Ask Bob

Kinda simple, Joe. One is that it’s not traditional on acoustics, and the look would probably make people shy away from purchasing. The other, for me, is more mechanical, in that maple is quite soft compared to ebony or even the softer-than-ebony rosewood that many fretboards are made from. Yes they’re good on a Fender. But Fenders arrived newly on the scene with maple fingerboards, with no pre-conceived notion of how they should look. We don’t enjoy the same freedom.

Daniel, I’ve made a guitar or two from birch, in the early days of the American Dream shop before we became Taylor Guitars. It’s a good question, and those guitars were good. Long ago, when the world was a smaller place, people used local wood to make things, including guitars. Birch was local in the east and Midwest, where guitars were made in those days. Like how the Spanish guitar makers made guitars from cypress because it grew in their backyard, so did Americans make guitars from local woods like birch, maple and cherry. Along the way, imported woods gained popularity, and not because they made much better guitars. Woods like rosewood and mahogany were exotic and plentiful at the same time. They made great guitars, and it made sense to use those woods. Then they became popular and became the new standards. Now, as those woods are stressed, we find ourselves looking at local wood again. The market isn’t quite ready for them, so I don’t see us using birch at this time, even though it has nice tonal qualities. But in the same vein of going local, we’re making a lot of  guitars from American walnut and Urban Ash from city streets, truly the definition of using wood from the backyard. You may see birch again, but at the moment it might be a hard sell in a market flooded with rosewood. But I agree that your impressions of the wood are true.

Good question, Aaron. First, Pacific Rim Tonewoods does the spruce grading. We’ll often grade it a little further once we receive it, but they’re pretty spot-on with their grading. Other woods get graded more often than not based on beauty first, and then weight and stiffness after that. It takes a while to train someone, and surprisingly, it’s one thing we cannot write definitions for. It just takes practice and seeing a lot of wood. The fact that we’re a factory and not a luthier making a few dozen guitars per year allows us to grade into general categories and also design our guitars to use wood that fits into those general specs. This is how we yield good guitars. The higher up the scale we go for quality and price, the narrower the specs become. It is one of the more elusive jobs we have, and we depend on people sticking around long enough to develop a sense for it.

Yes, Tanya, there is a very mechanical reason. The guitars made in Tecate are made with layered sides: three very thin layers of wood glued together under high pressure. If the cutaway has a negative bend, we cannot get the wood out of the mold. The press mold is a female part with a male part pressing straight down into it. So all the curves must face up. The Venetian style cutaways are made with solid wood that is bent, not pressed and glued. There are three separate and elaborate bending tools for that process. The wood progresses from one to another and then to the final one in order to be fully bent. This also allows a more complex contour that doesn’t become stuck in the mold. The layered sides cannot be glued progressively. It all has to happen in one action.

Vince, it’s a question that people have been interested in for ages. First, I have to say that it’s not hard for us to know whether a wood will sound good. We can see it, feel it, tap it. There are no woods, really, waiting to be discovered. More accurately, there are woods waiting for their time to be right. But like a chef or cook who can see ingredients and from experience know how things will turn out tasting without a laboratory or an engineering degree, so can we as guitar makers. It wasn’t hard for us to know that Urban Ash would make a nice guitar. And then when we got some lumber and worked it, we were more impressed with its working characteristics. Why did we choose it? Well, one big factor is that we can get it. Without being able to obtain it, there is no point in using it. So, many of the reasons we choose are a list of practical reasons. First, will it make a nice-sounding guitar? Then, can we even obtain it in quantity over time? Then, how does it finish and how does it look? Then, is there a place for it in our lineup? Does it fit our ecological goals? But the primary questions are always: Can we get it? Can we sell it? Does it make a good guitar that’s worth making and worth buying?

Regarding your query about sycamore, yes, it makes a nice guitar. It’s like maple. And one day it might have its place in the spotlight. It might be waiting backstage right now. So far, though, we don’t have room in the lineup, so we won’t delve into it.

[Ed. Note: Taylor’s master designer Andy Powers responds.]

Great question, Mark. Steel-string sets tend to have a lot more tension than nylon-string sets — often 50 percent or more tension than a nylon set. With less tension, the nylon strings will tend to have less energy or power to drive the guitar top and be amplified into volume. Reducing the scale length of the guitar further reduces the string tension, offering still less energy to set the guitar to vibrating. In order to make a guitar responsive to such low string tension, the guitar would need to be made exceptionally delicate, becoming impractical to care for, or be proportionally too strong, which would make a disappointingly weak sound.

One favored approach by makers is to build a smaller-body instrument for use with nylon strings, as a smaller body can be made in ways that allow it to be easily set in motion, yet with enough structural integrity to avoid being damaged easily. It’s helpful to think of a car here: A small, lightweight car might go plenty fast with a small engine, while a heavy car needs a much larger engine to achieve good speed. A big car with a undersized engine isn’t a going to win any races. This is why nylon-string instruments tend to have a smaller bodies and more delicate components than a steel-string guitars.

All this said, I agree a reduction in scale length can be a very comfortable playing experience, and we continue to explore possibilities that could offer ever better playability and great nylon-string tone.

Thanks, Richard — consider the word put out to readers. I’ll be getting hearing aids soon. I dread it, really, because I don’t really want to be less portable and have more stuff that helps me function daily, but I’m tired of the TV getting louder and louder. We used to laugh at the volume in my parents’ house. And now…I’m there myself.

Scott, we make a hardshell wooden case. It’s not a sealed vapor barrier, but it does a good job protecting against humidity as long as it’s not left for ages in a bad environment. As you stated, Martin does offer some cases that are molded plastic and can keep a guitar sealed.

When I think of the practical physical side to this question, here are the considerations and why we don’t offer both. First, guitars go in and out of cases all the time. When they’re out, they are exposed. If the case is left open when they are out, its lining absorbs or releases humidity. If the lining is humid and you close a guitar in it, it can be a disaster. We actually acclimate each case to the right humidity inside before we pack a guitar for storage. Then we put it in a heavy poly bag, and it can be stored for a long time. We can ship guitars around the world in containers on ships going to heaven knows where, into every ravaging climate, hot or cold, dry or wet, spending months on their journey, and end up fine with a properly built case and a plastic bag. A plastic case would still require the poly bag. If I were to store a guitar long-term in my home, I’d just put a plastic bag over it, all tied up. Other than that, our hardshell case, made with layers of wood and completely covered in vinyl, does a good job. Especially considering that in normal use, the guitar is in and out all the time. We talk about cases being a vapor barrier. This is hard to explain, but imagine paint on your door, which water runs off of. But the door can still swell and shrink seasonally. That’s because vapor goes through paint and other protective layers.

So in the end, I feel that a good case’s primary job is to protect the guitar from sudden and extreme changes in weather, and certainly damage from shock. It’s why I decided to make wooden cases. Also, we can make wooden cases ourselves, but we don’t have the huge technology to make molded plastic. And we love making our own products.

I do suggest, and always have, that people who own good solid-wood guitars learn over time how to care for them humidity-wise. Our TaylorSense product is a good tool to monitor how your guitar is doing, and Humidipaks are a great remedy, no matter what case you have, whether it’s a gig bag, wood hardshell or molded plastic.

Here’s one story you might enjoy, Randy. We just introduced the AD27 Flametop. People have asked for maple-top guitars for years, and we refused. But I wanted to try for a few reasons. Andy wasn’t too happy about that, but he’s a team player, which is great. Andy also knows how a guitar will turn out before he makes it. He doesn’t need much, if any, trial and error. Remember, Beethoven wrote symphonies while he was deaf. He could hear how it would sound in his head. Andy is similar when it comes to guitars. He said the Grand Pacific shape would work but other shapes wouldn’t. To please me, he made the other shapes. He was right, and he showed me why. The other shapes sounded fine, they were OK, but they would not tune. You could tune the guitar forever and not play two chords in tune with each other. The Grand Pacific tunes because of the shape of the top, defined by the sides, and that’s what Andy knew would happen and what I did not consider at all, not in my wildest dreams.

Scott, I touch on this in my answer to the other Scott’s question about cases. A few years back, we started packaging every guitar in a medium-weight plastic bag, over the case or gig bag, before putting it into a box. This saves guitars’ lives. That’s because the humidity remains constant, and if the guitar is cold or hot, at least the water volume doesn’t change. We had great evidence of this even before pandemic shipping delays, but it’s proven to be successful even now with containers stalled all over the world. I’m very pleased with how this works, although Scott Paul and I aren’t super-pleased with another use of plastic. But I’d trade a lifetime guitar shipped in plastic over almost every single thing you buy in a store now that doesn’t really need more plastic than product. I don’t know why pliers have to come in plastic that takes metal shears to cut them out. I don’t get that. I’ll remain on my plastic soap box, but it seems a guitar that will last for generations deserves a bag.