Taylor Guitars is an American guitar manufacturer based in

El Cajon El Cajon ( , ; Spanish: El Cajón, meaning "the box") is a city in San Diego County, California, United States, east of downtown San Diego. The city takes its name from Rancho El Cajón, which was in turn named for the box-like shape of the va ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

, and is one of the largest manufacturers of acoustic guitars in the United States. They specialize in

acoustic guitar An acoustic guitar is a musical instrument in the string family. When a string is plucked its vibration is transmitted from the bridge, resonating throughout the top of the guitar. It is also transmitted to the side and back of the instrument, ...

s and semi-hollow electric guitars. The company was founded in 1974 by Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug.

History

In 1972, at age 18, Bob Taylor began working at American Dream, a guitar-making shop owned by Sam Radding, where Kurt Listug was already an employee. When Radding decided to sell the business in 1974, Taylor, Listug, and a third employee, Steve Schemmer, bought American Dream and renamed it the Westland Music Company. Needing a more compact logo suitable for the guitars'

headstock A headstock or peghead is part of a guitar or similar stringed instruments such as a lute, mandolin, banjo, ukulele and others of the lute lineage. The main function of a headstock is to house the pegs or mechanism that holds the strings at th ...

, the founders decided to change the name to ''Taylor'' as it sounded more American than ''Listug''. Kurt Listug said, "Bob was the real guitar-maker." Listug became the partnership's businessman while Taylor handled design and production. In 1976, the company decided to sell their guitars through retailers. In 1981, facing financial difficulties, Taylor Guitars took out a bank loan to purchase equipment. As of 2012 Taylor Guitars had more than 700 employees in two factories: one in

El Cajon, California El Cajon ( , ; Spanish: El Cajón, meaning "the box") is a city in San Diego County, California, United States, east of downtown San Diego. The city takes its name from Rancho El Cajón, which was in turn named for the box-like shape of the v ...

, and the other in nearby

Tecate Tecate () is a city in Tecate Municipality, Baja California. It is across the Mexico-US border from Tecate, California. As of 2019, the city had a population of 108,860 inhabitants, while the metropolitan area has a population of 132,406 inhab ...

, Mexico, where the company makes their lower-priced models and guitar cases. In early 2011, the company opened a Taylor distribution warehouse in the Netherlands to serve the European market. In January 2014, the U.S. State Department honored Taylor Guitars with an Award for Corporate Excellence (ACE) citing Taylor's commitment to responsible practices in obtaining ebony for its instruments, which notably included purchasing their own sustainable ebony mill and increasing its usable timber from 10% to 100%. As of January 1, 2021, the company became fully employee-owned. In May 2022, Andy Powers was named the new CEO, President, and Chief Guitar Designer of the company.

Innovations

In 1995, Bob Taylor was interested in finding out if the perception of using exotic tonewoods in quality guitars was more important than

luthier A luthier ( ; AmE also ) is a craftsperson who builds or repairs string instruments that have a neck and a sound box. The word "luthier" is originally French and comes from the French word for lute. The term was originally used for makers of ...

techniques and good design. To that end, he recovered some oak from shipping pallets found at the factory for a

dreadnought The dreadnought (alternatively spelled dreadnaught) was the predominant type of battleship in the early 20th century. The first of the kind, the Royal Navy's , had such an impact when launched in 1906 that similar battleships built after her ...

guitar's back and sides and used a nondescript 2x4 for its top, dubbing the result the Pallet Guitar. Its neck was also made from oak recovered from the pallet, and the fretboard’s Formica-and-pearl inlay depicted a fork lift. In 2000, a limited edition of 25 Grand Auditorium-bodied Pallet Guitars were reproduced with aluminum inlay included to accentuate the original nail holes in the pallet wood. These have been sold to collectors, but the original Pallet Guitar remains on display at the Taylor Guitars factory in El Cajon, California. In January 1999, Taylor began making guitars with a patented, bolt-on neck they called the NT (new technology) neck. It differs from other guitar necks by using one continuous piece of wood all the way to the 19th fret to support the

fretboard The fingerboard (also known as a fretboard on fretted instruments) is an important component of most stringed instruments. It is a thin, long strip of material, usually wood, that is laminated to the front of the neck of an instrument. The str ...

. More common practice in guitar neck construction is to support the fretboard up to the fourteenth fret, and glue the unsupported portion to the soundboard. The NT neck fits into a pocket on the top of the guitar body, achieving the desired angle with small shims. Guitars sometimes require a neck angle realignment (neck reset). Taylor's system achieves this by changing the shims to adjust the neck angle. Prior to 1999, Taylor Guitars had a simpler bolt-on neck design. Those necks can also be adjusted without the more complex process of ungluing the neck joint. Taylor uses their own pickup system, the "Expression System," which consists of a

humbucking Mains hum, electric hum, cycle hum, or power line hum is a sound associated with alternating current which is twice the frequency of the mains electricity. The fundamental frequency of this sound is usually double that of fundamental 50/60 Hz, ' ...

induction pickup mounted in the neck and a pair of dynamic soundboard transducers wired to an onboard preamplifier designed by

Rupert Neve Arthur Rupert Neve (31 July 1926 – 12 February 2021) was a British-American electronics engineer and entrepreneur, who was a pioneering designer of professional audio recording equipment. He designed analog recording and audio mixing equipment ...

. The entry-level 100 and 200 series use an externally similar system known as ES-T, which uses a single under-saddle pickup and no soundboard transducers. The first-generation ES system was introduced in 2004. It had two transducers: one mounted to the bridge, and one on the lower bout of the sound board, and a small single-coil neck pickup mounted in the neck joint, all wired to the onboard preamp, which had three knobs for volume, tone, and blend. This early ES system was available on the higher-end 500 series and above as well as the 30th-anniversary limited-edition series starting in the fall of 2004. It was a custom order for the 300 and 400 series, and could be retrofitted to some older Taylor guitars with the NT neck design.

Factory

Taylor's 145,000 square foot manufacturing facility is about 20 miles east of downtown San Diego in El Cajon, California. A free, guided tour of the Taylor Guitars factory is open to the public at 1:00 p.m., Monday through Friday except some holidays. For those too far away to visit the factory, Premier Guitars published a four-part tour of the Taylor Factory, narrated by Bob Taylor in 2008.

Notable players

William Ackerman William Ackerman (born November 16, 1949) is an American guitarist and record producer who founded Windham Hill Records. Career Early years Ackerman was born in Palo Alto, California. His adoptive father was a professor of English at Stanfor ...

Axel Bauer Axel Bauer (born 7 April 1961) is a French singer, composer, guitarist, and actor, born in Paris. A figure of the French rock scene, he was discovered in 1983 with the song "Cargo". Several times awarded a gold record, he has sold three million re ...

Jade Bird Jade Elizabeth Bird (born 1 October 1997) is an English singer, songwriter and musician. Bird's music has been influenced by many folk and Americana artists. The media, when describing Bird's music, have drawn comparisons with pop, Americana, ...

Zac Brown Zachry Alexander Brown (born July 31, 1978) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and co-founder and lead singer of the country–rock Zac Brown Band, as well as electronic dance music group Sir Rosevelt. In 2019, Brown released a pop s ...

Lindsey Buckingham Lindsey Adams Buckingham (born October 3, 1949) is an American musician and record producer, best known as the lead guitarist and male lead vocalist of the band Fleetwood Mac from 1975 to 1987 and 1997 to 2018. In addition to his tenure with Fl ...

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Jon Foreman Jonathan Mark Foreman (born October 22, 1976) is an American musician, the lead singer, guitarist, main songwriter and co-founder of the alternative rock band Switchfoot. He started Switchfoot in 1996 with drummer Chad Butler and his brother Tim ...

* Russ Freeman * Andy Gullahorn *

Michael Hedges Michael Alden Hedges (December 31, 1953 – December 2, 1997) was an American acoustic guitarist and songwriter. Early years The son of Thayne Alden Hedges and Ruth Evelyn Hedges Ipsen, Michael Hedges was born in Sacramento, California. His l ...

Sam Hui Samuel Hui Koon-kit (born 6 September 1948), usually known as Sam Hui, is a Hong Kong musician, singer, songwriter and actor. He is credited with popularising Cantopop both via the infusion of Western-style music and his usage of vernacular Canto ...

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David Gilmour David Jon Gilmour ( ; born 6 March 1946) is an English guitarist, singer, songwriter, and member of the rock band Pink Floyd. He joined as guitarist and co-lead vocalist in 1967, shortly before the departure of founding member Syd Barrett. P ...

* Jewel *

Emily King Emily King (born July 10, 1985) is an American singer and songwriter. She started her career in 2004 and her first album '' East Side Story'' was released in August 2007. In December 2007, King was listed as a Grammy nominee for Best Contemporar ...

Leo Kottke Leo Kottke (born September 11, 1945) is an acoustic guitarist. He is known for a fingerpicking style that draws on blues, jazz, and folk music, and for syncopated, polyphonic melodies. He overcame a series of personal obstacles, including parti ...

* Dave Matthews * Travis Meeks *

Jason Mraz Jason Thomas Mraz (; born June 23, 1977) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. He rose to prominence with the release of his debut studio album, ''Waiting for My Rocket to Come'' (2002), which spawned the single " The Remedy (I Won't ...

Dolores O'Riordan Dolores Mary Eileen O'Riordan ( ; 6 September 1971 – 15 January 2018) was an Irish musician, singer and songwriter. She was best known as the lead vocalist and lyricist for the alternative rock band the Cranberries. One of the most recogniz ...

John Petrucci John Peter Petrucci (born July 12, 1967) is an American guitarist, best known as a founding member of the progressive metal band Dream Theater. He produced or co-produced (often with former member Mike Portnoy before he departed the band in 201 ...

Prince A prince is a male ruler (ranked below a king, grand prince, and grand duke) or a male member of a monarch's or former monarch's family. ''Prince'' is also a title of nobility (often highest), often hereditary, in some European states. ...

Gabriella Quevedo Gabriella Evelina Quevedo (born 12 January 1997, Kinna, Sweden) is a Swedish guitarist. She grew up in Kinna and developed an interest in guitar because her father played the instrument. Her father is from Argentina and her mother is Argentine-S ...

Steve Stevens Steve Stevens (born Steven Bruce Schneider; May 5, 1959) is an American guitarist. He is best known as Billy Idol's guitarist and songwriting collaborator, and for his lead guitar work on the theme to ''Top Gun'' – " Top Gun Anthem" – for ...

Al Stewart Alastair Ian Stewart (born 5 September 1945) is a Scottish born singer-songwriter and folk-rock musician who rose to prominence as part of the British folk revival in the 1960s and 1970s. He developed a unique style of combining folk-rock so ...

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* Snuffy Walden * Billy Joe Walker

References

External links