The Lineup
The latest news, views and happenings from the world of your favourite guitarists
Meet Taylor’s “Goldilocks” Guitar The new Grand Theater is a mid-length acoustic that’s “just right”
Taylor has unveiled a new kind of acoustic with its GT – Grand Theater, a “mid-length” guitar that sits between the US company’s hugely successful GS Mini travel guitar and its full-scale instruments. Furthermore, the GT finds Taylor continuing to enter bold new ground in other areas.
The new model has a scale length of 612.78mm (24.13 inches) compared with the GS Mini’s 596.9mm (23.5 inches), and designer Andy Powers describes the GT as a “Goldilocks” size that feels “just right”. The GT is a guitar the master luthier and Taylor partner actually began design work on several years ago, but it has now finally come to fruition as a solid-wood model to debut new C-class bracing and unexpected tonewoods.
While the GT’s top is the familiar Sitka spruce and the neck mahogany, the back and sides are a sustainable Urban Ash, which we spoke to Powers about in issue 461. This makes the GT the wood’s first showing outside of the 324ce Builder’s Edition model. The ’board, bridge and headstock veneer are another sustainable alternative to the usual tonewood suspects – commercially grown eucalyptus.
The sense that this is a smaller guitar with a bold voice is grounded in its new C-Class bracing, which is Powers’ adaptation of the existing V-Class principles, which work with the GT’s scaled-down Grand Orchestra curves and a body size between Taylor’s Grand Concert and GS Mini. Guitarist’s first impressions found V-Class
esque sustain across the fingerboard and a slinky, fast-playing experience with punchy projection.
“The size of it makes you think of slinging it on your back and travelling all over the world, playing wherever,” says Taylor artist KT Tunstall, who performed at the GT’s virtual launch event. “It’s such a portable smaller guitar but there’s something, for me, very nostalgic about a parlour-sized guitar. Every guitar you hold is going to give you a different vibe and make you want to play a certain way. With this kind of guitar, they’re quite bluesy and very tender.”
The Taylor GT has a UK SRP of £1,619; the GTe, with ES2 electronics, is £1,835. www.taylorguitars.com