Ask Bob

Bob: Tim, when it comes to spruce, the Builder’s Edition 814ce is the first. I always say, “Invest in the inevitable,” and this is surely the case here. All trees are coming out of the forest smaller and smaller. In 1990, which was my first trip to Alaska to participate with Steve McMinn of Pacific Rim Tonewoods, the spruce trees we diced up had all been blown over in a storm, and lying down, the diameters were more than my 6’ 1” (185cm) height. I couldn’t see over the top of the logs. Climbing on top of one of those logs required a ladder. Now many of the logs coming out of the forest are to my hip or less. They don’t yield wide spruce blocks like back then.

Adirondack spruce is even smaller, and so we’re using four pieces on the Builder’s Edition 814ce to obtain the width. It’s the sensible thing to do, makes a fine-sounding top, and allows us to use some of the smaller diameters.

To add to my answer, we’ve been making four-piece koa tops (and backs) for about five years now. Not a few, but rather, many thousands of guitars. We’ve had great acceptance and performance from these tops. The future is coming, and we want to flow where the forest leads us.

Andy: Hey Tim, to echo what Bob has said, the future of the trees we work with is in smaller diameters. From the scale we work at, we can see the diameter of the trees we’re working with is growing smaller over the years into sizes closer to commercial wood. (It might surprise you to know that trees produced for construction and carpentry work typically fall into a size range you could wrap your arms around — literally a tree you can hug.) Despite working with smaller trees, the future of wooden guitars isn’t a dire one. On a practical level, it simply means we need to do more woodworking to create a great guitar. As Bob says, invest in the inevitable. Being the age I am [early 40s] with a lifetime of guitar making behind me and a lifetime still in front of me, I’m eager to take the steps to be ready for the future. Whether a striped ebony fretboard, a four-piece koa top, a four-piece back, urban harvested wood, or a multi-piece spruce top, not only do I think doing good woodworking to create a good instruments is OK, it’s another reason to be optimistic.

Andy: Al, I’m glad you’re enjoying your guitar. That 614ce is great guitar and will ripen with age and playing time. I like to think of the V-Class top on that guitar more like architecture than a bracing specification. The widths and thicknesses of the various components are gauged and shaped to influence the stiffness and flexibility of the whole top. As a result, there isn’t a consistent width of all the brace parts, nor a specific height. The braces are shaped into arched forms to impart stiffness where needed and flexibility in other areas in the same way an X-brace design might have been scalloped out in strategic spots to loosen it up. When I think about braces, which we’re currently making from spruce, I always think about the back in addition to the top, as the two form a complete system. The maple back on your guitar was built with different brace shapes than I’d use on the rosewood back of a 814ce. Those two back woods don’t behave exactly the same way, so we voice them differently with braces to suit their tone and create a pleasing result for the player.

Bob: Rob, a little bridge pin history might be in order. We don’t make our plastic bridge pins, and while we can buy them from a few different suppliers, they do tend to be of a very close size with all other plastic bridge pins. It’s my guess that this size was memorialized a long time ago based on what Martin used. Just a guess, but it makes sense to me. Now that there are so many guitars and pins already made, it’s not a good idea to change that size.

Now, for the ebony pins. We make those ourselves. But there was a time when we bought them from a company called Gurian, who used to make guitars decades ago. Michael Gurian made a machine to make the ebony pins for his own guitars and for sale to other people. He’s a brilliant guy, now retired, but super smart. We’ve used those pins for over 40 years. Now, we own the very machine that they used, and we make them for ourselves. Yes, Michael made his pins a little fatter in diameter than the plastic pins, and that set in stone what size they are. We cannot change because they wouldn’t be backwards compatible. And the dies for grinding them under water are super expensive. So, yes, we have two sizes. Tecate guitars use plastic because they’re more economical, while El Cajon guitars use the ebony pin we’ve used for ages and will continue to make for as long as I can see. A tiny bit of reaming of the hole from a luthier will do the trick if you want to switch out to ebony pins on your 224. It’s super easy.

To answer your question about plastic pins wearing out, they can. It takes a long time, and they won’t affect the sound along the way if you simply pull your ball end up to the bottom of the top when you change strings. So, continue with plastic? No problem, they’ll serve you well and are easy to replace. I bet you’ll still be using the same set 10 or 20 years from now. Change to ebony? Also easy to do, and they will last a long, long time.

Bob: Well, Bill, the GA is louder than the GC. There’s more top to vibrate and more air volume to project. Nearly all guitars a century ago were small — smaller than our Grand Concert. In fact, in those days, some guitars were referred to as a Grand Concert because of their comparably big sound — so grand you could use them in a concert! As audiences grew and more instruments joined in, guitars grew in size. Dreadnoughts and Jumbos were made to be even louder. Our GA is the overall size of a dreadnought, just a different shape. But we brace and string it to be a little less boisterous. You could say that our Grand Auditorium cutaway is the guitar that built Taylor Guitars. It’s a super all-around guitar, easily fit for both fingerstyle and strumming.

With the advent of modern pickups, players started rediscovering the tone of smaller guitars. Plugged in and amplified, a little guitar can compete. But in the simplest terms, the GA is louder than the GC, but not by so much that you have to worry.

Andy: Bill, in addition to what Bob mentioned, there’s a consideration between volume and projection. I think of it this way — volume is how loud the guitar sounds to me the player, and projection is how loud the guitar is to the audience, or how far the sound travels. Smaller-bodied instruments tend to emphasize a higher frequency range, putting some extra muscle to the high notes and creating a balanced tone. Larger-bodied instruments tend to emphasize the bass more readily, making that seem louder. Both can sound loud to the player and project well to an audience. They just emphasize a different part of the sound and project that portion differently, which is often interpreted as volume. Have you heard a mandolin played recently? It’s amazing how loud those can be, and how far they project. When that little mandolin body is tuned down to guitar pitch range, it’s astonishing how quiet it becomes.

Bob: That’s easy, Marc: humidity control! But let’s list a few others. Heat control. Do not leave your guitar in your hot car. It gets so hot in cars. You know, we bend sides with heat. We straighten a neck with heat. Imagine a guitar under tension pulling on the wood as it heats up in a car during the summer. These are the two main things to avoid damage. Now to the fun parts. Change strings, and wipe the fretboard clean when you change them. Keep the guitar clean. And if you find your action is getting high over time, treat yourself to a setup with your local luthier. It’s amazing what a little bit of setup can do to make your guitar so rewarding to play.

Bob: Tim, I agree that those were wonderful guitars, and the answer is pretty simple. Andy designed the Grand Orchestra (GO) and the Grand Pacific (GP), and we simply felt like retiring the Jumbo shape. I’m cautious about saying “permanently” because we never know if or when we’ll consider bringing it back. One reason is that we’ve worked very hard to have Taylors be Taylors; in our trade dress, bracing, our neck construction, our tone, our pickups and our shapes. As a company, we looked at the shapes we make in El Cajon and made an effort to continue down the design path that veered away from the Martin dreadnought and the Guild/Gibson jumbo. We just felt like a change for our own sake, if you can understand that reasoning.