Basses

The power of change: why Taylor’s Gold Label guitars are getting bigger, and why you should be excited

July 2, 2025

Ad feature with Taylor Guitars
Andy Powers wants to make Taylor fans a little uncomfortable, sort of. “Well not uncomfortable,” the ever-affable Taylor CEO quickly corrects himself. “But I think it does feel like a bit of a surprise. Like, ‘Where are we going with this? I did not expect that sort of change from you’.”
Powers is talking to us about the Gold Label series of instruments – a totally new line for Taylor that debuted back at the NAMM Show in January 2025… and quickly became some of the most talked about guitars to come out of El Cajon in a very long time.
Because anyone who knows and loves Taylor Guitars knows that there’s a pretty successful formula – the look tends to be clean, sleek and modern, the bodies tend to prioritise player comfort with cutaways and contours, the sound tends to be pristine and hi-fi, and the playability is slinky and inviting. But the first Gold Label instruments broke with at least a couple of those conventions – with radically different looks and a wealth of under the hood innovations that made them, in some ways, the most un-Taylor guitars the company has ever made.
Or to quote our review of the Gold Label 814e, “A guitar that melds vintage warmth with the precision and clarity we’ve come to expect from a V-Class guitar – if you’ve been left cold by Taylor guitars in the past, this might make you take another look.”
And to hear Powers himself talk about it, that was very much the point: “This is a different flavor altogether,” he explained to us ahead of launch. “Equally good, equally interesting, but probably speaks to a different musician – or different use case at least. And so this will be interesting to watch expand. There’s a lot that we can do with this coming in the future.”
Plenty of players have clearly already got the message when it comes to the Gold Label Collection, because that future is already here. Barely six months after the initial launch, part two of the Gold Label Collection might be its most exciting development yet.
Image: Taylor
Pushing Power
The original Gold Label 814e guitar also debuted a brand new Super Auditorium body shape that was designed to take advantage of two revolutionary Andy Powers creations – a Fanned interpretation of V-Class bracing, and the brand new long-tenon Action Control Neck. The result was a warmer, rounder and more robust tone that felt dramatically different from any other Taylor guitar that had come before it, and also more traditional and vintage at the same time.
The Super Auditorium felt like a more classic take on the traditional Taylor formula, but anyone who played a Gold Label guitar knew instantly that this could be used in a variety of different ways. But the non-cutaway 814e was already a pretty big guitar – few would have expected the next evolution of the Collection would be to go even bigger. Enter the Gold Label Grand Pacific.
The Grand Pacific body shape was already the big brother of the modern Taylor line – a slope-shouldered design that’s pretty much the exact same width, length and depth as a classic Dreadnought guitar. But for the Gold Label, Powers decided that the sonic qualities of the design meant he could go even bigger than a dread. The Gold Label GP retains the beautiful dimensions of the original, but this thing is an extra 3/8-inch deeper – making it a whopping five inches deep at the soundhole. That’s deeper than a dread, that’s deeper than a Super Jumbo… but Taylor is known for making smaller and more compact bodied acoustics still sound fantastic… why would the good folks in El Cajon suddenly want to go in the other direction?
The answer is “lung capacity” – the extra body depth in the Gold Label Grand Pacific gives the guitar more low-end expressiveness, a deeper resonant frequency, and of course, a little more ‘sonic push’ when it comes to volume. In practice this translates to a guitar that combines the wonderfully in-tune and clear high-end characteristics of a V-Class guitar with an expanded low-end expressiveness – giving your notes and chords articulation and clarity wherever you play them.
It can also shout with the best of them. While the onboard LR Baggs Element VTC means you’ll sound great when plugging in, the sheer power and volume available with the Gold Label GP will mean you’ll have no problem being heard should you choose not to.
Image: Taylor
Colour & The Shape
The look of the original Gold Label 814e was head-turning, and that was entirely intentional, “With that sound in hand, I needed to appoint the guitar appropriately.” Powers explained. “And this does feel like such a radical change for us.”
Powers drew on his love of vintage banjo and archtops of the pre-war period, plus the acoustic guitar-making language of the 1930s, to inform the radically classic look of the Gold Label guitars.
But the new spruce/rosewood 717e and spruce/mahogany 517e also add another striking look to the palette to go with the eye-catching sunburst options of the 814e. The 717e and 517e Blacktops do exactly what it says on the tin – painting the spruce top black for a strikingly vintage and old school appearance. If Taylor had been making guitars during the Great Depression, they might very well have looked like this, and it’s a stunning prospect.
It all adds up to demonstrate why the Gold Label concept is such an exciting one for Taylor – whether you’re a devotee of their guitars or not. This is a company boldly stepping out of their comfort zone and trying different things, but alloyed to the precision and innovation the brand is synonymous with.
The obvious and safe thing to do would have been to follow up the Gold Label’s initial success with something safe and more traditionally Taylor – a cutaway guitar or one with a Grand Auditorium body shape, for instance. Neither of those options would have been wrong of course, but it shows the commitment of Powers and his team to use Gold Label to broaden the brand’s horizons. They’re pushing into the unknown here, and that’s by design.
“I don’t have it entirely mapped out,” Powers explained of the grand plan for the Gold Label Collection. “That would be tremendously boring, because then it might as well be done! I like there to be a little bit of adventure in life. It’s the kinds of things that I remember made me excited with guitars, and still make me excited with guitars. Let’s do something that when we pick the instrument up and play the same open-position chords, we go, ‘Wow, I hear this in a new way’. That feels inspiring. That’s worthy of living.”
Find out more about the Gold Label 717e and 517e at Taylor Guitars.
Image: Taylor
The post The power of change: why Taylor’s Gold Label guitars are getting bigger, and why you should be excited appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.