R. Taylor Guitars
February 1st, 2006
Although the workshop for R. Taylor is on the Taylor Guitars campus, it’s actually a separate company. The crafting of R. Taylors is overseen by Tim Luranc, Larry Breedlove and Ed Granero, who are three of Taylor’s most skilled builders. (Tim has actually been with Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug from the beginning and was there on the very first day of business when they spent the day cleaning up from a flood instead of building guitars.)
The R. Taylors are built with a lot of handwork, and unlike the standard Taylor line, you can order them with different neck profiles and top bracing patterns. You can order guitars made from a wide variety of wood combinations, including tops of cedar and different varieties of spruce, and bodies of maple, koa, mahogany and Indian or Brazilian rosewood. You can also order them with abalone trim, but to my eye the wood is of such a high quality, the plain ones looked mighty fine.
Since they were displayed in a hotel suite instead of on the main NAMM floor, I could actually hear what they sounded like. I was particularly taken with the mahogany/cedar, but the maple/Sitka spruce with a cutaway also sounded exceptional. Production will be very limited and only a handful of selected dealers will be stocking them. The R. Taylor workshop is also something of an incubator for new designs, and the new GS shape, which is Taylor’s first new body shape since the Grand Auditorium came out over a decade ago, was developed there.-MJS
6 Comments Add your own
1. Jim Stewart | February 2nd, 2006 at 2:54 pm
I met Bob Taylor at his bench in Lemon Grove when Sam Radding was American Dream. I’m certain that he does NOT remeber the event. I believe he was working on a guitar for the Lake of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. That’s how I remember it, anyway. Sam was building a dreadnaught for me. I first met Sam when he was building on University Ave. near San Diego State. That’s where I picked out the wood for the guitar.
I still have my American Dream. Sitka Spruce top, Birch neck, and Brazilian Rosewood back, sides, and fretboard. Inside, it is dated 1971. The serial number is 0009. Sam wrote it into the bracing, along with his name, in ball-point pen.
When Taylor Guitars started becoming famous, I was struck by their incredible similarity to my American Dream. I even took my guitar into a friend’s music store to compare them up side-by-side. Hmm. By golly, they have to be related. I did a little sleuthing and, sure enough, stumbled onto the story.
I don’t travel much with the American Dream. The 3-piece back is spectacular, but is very thin and prone to cracks, even properly humidified. Sam experimented a little, getting the wood as thin as he could. He wanted to be able to see light through it. Well, you can, but not always in the way he intended.
The sound is glorious and I use it in the studio. For live gigs, I use a CE414 and a Taylor 12-string, whose model number escapes me at the moment.
My other oft-used guitar was built by Tony Huber when he apprenticed for Jeff Eliott in Portland. It’s a steel-string, but is a modified classical design. It is also a studio guitar. The top is Douglas Fir and was actually from a round destined for firewood when Jeff saw the grain and traded a guy a piece of maple for it. The fir has aged to a nice rich orange color. It’s a wonderful instrument.
I’m posting this for it’s historical interest and because I love guitars and have an interesting connection to Taylor Guitars. I hope the R. Taylor venture is a success.
Jim Stewart
Portland, Oregon
2. Herb Hunter | February 7th, 2006 at 7:19 am
Thank you for posting this information. I found it very interesting especially in the absence of any other information about the R series.
3. Bryan T. Rankins Sr. | February 14th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
I consider it a great honor that I was among the first to play these amazing instruments. My first thought as I put these guitars through their paces (as mediocre a player as I am), is that they sounded like a high end boutique guitar that had already been played for 6 months. They all sounded different, but with one extreme simularity. The articulation from string to string everywhere on the neck was incredible. When you strum a chord, you hear six wonderful voices harmonizing together as a chior. Each voice as clear as the next. No domination on any frequency. Just one of clear and rich tone. Playability and great craftmanship is something we’ve come to expect from Taylor, but these are several cuts above the norm. As good as these ‘green’ guitars sounded, I can hardly wait to hear one after a year of playing. You owe it to yourself to seek out these guitars and compare them to everything you’ve ever heard or played. You will be very happy. And if you don’t smile from the first note, I’ll be very surprised.
4. Fretboard Journal Blog&ra&hellip | February 14th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
[…] We’ve been getting more hits for the R. Taylor post than everything else combined, so I figured I’d put up some different shots of them from NAMM 2006. I don’t have much to add to the first post except to say the new headstock design actually has a functional aspect apart from its visual role of setting the R. Taylors apart from the standard line. On “snakehead” style headstocks, to swipe a phrase from the mandolin world, the strings above the nut are in a straighter line than on other headstocks. This means the strings are less likely to bind or get caught in the nut, which makes moving into open tunings like DADGAD a little easier. […]
5. Fretboard Journal Blog&ra&hellip | April 17th, 2006 at 7:55 am
[…] The R. Taylor website is finally up. You can go here and here for our NAMM Show reports on them.-MJS […]
6. Stefan | May 20th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
I went to Gettysburg Blugrass Festival 5/20, Where I met Emory Knode, he owns R Taylor series 1 #5, and he actually allowed me to play it. I have been holding out to see if the new GS has the bottom end I have been hoping it promised, it does, but this R Taylor series one was one of the sweetest guitars I ever had in my hands. It had the feeling of a very high end up Breedlove I had the pleasure to play. I just do not know if I can go the extra step and spend the extra cash for the R Taylor. But, I will say that right now I think the Taylor GS is an even playyer with the Martin HD28V. Right now, I think the GS voices louder and has better tighter mid, and looks better in my opinion.
Emory owns Appalachian Bluegrass, MD. Hell of a nice guy.
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