How Taylor quietly revolutionised its most iconic design with the Next Generation Grand Auditorium
When you ask a guitarist to think about Taylor, the brand that’s been at the vanguard of acoustic guitars for the last 50 years, chances are they’re imagining the Grand Auditorium. Created by iconoclastic co-founder Bob Taylor in 1994 to be the ultimate all-purpose acoustic guitar, the Grand Auditorium sits between the big-bodied dreadnought and the more compact concert-sized instruments. Its versatility, a shining example of the brand’s determination to do acoustic guitars differently, has made it the most popular and beloved of Taylor’s many innovations since the brand’s humble beginnings in a hippy co-op in San Diego.
That’s probably why Andy Powers, Taylor’s CEO, President and Master Guitar Designer, chose the Grand Auditorium to put his most definitive and impactful stamp on the brand since his promotion to CEO in 2022. Enter the Taylor Next Generation Grand Auditorium – Powers’ reimagination of the brand’s most iconic instrument for its post-founder era.
The Taylor Next Generation Grand Auditorium on the Guitar.com Cover. Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
When you look at the instrument, though, you’d be forgiven for wondering what exactly is new about it.
“Well yeah, exactly!” Powers exclaims, sat cradling a new 814ce in his lap within the airy surrounds of a Californian hotel suite. “This is a guitar that we’ve built for a long time. It’s an iconic model for us. And we deliberately wanted to keep it appointed in the form that we know and love. But what’s so interesting about this instrument is that it represents our best and brightest guitar-making. A lot of very materially significant parts of the guitar design have been upgraded.”
Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
Stick Your Neck Out
Perhaps the most important and impactful change is one that you might never even need – but you’ll be thankful for if you do. The Action Control Neck is a Powers innovation that has been the best part of a decade of trial, error and experimentation, and after a limited debut on Taylor’s Gold Label collection last year, it’s now ready for the limelight.
Traditionally, acoustic guitar necks are glued into the bodies – a perfectly fine way to do it, but one that comes with its own issues. If you don’t like the height of the strings and general playability, your only real option is to take it to a luthier who will have to carefully remove the neck, add some shims to alter the neck’s angle so it’s more to your preference, and then reglue it back. What’s more, as a guitar gets older, the force of years of string tension often gradually pulls the neck forward, raising the action and making the guitar uncomfortable to play. The only solution? A neck reset.
“This instrument represents our best and brightest guitar-making”
“[With] a conventional neck reset, your guitar might be in a luthier shop for a month,” Powers explains. “That’s going to cost some money. It’s like open heart surgery for a guitar.”
Back in 1999 Taylor took its first steps to change this. The NT Neck, as it was known then, utilised cutting edge computer-controlled milling to create a bolt-on neck that had the same tonal transfer as glue, but also gave any tech or luthier the ability to easily remove the neck and reset it.
“We’ve been known for building great playing guitars that are easy to service, easy to adjust,” Powers explains. “But I wanted the adjustability to go even further. The way that we’ve built guitars with our Taylor neck system, that’s a huge improvement. But the Action Control Neck takes that level of adjustability farther than anything.
“You can do an action adjustment literally within seconds and not even have to re-tune the guitar. You simply adjust it to where you want to play, and you’re ready to go.”
Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
As he talks, Powers pulls out a flexible shaft screwdriver – the sort you can buy on Amazon for the price of a good cup of coffee – to demonstrate. He pops the screwdriver into the soundhole, gives a quick turn, and before our eyes, the action has been visibly lowered, but the guitar is still in perfect tune and intonation all the way up the neck. A job that would take a trained professional hours or even days to complete has been done in less time than it took to write this sentence. It feels a bit like a magic trick.
But why invest so much time in something that isn’t really a problem for Taylor once the guitar is out of the doors of their factory in El Cajon, California? Sustainability is one thing – which Taylor has taken seriously in its guitar-making for decades. If you’ve got a guitar that can be tweaked to a player’s individual taste – or their evolving playing style – in a heartbeat, you’re likely to hold onto that guitar for much longer.
“And you may never need to make those adjustments!” Powers adds. “You might pick the guitar up, it feels great, sounds great, and you’re happy forever. But I know for myself, over time my playing approach changes, or I start wanting to play in a different style. That means I want the guitar set up differently – fine. Just adjust it.”
Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
Grand Gestures
Wanting to meet real musicians where they are is also key to the other significant innovation at the heart of the Next Generation Grand Auditorium. The Taylor Expression system has been ever present in the brand’s guitars for the best part of two decades – the three rounded control knobs on the guitar’s top are about as distinctive a part of Taylor’s visual design language as the pickup itself was in shaping its live sound.
Now all of that is changing: the new Claria system offers not only a more subtle visual proposition, but a different approach to amplifying the sound, too.
“The development started by creating a pickup for big artists on big stages,” Powers explains. “It was the kind of situation where you don’t get to tune the environment to suit the pickup, so we needed to tune the pickup to suit the environment. And so we wanted to create something that was very player-centric, real intuitive and very easy to use.”
“I want the guitar to serve the player well in every way that we can”
While the Claria started with the needs of artists playing stadiums and other big rooms, Powers soon realised that the problems he was trying to solve could present themselves in any setting.
“If you’re playing a club date, when you walk on stage, you may not even get a soundcheck. Sometimes you barely get a line check and you’re off and running! And so you need something that you can dial in quickly that offers a greater selection of useful sounds.”
That user-friendly simplicity is at the heart of the new Claria system – if the Expression system was a scalpel made for carefully crafting perfect studio-quality tones, this is a lot more forgiving. “You’re not doing surgery on your amplified sound,” Powers reflects. “You’re just going, ‘That sounds good. Let’s play!’”
Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
Player Power
There was a time when Taylor guitars were designed for a certain type of player, and had a certain type of sound. Bob Taylor himself enjoys remarking that people often speak both positively and negatively about the sonic qualities of his guitars, using much the same language. It doesn’t bother him, so long as both sides agree that the instruments are well-made.
Powers is cut from a different cloth. His background as a boutique luthier who made guitars to suit each customer’s needs has helped make the ‘Taylor sound’ a much broader church than it was before he joined the company over a decade ago.
“I want the guitar to serve the player well in every way that we can,” he affirms. “The whole idea behind this was that we want to build a great, professional-quality guitar. If you were to pick a guitar because you like the sound of it, I want to make sure that all the other aspects of that instrument support you in your play. That’s what I’m looking for.”
Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
The proof of his success has been placing prototypes of these Next Generation guitars in the hands of artists – the grin on Powers’ face tells its own story. “You see players respond to these, and you can actually watch fresh inspiration happening,” he enthuses. “It does really feel like it’s a breath of fresh air. I can see the future. I can see where we’re going. I know that players love playing music. That’s what interests us in the first place. So let’s build the guitars to suit them and serve their needs.”
The Taylor Next Generation Grand Auditorium is available now
Words: Josh Gardner
Photography: Rachel Billings
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