Streets Ahead
Taylor is known for sustainable tonewoods, but the company’s latest find comes from an unexpected place: cities
Taylor has searched the Earth for sustainable tonewoods – so it’s ironic that the company has now discovered a promising new guitar-making wood growing right on its doorstep, among the streets of California’s big cities. Master luthier Andy Powers tells us how he and company founder, Bob Taylor, hit the town to build the stunning new 324ce acoustic
Guitarists are notoriously conservative, but Taylor – as a brand that started life in 1972 not 1872 – has always enjoyed the freedom to create the guitars that it wants to make, not the guitars that tradition dictates it should build. Over the years, founder Bob Taylor has made good use of that freedom to move the guitar maker’s art forwards – usually in the direction of greater sustainability and an open-mindedness about tonewoods.
Bob Taylor may have taken a step back from hands-on guitar design at the Californian company in recent years, but Taylor’s master luthier Andy Powers has embraced the same mission to work with progressive materials and minimise the company’s impact on pristine forests. Taylor is already well known for its efforts to make ebony and koa supplies from Cameroon and Hawaii more sustainable. Now it has gone a step further to harvest high-quality guitar-making wood from the very streets of California’s cities.
Taylor’s brand-new Builder’s Edition 324ce looks stunning, with its low-key aesthetic and tactile contours (see review, p78). Less obvious is that its back and sides are made of a wood called Shamel ash, which is more commonly found in California’s parks and residential streets than it is on high-end guitars. We caught up with Andy to learn how Taylor came to be using this novel tonewood – and he explained that the ‘lightbulb moment’ came almost out of the blue.
“I have a musician friend who lives in the Los Angeles area,” Andy recalls. “He found an urban wood reseller, and these guys would find little bits and pieces of things and they’d cut slabs of it for people to make tabletops out of. I thought it was interesting, so I said, ‘Oh, that is cool. What woods do they have?’ and he named a few species that I had never worked with. I guess I wasn’t thinking too much of it at the time, but it was pretty interesting.
“At the same time Bob [Taylor] was taking a fresh look at forestry projects. The idea is that we are transitioning from the ‘hunter-gatherer’ era of wood procurement into being farmers of wood, which is a big transition. So we took that idea and we started to look at all the trees around us and we thought, ‘Well, wait a minute.’ There are trees that are planted every day
“[Shamel ash] could go in a lot of different directions, but for the 324 Builder’s Edition guitar, it is voiced to be very central in term of usage”
all over every city in the world. Those trees are maintained, they are watered, they are fertilised, they are trimmed, they are cared for, and yet every one of them gets removed out at some point when they become too large or obstructive for their position by a road or what have you. Then what happens? Well, we know what happens: most of the time, rather than being utilised for high-value purposes, those trees just get turned into mulch, which is the stuff you hope becomes dirt.
“So we started thinking about that and going, ‘Well, wait a minute. If we were building violins back in Cremona 300 years ago, we’d look around at what trees we had locally available and start working from those. We would design the instruments that we built with those trees in mind. Why don’t we return to some of that same concept? Let’s look at the trees that are right around us and work from there.’”
All that remained was to find a supplier who could provide the quality and volume of urban tonewoods that the company was looking for. Fittingly, it simply took a drive around the streets of Taylor’s home district to find a solution.
“We saw some guys maintaining trees here in El Cajon, so we pulled the truck over and start talking to them, going, ‘Hey, what are you planning on doing with that?’ It literally started as simply as that. We started talking to these guys and we came to find out there is a company here in southern California, an amazing company called West Coast Arborists, and they maintain all of the city trees in almost every city throughout the entire state. We talked to them and found out that, well, they are pretty forward-thinking. They are thinking along similar lines about the trees they handle, even though no-one was really doing anything with them yet. They had a huge log yard where they were looking at these trees and going, ‘You know, that just seems like it is too big, too nice a tree to grind into mulch. Let’s keep the log just in case someday somebody can use it.’
“We started working with them and went through their yard. It was full of trees that I’d never worked with and that Bob had never worked with. But we took a look at a few things and said, ‘Okay, well, that looks like it could have usable wood in it. Let’s take a sample of that: let’s get a chainsaw and cut a chunk off that one.’ We got to do some taste-testing [laughs].”
“We saw some guys maintaining trees here in El Cajon and asked, ‘What are you planning on doing with that?’”
The ‘Goldilocks’ Wood
Like the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, Bob and Andy discovered several types of urban wood that might be suitable for guitar making – but one in particular was ‘just right’.
“Shamel ash caught my attention because it looked like it had all the right characteristics,” Andy says of the tonewood that eventually went into the 324ce Builder’s Edition. “By right characteristics, I mean the practical things. Can you saw it? Can you dry it? Can you glue it? Can you sand it? Can you finish it? Is it dimensionally stable? Those kinds of things.
“Shamel ash was so easy to start using because it had so much in common with guitar-making woods that we really love, particularly mahogany. Mahogany is the king of the woods because you can make anything from it. It is very dimensionally stable and it has amazing working characteristics. Because of that, we build all sorts of things, like boats and guitars and everything out of it.”
Trees are sometimes misleadingly named so, given that Shamel ash has many of the characteristics of mahogany, how does it relate – if at all – to the kinds of ash most guitarists are familiar with from Telecasters and the like?
“There are two types of ash that guitarists are familiar with,” Andy explains. “First, you have the ultralightweight stuff – what people call swamp ash. It’s real soft, kind of spongy but a very lively-sounding ash. Then you have the much-maligned, ultra-heavy northern ash: what I call baseball-bat ash, the real heavy, dense, hard ash that you would make a table out of. Electric guitars were made out of that type of ash back in the 70s and they weighed 30lbs [laughs]. They just felt like anchors. But this Shamel ash that we discovered is not really like either of those. It has a colour that is similar to both of those familiar types of ash, but it’s somewhere in between in terms of density, grain structure, growth characteristics and dimensional stability.
“It is pretty exciting because we are still in a phase of discovery with it, and other urban species as well, because while I fell in love with the Shamel ash it certainly isn’t the only wood that is appropriate. It was just really the best one to be introduced to first. So we are using it for backs and sides to begin with and it works fantastic for those. I believe it would work for tops, too, but I’m still discovering exactly the kind of characteristics that we want because right now these trees, they really reflect the location that they grew in.
“So, let’s say, if a Shamel ash grew right on the side of a roadway, it will tend to be a real good sawlog because when it was young all of its branches were pruned off to keep roadway clearance. As that tree gets old it will have a real nice straight, knot-free, real clean and clear chunk that you can take great wood from. A top would work really good from a tree like that. On the other hand, if that tree got too much water, the grain lines would tend to be a little bigger than I would want for a top. So it is a process of discovery. But I believe we could make tops out of it – and we could probably make necks out of it. We are still researching how best to introduce this wood into other areas of guitar making, but for now it has been working great as a back and side wood, so that’s where we are starting.”
Director’s Cut
It’s clear that Shamel ash has some pretty versatile properties – but because it is unfamiliar to most guitar players, Andy decided that the 324ce was the right place to debut it, as the Builder’s Edition collection that it forms part of was created to show off a kind of ‘director’s cut’ of progressive guitar designs.
“For the moment we are introducing it on the 324ce Builder’s Edition guitar as a pretty unique piece because it is our most accessible guitar within that Builder’s Edition series where you have the contour cutaway and all the unique aspects that we have incorporated into those guitars. That seemed like the perfect place to introduce a new species [of wood]. With the 324ce we paired the Shamel ash back and sides with a mahogany top – because they have certain similarities, they play off each other really well. So we are introducing it there, but that certainly isn’t going to be the only model that we ever build with this. It will be expanding to some other new guitars that we haven’t introduced yet but will in the near future.
“Shamel ash actually has a real easygoing set of characteristics, so there are a lot of different tonal colours that you could derive from it. It could go in a lot of different directions, but for the 324 Builder’s Edition guitar, it is voiced to be very central in term of usage. If you want to strum chords on that guitar, it works great as a rhythm guitar. If you want to use it as a lead instrument, it works great for that. It is right in the middle zone of what a modern acoustic guitar player would want to get out of that instrument.”
As mentioned before, this isn’t the first time that Taylor has used tonewoods in non-traditional ways. Its 600 Series, for example, was built around the idea of making maple – which is in plentiful supply – more viable as an all-round guitar making wood. The 600 Series featured maple back and sides and its bracing (among other things) was specially adapted to produce a more balanced tonal response than you might ordinarily expect from maple, which is often associated with bright, zingy tones. Does Shamel ash require similar tweaking to give of its best?
“We made a few small changes,” Andy says, “because, to me, there is a difference between just ‘working’ – and working really well. So we could put [a traditional] set of braces on this back, and, yes, it works. But with a few small adjustments to the profiles and whatnot we find that it works better. With this one, the back of the guitar is tuned a little – in fact, it’s very similar to the way I would tune a koa back because, again, the Shamel ash has some similar characteristics.
“Let’s face it, a piece of wood doesn’t really sound like anything by itself,” Andy reflects as we conclude our chat. “It is not until you turn it into an instrument that you can appreciate its unique attributes, the sounds that it makes – and even in that context you are never listening to just the material. You are listening to the material, the design, the workmanship, and then what the musician is bringing to it.” www.taylorguitars.com