a cello. The 8-string has the additional benefit of the jangle of the two middle octave strings, which fills out the sound even more, particularly when strumming.

The practical applications of these unique characteristics include: 1) textural variation when playing with other guitarists, due to the thicker strings and unison strings (just strumming G, C and D in unison with a standard guitar is an auditory thrill); 2) chord voicing variations that allow the baritone to be played in different frequency registers, using different chord shapes; and 3) the ability to play faux basslines. These last two functions could stand a bit more explanation, so let’s put them into song context. 

Example 1 is the A section melody for the old-time/bluegrass staple “Angeline The Baker,” notated for standard tuning guitar, in the key of D, using open position “cowboy” chords. Nothing unusual here.

Download File

Example 2 is the exact same melody but here transcribed for baritone. If you don’t have a baritone handy, don’t let this confuse you: Yes, the key has changed on paper, but when you play the baritone in the key of G, it will actually sound in the key of D. As you’ve no doubt noticed, not only has the melody changed positions, but the chords also are different. Once again, because of the baritone’s down-a-fourth tuning, the G chord will actually sound as a D chord. This is an example of using the baritone for chord voicing and frequency register variations. 

Example 3 introduces a bassline for standard guitar. Now if you are playing this on a normal guitar, you’ll hear that Example 3 does work, but it’s pretty thin for a bassline.

On the other hand, Example 4, transcribed for baritone, is fat, rich and full, like a bassline should be.

A New Instrument?

In the early 1700s Bartolomeo Cristofori invented what we now call the piano, which was a radical variation of the harpsichord (and then some). Though the outward physical appearance of both harpsichord and piano are similar, no one would ever confuse the sound of the two instruments. Additionally, the two instruments could be played the same way, but the greater expressive control and tonal flexibility the piano offered required composers to rethink their approach to keyboard music and helped create a new body of musical works that changed music forever.   

This is how I see and hear the 8-string baritone.

I’ve already made my case for the 6- and 8-string baritone as a fine addition to any player’s collection, but now allow me to get a little more personal and suggest that the limits of the 8-string baritone are only those of our own imaginations.

Personally, I have been doing my best to slowly but surely compose a body of music specifically designed for the 8-string baritone. These pieces emphasize the individual texture, tone and timbre of the instrument; highlight the massive, resonant overtones the guitar produces; and exploit the extreme register differences found between unwound, doubled, and wound bass strings. For all intents and purposes, these pieces can only be properly performed on an 8-string baritone, a guitar that can produce music no other instrument can. And I’m writing the music because it wants to be written. Ultimately this is why the 8-string baritone is perfect for me: It inspires. It induces. And it responds!

After 24 years, we’ve decided it’s time to change our strings.

We’re happy to share that we’ve begun installing D’Addario’s premium XS coated phosphor bronze strings on our acoustic steel-string models. As of this summer, most of Taylor’s U.S.-built models are being strung with the XS coated strings (along with XS coated nickel electric strings on our T5z models), and we’ve begun that transition on our Mexico-made guitars (Baby Taylor through 200 Deluxe Series).

The decision came from Taylor’s chief guitar designer, Andy Powers, who favors the sound, feel, durability, consistency and performance of the XS coated strings in tandem with his latest guitar designs and other models within the Taylor lineup.

“We’re excited for this new chapter of partnership with D’Addario,” Andy says. “The XS strings are really consistent and produce a great response. By working to optimize the musicality of our guitars, we want to help musicians express themselves to the fullest.”

The move builds on a longstanding association between Taylor and D’Addario, whose steel-string sets we used for many years, and whose nylon strings we’ve used since the introduction of our nylon-string guitars in 2003. There’s always been a kinship between the two companies —reflecting a shared passion for innovation, manufacturing excellence and sustainability leadership.

“I feel like we’re really on the same wavelength,” says D’Addario founder, Chairman of the Board and Chief Innovation Officer Jim D’Addario of the two companies. “We really run our businesses the same way.”

Performance Consistency

Throughout his tenure at Taylor, Andy has talked about the different ingredients that factor into a guitar designer’s recipe for a guitar — like the choice of tonewoods, the body dimensions, the internal bracing architecture — and the distinctive ways they interact to shape a guitar model’s sonic identity.  

Another essential ingredient is the guitar strings, which literally set the guitar in motion. By design, the strings should optimize the musical output of the guitar. And for Andy, there are clear musical metrics he looks for in a string’s performance: pitch accuracy, dynamic range, sustain and feel.

Of particular importance, he says, is the performance consistency across a set of strings.

“More than anything, what I always look for is whether the strings all behave in the same kind of way,” he says. “As a guitar maker, I want the exact same character from one string to the next. Otherwise, you can ruin everything about the guitar.”

That desire for consistency across each string set is amplified by the scale of Taylor’s production — in the range of 200,000 guitars each year. With our manufacturing sophistication, we’ve been able to bring an extraordinary level of consistency to the build quality of our instruments. Similarly, D’Addario has achieved impressive consistency through its proprietary string-making technology and precision manufacturing processes, which allow them to produce 800,000 strings a day.

The Value of Coated Strings

There’s another important consideration with strings: their performance longevity, especially in a store environment, where a guitar might be played by many customers before it finds a permanent home. No matter how well-crafted a guitar might be, dirty or dead strings will compromise the guitar’s tonal response, potentially causing it to languish in a store.

That’s one reason why Taylor adopted Elixir strings for our steel-string acoustics back in 1999. The company was the first string maker to introduce a coated guitar string, and that revolutionary technology proved to extend the string life considerably in a high-traffic retail setting.

Collaborating with D’Addario to Make the GS Mini Bass

A great example of the innovative spirit that connects Taylor and D’Addario is the development of our award-winning GS Mini Bass, launched in 2017. Andy had been exploring ways to take the compact proportions of the popular GS Mini and make a small, ergonomically friendly acoustic bass guitar — a radical notion given that the scale length was about 10 inches shorter than a typical bass. A traditional string set simply wouldn’t be able to make accurate notes at that string scale length.

Andy pitched his idea to D’Addario’s string engineering team, who proved to be hugely instrumental as a development partner. For more than a year, D’Addario’s team worked with Andy to develop a custom string formulation that would allow the bass to function. In the end, the collaboration yielded a unique solution — a nylon-core string overwound with a traditional phosphor bronze wrap wire.

“That combination worked great,” Andy says. “Without those strings, I’m not sure this instrument would have been possible.”

Since the bass’s launch in 2017, Andy has stayed connected with the D’Addario team, both as he pursued his new guitar design recipes and as D’Addario pushed forward with their own string R&D projects, on their way to releasing their premium XS coated strings in 2021. Andy had the opportunity to beta test some of the XS string set prototypes along the way and offered feedback on how they performed with his V-Class bracing designs and other new models he was developing like the Taylor Grand Pacific.

Jim D’Addario remembers the impact of a complimentary note Andy sent after testing one particular iteration of XS strings.

“When that email about the testing sample went around the office, there was a bit of celebrating,” he shares.

XS String Innovation

Developing and refining the technology to produce the coating for the XS strings, says Jim D’Addario, took his engineering team more than four and a half years.

“We had to develop our own film that we would treat, impregnate and slit, and put it on spools,” he says. “We had to make special winding machines to wind that thin ribbon — it’s 1/30th the thickness of Saran wrap. And we came up with what I think is the best coated string on the market because it’s long-lasting and you can’t tell it’s coated [in terms of] the sound. It’s almost identical to an uncoated string. It’s one of the products we make that I’m proudest of.”

For Andy, the final version of the strings checked all the boxes he was looking for in advancing his designs.

“The [XS] string moves more in the way that it should to make an accurate note,” he says. “That was a big step for me. It just feels more musical. It’s a beautiful feeling. A great response. Really consistent. It’s got all the metrics that I could say make something musical: the dynamic range, the pitch accuracy, the feel, the sustain… And then you learn how it’s made and it starts to make sense.”

Anatomy of a String: A Closer Look at D’Addario’s XS String Technology

• Ultra-thin coating: Ten times thinner than a human hair, D’Addario’s proprietary coating technology offers the highest degree protection from contaminants to maximize the string life. It incorporates a super-thin film coating on the wound strings and a unique polymer treatment on the plain steel strings.
• Hex core construction: The hexagonal core wire enables the wrap wire to grip in a way that improves the dimensional stability and durability and produces precise intonation.
• Fusion Twist technology: According to D’Addario’s team, this construction technique optimizes the tuning stability and improves the break strength for the plain strings.
• Premium high-carbon steel core wire: D’Addario touts its in-house steel processing capability to improve tuning stability and break resistance.
• In-house wire drawing: D’Addario’s proprietary wire drawing machines and processes give them precise control over the quality and consistency of their wire.

Taylor x D’Addario: The Conversation

Earlier this year, in preparation for the launch of our string partnership, Bob Taylor and Andy Powers visited D’Addario’s headquarters in Farmingdale, Long Island, New York, to participate in a conversation with Jim D’Addario. Fretboard Journal publisher Jason Verlinde moderated the chat, which was captured on video, as Bob, Andy and Jim reflected on their relationship, their respect for each other, the philosophies of their respective companies, and why they make compatible business partners.

“Jim [D’Addario] and I have always had a common love for industrializing things,” Bob points out. “Making machines, making high-quality things. I’m highly respectful of Jim’s abilities.”

What’s made D’Addario successful, Jim says, is curiosity and a kind of persistence that’s become ingrained in their culture.

“If I think we’ve got a good idea and if it’s not working out, I stick to it until we get it to work, and that’s really made us what we are. We are always looking for ways to do it better.”  

Persistence in pursuit of guitar innovation underscores the symbiotic nature of both company cultures and speaks to the parallel paths each has traveled over the past half century.

Although Andy came to Taylor later (2010), he has known Jim for a long time and has great respect for what Jim and D’Addario have accomplished.

“When I met Jim, I found a kindred spirit,” Andy says. “It’s the guitar maker in us that wants to be standing alongside the string maker in them.”

Watch the conversation in its entirety below.

Watch Video

The conversation about the strings calls to mind comments Andy made about the importance of feel and response in a 2022 interview in Wood&Steel.

“There are differences beyond sonority, because we’re not talking solely about what you’re hearing, but what the guitar makes you feel,” he says. “This isn’t even directly speaking to how far the strings are from the fretboard, their tension or scale length — setup qualities that are measurable. It’s about the back-and-forth communication you experience when you’re playing a certain guitar. When there’s something about the combination of the sound that comes out of it, the feel of those strings under your fingertips, the resiliency and flexibility, the touch sensitivity — the combination of all the tactile elements and the resulting sound that comes from them — that informs how a player interacts with the guitar.”

Reducing String Waste and Launching a String Recycling Program

An important shared value between Taylor and D’Addario is a commitment to environmental stewardship and socially responsible business practices. One common denominator is the desire to use modern manufacturing methods to create efficiencies and reduce waste. As part of our new string partnership, Taylor and D’Addario have been discussing ways for D’Addario to make strings that are closer to the actual length needed, especially for guitars with shorter scale lengths like the GS Mini, to minimize the waste of excess string material.

Another obvious example of D’Addario minimizing its environmental impact is by making coated strings that greatly extend the performance life, meaning that players won’t have to change their strings as often. And to reduce the waste associated with used strings, D’Addario has invested considerable resources into a pioneering string recycling program called Playback, created in partnership with TerraCycle, a company that specializes in developing solutions for hard-to-recycle products.

Currently administered in the continental U.S., the program enables players to recycle their used guitar and orchestral strings (steel and nylon) by dropping them off in a D’Addario/TerraCycle recycling collection bin at a location near them. Most recycling bins are located in participating music stores. (You can find a recycling location near you here.) Metal strings are melted down and smelted into new metal alloys; nylon strings are recycled into industrial plastic applications.

As part of our string partnership, Taylor is proud to join the program and encourage Taylor owners to recycle their strings. On our campus in El Cajon, California, we’ve set up collection bins for our own internal use in strategic areas of the factory (such as our Repair department). We’ve also become a public string recycling drop-off center listed on the D’Addario website, with a recycling bin located in our Visitor Center.

Through the Playback program, individuals also have the option of shipping their used strings to be recycled by creating a free Players Circle account on the D’Addario website. (A shipping label can be downloaded via the account.) The qualifier is that, in order to reduce the carbon footprint associated with shipping strings, shipments must weigh a minimum of five pounds.

Given that threshold, the folks at D’Addario suggest that interested individuals could collect used strings from other players (friends, bandmates, music classmates) in order to meet the weight requirement and ship larger quantities more efficiently. (Terracycle calls this “brigade work.”) An additional incentive is that the individual will accrue points through their Players Circle account that can be applied as currency toward eligible D’Addario products. 

Between heirloom-quality guitars and premium, long-lasting strings that can eventually be recycled, players can feel better than ever about playing a Taylor.

“I always think of the soundboard kind of like the cone of a speaker,” says Bob Taylor. “It’s the part that’s really vibrating. And I think of the back and sides of the guitar as being like a speaker cabinet.”

For centuries, spruce has been the predominant tonewood choice for the soundboards of stringed instruments, ranging from violin-family instruments to mandolins to acoustic guitars. Piano soundboards are also made with spruce.

So, what’s special about spruce? As a coniferous softwood, spruce is lightweight yet also stiff and strong in the right ways, especially when properly quartersawn (more on that in a bit). Its favorable strength-to-weight ratio, which includes a high degree of elasticity, allows it to hold up to considerable string tension yet also turn the vibrating string energy into a clear, dynamic tonal response.

A quality spruce top can be set in motion easily with a lighter playing attack, yet it also tends to respond well to more aggressive playing without losing tonal clarity. It also projects well and produces pleasing sustain. Spruce is also used for a guitar’s internal bracing, even when the top is a hardwood like mahogany or koa.

Over the years, curious Taylor owners have asked many questions about the important properties of spruce, the choices we make in our selection process, and how different physical characteristics impact the tonal response.

We’ve also talked a lot about soundboards in recent years in conjunction with a guitar’s internal bracing architecture, particularly as we unveiled our innovative V-Class and C-Class bracing designs. These and other bracing patterns orchestrate the movement of the soundboard in nuanced ways and work in tandem with the back and sides to voice the guitar and give it distinctive tonal character.

Straight to the Source: Pacific Rim Tonewoods

This year, with the release of our new Builder’s Edition 814ce, spruce has once again become a topic of conversation due to the model’s four-piece top construction rather than a traditional two-piece top. This unique design feature gives us a great opportunity to take a closer look at our use of spruce from two distinct perspectives: First, we wanted to shed more light on exactly what goes into producing a high-quality spruce soundboard; second, we wanted to put more context around the idea of making four-piece tops as we confront the changing realities of commercially available spruce trees. In both cases, we knew exactly who to enlist to share their expert knowledge: our longtime spruce supply partner, Pacific Rim Tonewoods (PRT).

Located in Concrete, Washington, in the Skagit Valley/North Cascades region (about 50 miles southeast of Bellingham), PRT has been a supplier of premium tonewoods for over 35 years. It’s hard to overstate their importance in the acoustic guitar industry. They supply the lion’s share of Sitka and Lutz spruce tops used on American-made guitars, to the tune of 300,000-400,000 tops per year.

In addition to spruce tops, PRT also supplies sets of figured maple (sourced from their region) and Hawaiian koa for musical instruments. Speaking of koa, PRT is also our partner in the collaborative venture Siglo Tonewoods, a multifaceted forestry initiative that combines native forest restoration in Hawaii with growing instrument-grade Hawaiian koa for future generations of instrument makers.

We wrote about PRT back in our winter 2015 issue (Vol. 81) in the context of the innovative research they were doing with maple — more specifically, how to grow figured maple that would be ideal for musical instruments.

Log buyer and splitterman Justin El-Smeirat references a spruce log’s growth rings as he explains its likely growth history

Color-coded block of spruce that will be cut into guitar tops and brace wood

Guitar top sets being graded

In many respects, PRT founder Steve McMinn and Bob Taylor are kindred spirits: in their natural curiosity and passion for their work; in their desire to make high-quality wood products in innovative ways; and in their commitment to responsible forest stewardship. Through their collaboration over the years, including the Siglo venture, both value taking the long view and are highly motivated to do the work to invest in the future of tonewoods for musical instruments.

Building a Specialty Sawmill for Musical Instruments

As we noted in our 2015 piece, McMinn’s father was a forester in the Pacific Northwest, and Steve followed a similar path, working as a logger to put himself through college, and on trail crews for the U.S. Park Service during summers, which deepened his appreciation for environmental stewardship.

McMinn’s interest in supplying tonewoods for musical instruments was sparked after building a guitar from a kit he ordered and realizing the quality of the woods he received was inferior to what he could get himself. So he started salvaging storm-downed Sitka spruce from U.S. Forest Service land in Alaska and Washington. In the beginning he’d hike into the forest, split a choice spruce log into blocks, and backpack them out. He also learned which properties luthiers look for in a spruce soundboard, and gradually refined his milling operation accordingly to provide the best possible product.

McMinn first pitched Bob Taylor about buying spruce tops with some sample sets pulled out of the trunk of his car in the late 1980s, as Bob told Steve in a recent conversation at the PRT mill.

“You said, ‘If I make a top like this, would you buy them?’ and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah!’” Bob recalled. “You don’t know how close I was to not even being able to get [guitar-grade] spruce — it was getting harder and harder for me to have access to it.”

And that was when Taylor was only producing 4-6 guitars a day.

Bob’s comment speaks to the particular way spruce needs to be cut to optimize it for the performance demands of a guitar top.

Several decades later, PRT has devoted its operation to supplying premium quality tonewoods to instrument makers, and like Taylor and the rest of the guitar industry, has grown larger and more sophisticated. There are new buildings, machines and processes on their campus, all in the service of transforming hulking logs into refined guitar parts.

The PRT team is also pushing the envelope with pioneering research into the science of how spruce produces acoustic sound, identifying the roles that attributes like stiffness, density and damping play, and quantifying those properties in ways that have allowed them to start grading wood based on predictable sonic performance.

The value-added benefit of sonically graded tops, Steve says, is that they can steer the right wood to the right guitars based on its sonic properties rather than simply cosmetic appearance. Or, as Steve likes to say, “We move people past the tyranny of the eyes.”

If you’re into guitars, a visit to the PRT campus and seeing firsthand the combination of skill and care that goes into their processes promises to give you another level of appreciation for what it takes to produce wood sets for musical instruments. That’s why we wanted to go there and spotlight their work.

A marked-up block of spruce illustrates how boards are quartersawn (cut perpendicular to the growth rings). Brace wood is cut in between some of the top cuts

A sonically graded top set is tagged with measurements of its density, stiffness and damping properties

An overlaid template helps determine whether a board is suitable for a dreadnought-size guitar or a smaller body or possibly a 4-piece top

In mid-March, I traveled with Bob Taylor, Scott Paul (our Director of Natural Resource Sustainability) and Taylor Director of Marketing Craig Evans to Concrete for a two-day trip. There, we joined video producer Gabriel O’Brien and another cameraman, Chris Lallier, to document their operation.

Gabriel and Chris spent one day with Steve’s righthand man, general manager and partner Eric Warner, who walked them through the process of transforming a spruce log into guitar tops with the help of a couple of experts: log buyer and splitterman Justin El-Smeirat and sawyer Derrick Schmidt. The second day’s main agenda was to shoot a roundtable discussion with Bob, Scott, Steve and Eric covering a range of topics around the use of spruce for guitar tops.

Among the discussion points were where and how PRT selects spruce logs, why spruce is so suitable for stringed instrument tops, what characteristics they look for, how to cut tops, the importance of quartersawn pieces, and the specialized skills PRT brings to the process.

Eric Warner and Scott Paul also weighed in as the conversation shifted to the changing availability of Sitka spruce and why cutting four-piece tops will become necessary for guitar makers. Bob, Steve, Scott and Eric talked about the realities of working with younger, smaller trees (80-120 years old) rather than the larger old-growth specimens (250 years or more) that people have relied on for hundreds of years, and the importance of adaptability on both the wood cutting and guitar-making fronts.

The conversation, along with a closer look at the milling process, were then edited together and separated into four sections, which you can watch below.

Part 1: The Hunt for Good Top Wood

Bob Taylor and Steve McMinn talk about the growth of Pacific Rim Tonewoods into an industry-leading spruce supplier for musical instrument makers, the characteristics they look for in spruce logs for guitar tops, and the best way to cut spruce for soundboards. PRT log buyer/splitterman Justin El-Smeirat also explains the process of sourcing and transporting spruce logs, what characteristics they look for, and how they assess and cut a log for maximum value.

Watch Video

Part 2: The Beauty of Spruce

Steve McMinn explains in more detail why spruce is suitable for guitar tops. We meet Justin El-Smeirat at the splitting deck, where he demonstrates how to split a spruce round into blocks to maximize yield. Eric Warner explains how making four-piece tops enables PRT to extract more value from a log. And Eric heads inside the mill to show us how spruce blocks are quartersawn into boards on a headrig, dodging defects within the block. Defects will dictate whether they can cut a larger dreadnought-size two-piece guitar top or a four-piece top. In between top board cuts, they’ll cut brace wood.

Watch Video

Part 3: Finding the Best Spruce for Guitars

Steve McMinn and Eric Warner talk about their newest “secret sauce,” sonic grading technology, which allows them to measure and sort spruce based on attributes like density, stiffness and damping. This helps predict its sonic performance properties in a way that provides guitar makers with greater predictability and consistency. Steve and Bob Taylor also talk about the value of precisely quartersawn wood and explain their preference for wider-grain spruce. In the mill, Eric shows us how boards are edged for four-piece tops and explains how boards are steered toward either tops or braces as the sawyer works around defects in the wood.

Watch Video

Part 4: A Changing Forest

Bob Taylor, Steve McMinn, Scott Paul and Eric Warner discuss the diminishing commercial availability of large, old-growth spruce and how sourcing smaller-diameter trees is leading to the cutting of more sets of four-piece tops. Despite it being more work both for cutting tops and making guitars, there are also benefits to be had, such as the ability to use more wood from a log and create an even more consistent grain structure with guitar tops. Bob and Steve talk about their willingness to adapt to the available resources in a way that respects the forest and continues to serve musicians without compromise.

Watch Video

It’s been a few years since Andy Powers put his name on a guitar peghead.

When he joined Taylor Guitars back in 2011, Andy officially shuttered his business as a thriving custom builder whose instrument-making repertoire included flattop acoustics, archtop guitars, mandolins, ukuleles and electric guitars. That diverse instrument range speaks to his omnivorous love of — and expertise for — crafting an array of music-making tools.

Since his arrival, Andy’s focus at Taylor has been on advancing Taylor’s acoustic guitar designs, which have produced a raft of tone-enhancing innovations like his V-Class bracing, along with many award-winning models. But what Taylor fans may not know is how deeply Andy’s life has been rooted in the world of electric guitars.

That’s about to change.

View Fullscreen

On Andy’s behalf, we wanted to share the fruits of his exciting new solo project: a line of electric guitars called Powers Electric.

First, a few disclaimers. This is not a Taylor guitar. It’s a pure electric, a guitar with a design and musical identity all its own, a guitar that currently can only be made by Andy and a few select craftspeople, and in very small numbers. Andy fondly calls it his workshop guitar because of how personal a design it is — his dream electric guitar.

Taylor co-founders Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug encouraged Andy to pursue the project. And they agreed that, in order for it to be the best possible expression of his vision, Andy needed the creative freedom to build it outside the established design language of the Taylor brand.

Of course, we’re excited to share what he came up with. Andy believes there’s room in the electric guitar category for something unique, and we believe he’s created something special.

Before we reveal more about the guitar, it might help to shed more light on how Andy’s background informed his design approach.

An Early Love of Electrics

As a kid, Andy’s first exposure to a guitar was an acoustic that sat at the ready in his family’s house. Between a dad who was a skilled carpenter and a mom who was an artist, there was plenty of encouragement (and surplus wood) to make things, which spurred the precocious kid to attempt to build his first acoustic guitar before he’d even turned 10. In hindsight, he muses that the crude result could at best be referred to as a “guitar-shaped object.” But he was hooked on the idea of making an instrument.

As a player, the first guitar Andy actually bought (with help from his parents) was a used Strat.

“Wow, did I ever have fun with that guitar,” he recalls. “Early on, I was obsessed with early ’60s instrumental surf rock like the Ventures and absorbed that before I moved on to the later rockers and the earlier rockabilly, blues and jazz players. I supposed I never really grew out of that.”

He remembers the powerful spell electric guitars cast on him as a teenager — and still do to this day — between their bold colors, cool contours and the endless range of amped-up sonic flavors and moods they could conjure with the flick of a switch or the click of a pedal.

“Their shapes, sounds and expressions felt like they had their own gravity, pulling attention toward themselves,” he reminisces.

A Golden State of Mind

The area where Andy grew up also nurtured his creative sensibility in a big way. That would be Southern California’s northern San Diego County. Living near the Pacific Ocean, Andy fell in love with surfing at a young age, and it remains a passion to this day.

Southern California’s vibrant ethos invited self-expression and envelope-pushing experimentation.

The Southern California lifestyle was richly flavored by the region’s culture and the offbeat characters that helped shape it. Surfing, skateboarding, hot rodding and classic cars, music, art, architecture, industrial design and other cross-pollinating creative influences formed a vibrant ethos that invited self-expression and envelope-pushing experimentation.

Bob Taylor can testify to this unique regional sensibility from his own experience as a San Diego acoustic guitar builder. In fact, when he began thinking about a guitar-making successor years ago (eventually Andy), one of his essential criteria was that the person also be from the San Diego area and be self-taught.

“In my lifetime of guitar building, I realized through experience that it was easier and more acceptable to show our guitars here in California than in the East, where there was already a rich history of guitar makers,” Bob says. “I also started to notice the creative differences in guitar builders from here rather than elsewhere. We were willing to break tradition.”

When it came to electric guitar design, Southern California was ground zero for many early innovations. Only about an hour north of where Andy lived, guitar-making pioneers Les Paul, Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby had hung out and talked shop at Les’s place on their way to making musical history with their groundbreaking designs.

And in the surfing world, during the transition from traditional longboards to shorter, more maneuverable boards in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Southern California became an epicenter of surfboard design innovation. As a surfer, Andy was drawn to the aesthetics of surfboard curves and the aesthetic of the act of surfing itself. Over time, he would find a natural connection between surfing and making music — how one might similarly use different boards or guitars for different scenarios, and how both riding a wave and playing guitar are deeply expressive acts. With the right piece of gear, people could express themselves in a fluid, melodic way.

Finding His Musical Path

By the time he was a teenager, Andy had found a groove fixing and making instruments. Before he even had his driver’s license, he was already known around town as a skilled instrument repair person, working with local music shops and private customers when he wasn’t surfing or playing music in bands with friends.

Watch Video

He refined his playing chops in college at the University of California, San Diego (fortuitously located near one of his favorite surf spots), where he studied music with an emphasis on guitar performance. He’d sometimes sit in on live jazz gigs with some of his music professors, while continuing to repair and build guitars — often with them as clients.

A Student of Guitar-Making History

As part of his immersion into instrument restoration and building, Andy soaked up the history and evolution of instrument design. Some of the important books he consumed in his self-education were the reference guides written by George Gruhn, founder of Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, who is widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on American vintage guitar design. Andy developed a relationship with Gruhn over the years, and especially in the years since Andy became the lead design architect at Taylor, Gruhn can testify to Andy’s range and depth of knowledge, and more specifically, his ability to contextualize the history of guitar design.

“If you study the progression of electric guitar design, you learn what was done and what wasn’t, and why things changed.”

Andy Powers

“Andy is one of the most knowledgeable people I have ever encountered in the musical instrument business,” Gruhn says. “He understands design. He also understands tradition — the pathology of instruments: what doesn’t work. When he designs a new guitar, he can look at the evolutionary systems that preceded it.”

Gruhn’s comments place a helpful frame of reference around Andy’s approach to designing a new electric guitar (in addition to acoustic guitars). As someone who has either played, worked on or studied many of the great electrics of the past 70-plus years, he has an almost savant-like knowledge of electric guitar design history.

“If you study the progression of it, you learn what was done and what wasn’t, and why things changed,” Andy says. “The cool part is you can study that a lot faster than you could participate in it in real time. I didn’t have to wait until the next model year for somebody to make their refinement.”

In conversation, Andy can easily slip down a rabbit hole of electric guitar design history, detailing, for example, the year-by-year iterations of a Les Paul Standard from 1952 to 1953 and onward, noting what changes were made and why. Chatting from a workbench in his design studio, he casually sifts through Fender’s early electric guitar development almost as though he had been there, from their seminal transition from lap steels to a Spanish-style guitar with a round neck, to Leo Fender’s modular approach to design in order to make his guitars easy to service, to the reasons for Leo’s preference for single coil pickups.

Andy delights in nerding out about this stuff, not to strut his knowledge, but because he genuinely loves absorbing and talking about the thinking and the creative problem-solving and trial-and-error approach that have gone into electric guitar design. Or classic cars. Or surfboards.

Defining What His Electric Should and Shouldn’t Be

Technically, you could say that Andy has been thinking about this new electric guitar for most of his life. His urge to design a new type of electric guitar ultimately came from a simple, practical truth: Though he has played, owned and repaired plenty of great electric guitars — and loved various attributes of many — the guitar he wanted, one that checked all his boxes, didn’t exist.

View Fullscreen

View Fullscreen

View Fullscreen

View Fullscreen

“I wanted a sound and a feel I didn’t have,” he says. “I wanted something that shared in the inspirations of past makers but was created for a more modern context. For me, it meant creating a fresh design from the ground up based on decades of work and study.”

He was keenly aware of the design features that defined other guitars and intentionally challenged himself to embrace a different approach.

“There are elements that already exist on other guitars for good reason — they suit those unique guitars.” he says. “This guitar was meant to be a fresh creation, so at one level, there was an exercise of deliberately excluding the things you know already work in search of a fresh direction.”

“I wanted something that shared in the inspirations of past makers but was created for a more modern context.”

Andy Powers

In some cases, he was able to draw from the pioneering ideas of early electric pickup design that were limited by the materials of the day and now, decades later, reapply them in a more modern context based on new materials or technologies.

View Fullscreen

Not a Taylor Design

One constraint that would prove to be liberating was how his guitar might — or might not — relate to the Taylor design identity, particularly the T5z. After all, Andy is Taylor’s chief guitar architect. And he already had been working on migrating Taylor’s T5z design toward a more electric aesthetic and personality. So initially, he began to conceive of this new guitar within a related stylistic framework. He made some early prototypes that boasted innovative pickup designs and other features, trying to make it somewhat compatible with the Taylor brand identity. But his efforts to preserve some family connection seemed to limit the guitar’s potential, as Kurt Listug explains in his column this issue.

“I told Andy I thought the guitar was well designed, well made and aesthetically pleasing but it was just plain wrong,” Kurt says. “I suggested he build the electric guitar he really wanted for himself.”

In his column, Kurt also recalls the lessons learned from Taylor’s solidbody electric line, launched in 2008 (preceding Andy’s arrival), which found a devoted segment of fans but never achieved widespread success. (After several years, it was discontinued.) In hindsight, Kurt says, the guitars didn’t fit the brand.  

View Fullscreen

“Acoustic guitar culture and electric guitar culture are very different,” he says. That kind of electric guitar needs its own brand, its own styling and its own trade dress.”

Andy’s ideas for his ideal electric guitar were the equivalent of being in a band and coming up with great new song ideas that simply weren’t right for the band — they were better suited for a separate solo project.

“Like a surfboard or roadster, every line was considered both for its looks and its handling.”

Andy Powers

It turned out that the arrival of the pandemic became a catalyst for bringing the project to life, giving Andy additional time to refocus on designing the guitar in his home studio. With a newfound sense of creative freedom, he was able to bring all of his ideas together holistically in form and function.

Flicking the Switch on Powers Electric

After decades of studying and experimenting, Andy is ready to unveil the electric guitar he’s always wanted to make, offering something new (including some patented designs) while retaining elements of familiarity that electric players will appreciate. Aside from the tuners, strings, frets and a few other sundries, virtually everything about it was designed, engineered and built from scratch in-house. It’s richly infused with Andy’s Southern California aesthetic sensibility, drawing inspiration from the innovative, DIY spirit of the surfing and hot-rodding communities.

View Fullscreen

“I wanted the body to look good from every viewing angle,” Andy says. “I wanted an asymmetrical shape without sacrificing visual balance. I wanted timeless styling with modern embellishments. Like a surfboard or roadster, every line was considered both for its looks and its handling.”

The fully enclosed, slim hollowbody design features unique internal trussing that maximizes resonance and sustain and suppresses feedback.

The vibrant palette of colors for the bodies is largely inspired by memorable paint colors used on classic cars. Other proprietary design features include the two different pickup options, a specially engineered trem/vibrato system with a “camshaft tailpiece” that allows players to maintain closer relative pitch between notes when using the vibrato and bend strings without pitch droop, a uniquely asymmetrical fretboard radius, and colorful control knobs (crafted in house) made from layers of surfboard resin — inspired by art pieces created by Andy’s friend, surfboard shaper Josh Martin. Even the case is a unique design, beautifully crafted with the same upholstery materials found in classic Porsche cars.

We’d prefer to give Andy his own space to fully showcase his new guitar brand, so we encourage you to make your way to Powerselectricguitars.com or Instagram (@powerselectricguitars), where you can see the guitar line’s stunning design aesthetic, learn about all the unique performance features, and watch Andy and others play and talk about the guitar.   

View Fullscreen

After months of beta testing with some of the music industry’s top players, including showcase events in Los Angeles, New York and Nashville, the Powers Electric Guitars brand officially launched in mid-June with an initial small-batch release of about 30 guitars. It’s not a guitar that will be available in significant numbers anytime soon — only Andy and a small team of craftspeople are able to build the guitars, which will be sold exclusively through a select network of eight Powers Electric dealers to start.

You’ll find the full list of dealers at Powerselectricguitars.com. You can also join the Powers Electric mailing list, which will give you an inside track to all the latest developments moving forward — including each new batch of guitars as they are released.

We really think you’ll like what you see and hear. We know Andy does.