Show & Tell: School of Tone
andy powers on taylor’s rulebreaking new academy acoustics...
Certainly one of the highlights of this year’s NAMM Show, Taylor’s Academy series (see our review on p104 of this issue) redefines the affordable or starter guitar. “The basic list I wanted was: I want it to be easy to hold, easy to play, and to make an easy sound so even a novice can pull a sound out of it easily,” related designer Andy Powers. “It can’t be too precious and it can’t cost too much and it has to be durable. So the only way that I could do that was to take away everything that didn’t need to be there, but keep all the stuff that was really essential.”
Why bother with an armrest, then? “I considered it kind of essential; it makes the guitar so comfortable. What allows it to happen on this guitar, where it can’t on say our 100 or 200 series, is that there’s no binding, no trimming, no purfling – those are the things that makes an armrest so hard to do. It’s not actually the cutting of a piece of wood, that’s quite simple. It’s not so different from [the forearm contour on] a Stratocaster – you’re just cutting some wood away. But if you’re going to trim it out with the binding and everything, like on our 900 series, oh, that went to a completely different level! That’s hours and hours of really careful handwork.”
And these guitars use Taylor’s NT neck
“I wanted it to be easy to hold and easy to play, even for a novice… It’s the least expensive guitar with everything that’s good about a Taylor”
joint, too? “Yes, exactly the same. We use a similar neck on the 100 and 200 series, but not on the Big Baby, which is almost like a Fender-style design but with bolts going through the front on the neck. The GS Mini has a sort of truncated version of it. So this is the lowest-priced guitar with the proper NT neck joint. It’s the least expensive guitar with everything that’s good about a Taylor guitar: solid ebony fingerboard, really good fret job, and a solid mahogany neck that’s infinitely adjustable to get exactly the right neck angle, even over time. This guitar won’t wear out. In 30 years’ time, this will still be a functional, well-playing instrument.”
Along with the two steel-strings on review, the third Academy guitar is nylonstring with 12 as opposed to 14 frets to the neck joint. That’s unusual for Taylor, isn’t it? “It would have been easier to keep it a 14-fret, like the others, but the 12-fret design sounds better, especially for nylon strings. Where you actually put the bridge really matters. It wouldn’t have sounded so good if it were a 14-fret design.
“I don’t really consider this a ‘classical guitar’,” Powers continues, “it’s more of a nylon-hybrid guitar. Yes, you can play classical music on it, but just as likely you’re gonna strum it with a pick, or use it as a kind of folk-singer guitar. It might be the perfect bossa nova-type guitar. I can imagine a lot of guys playing coffeehouse and restaurant gigs could use this, because, amplified, it works really well. At the same time, it’s not something really precious that you’re worrying about sitting on a stand during your break.”