Taylor Guitars offer a free tour of their factory in El Cajon, just outside of San Diego in California. After my tour, my guide, Colin, kindly gave an interview about Taylor Guitars, and compact and affordable recording.
The Taylor TSBTe has been used frequently in recording posts to date. It’s the go-to for scratch tracks and makes for half of the light audio recording acoustic sound. So, being in actual Taylor HQ with to somebody from the company to interview is exciting stuff!
So recording in a compact and affordable way: what would be your recommendation in terms of Taylor Guitars? What would tick those boxes?
I would say in general, Taylor Guitars are great guitars to record with, because the electronics that we use are pretty high fidelity. They have a pretty organic and natural sound. I think they’re really good for recording, especially if you’re going to be running directly into an interface.
If you’re really looking to keep things condensed, compact and not really expensive, I do think the GS Mini is a real good option.
You can record either with onboard electronics – some of them will have the ES-B electronics in there, some of them won’t. Or you can install an ES-Go pickup – it’s like the after-market version. Or, they sound really, really good miced up.
So you have three different options to record a GS Mini.
Would any of Taylor’s new products align with compact, budget recording?
Yes. There’s one thing I’ll point out right off the bat. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the GS Mini bass? It comes with built-in electronics. We started out with sapele, which is more or less mahogany, but we are making a maple variant of it now which sounds really great.
So obviously if you’re just looking for something really easy, if you want to expand your sonic repertoire, and add another instrument to your arsenal without spending a bunch of money on an actual acoustic bass, that’s a good way to go.
The new stuff we came out with this year is mostly on the V class framework. So we did the Grand Pacific which is our new dreadnought guitar. And then our Grand Concerts are going to have the same new bracing as the Grand Auditoriums have.
It’s tough to speak to that in a compact and affordable perspective, because most of what we’ve come out with this year is all in the solid wood line, so it starts at $1600 to $1800.
I will say that the 317, which is our least expensive Grand Pacific model with the new body, part of what’s amazing about these guitars, if you are looking to record at home, they are incredibly easy to mic up.
You don’t get all the woofiness or muddiness, that blast of air that you can hear through a recording of most larger, dreadnought, jumbo size guitars. We’ve designed that out of the equation. So it’s a perfectly clean and usable sound, straight into the microphone.
That’s really, really interesting… and really, really, useful.
So, say you have your Taylor Guitar, you have it in your apartment, there’s not much room… would you have any advice in looking after it to make sure it always sounds great?
I always tell people, regardless of whether they live in a humid climate or not, keep your acoustics guitar in a case. The guitar’s going to be happier for it.
The caveat to that is to keep it in its case, but play it as often as you can. The more you play a guitar, the better it is for the instrument.
Other than that, use a case humidifier. Even if it’s just a little wet sponge that you put inside the case, to make sure that nothing is warping or cracking.
Thanks to Colin from Taylor Guitars for this interview. It’s interesting and insightful and was pretty much done on the fly!
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