How Acoustics Are Born

Taylor’s master luthier Andy Powers takes Jamie Dickson on the journey from prototype to production

- Jamie Dickson

Last issue, we joined Taylor’s master luthier Andy Powers to learn how skilled luthiers can make small-bodied acoustic guitars sound larger than life. As promised, we rejoin Andy this month to learn how he prototypes and tweaks guitars during the design process until a new model is ready to join the official range. Taylor’s recently launched, medium-size GT Series was a particularly interesting challenge, Andy says, because its downsized body meant he had to use new construction methods to unlock the guitar’s full potential, rather than rely on existing templates of how an acoustic should be built. But it wasn’t easy at first, he admits.

“With the GT guitars, what was really interesting was mixing a modern-proportioned body that was a little smaller overall, with a slightly shorter string length than what is typical, which changes the tension and the whole equation of how that guitar is going to work,” Andy says. “With the Grand Theater, I built one guitar initially and that was some years ago. I liked the premise of the idea. But I didn’t necessarily love the first result I got with that first guitar. It was promising, it was encouraging and there was something there – I really liked the string feel, for example – but it was also very clear that there was something missing. But at the time, I didn’t have a parameter I could change that could give me the result I wanted. It wasn’t until I had started developing what we later called C-Class bracing that I could get the sort of controllable parameter I wanted to make that guitar work correctly.”