Taylor Custom | Custom #3: Grand Pacific

Wow, what a rare and special piece. Doesn't it just look fantastic?

This eye-catching custom Grand Pacific dreadnought features back and sides of solid hand-selected Urban Ash paired with an Adirondack spruce top for extra headroom and projection. Custom details include flamed maple binding, a maple rosette, Gotoh 510 tuners in antique gold, dark-stained bone bridge pins, a firestripe faux tortoiseshell pickguard, a glossy Tobacco Sunburst finish, and stylish Art Deco fretboard inlays in maple and cocobolo. With its warm, seasoned sound and clear low-end power, it's a Taylor like you've never heard before.

Until now, Taylor has been known for a modern take on acoustic tone - a vibrant sound with precise and well-defined individual notes. But they like other acoustic flavours too. Drawing inspiration from traditional acoustic music, master guitar designer Andy Powers leveraged the tone-shaping control of their award-winning V-Class bracing to design the Grand Pacific acoustic guitar. Broad, overlapping notes blend into a unified harmony to create a warm and inviting sound. You'll be inspired in a whole new way.

Also known as Eastern red or Appalachian spruce, Adirondack defined guitars of the pre-WWII era. Its availability is beginning to increase slightly, as another generation of trees matures, although they're still considerably smaller than their old growth forebears. Current supplies of Adirondack tend to lack a certain aesthetic purity of look (they tend to be wider-grained and more irregular in colour and grain patterns), but tonally, Adirondack is even more dynamic than Sitka, with a higher ceiling for volume. The payoff is the ability to drive an Addie top hard and hear it get louder and louder without losing clarity; it's hard to outplay it. Another sonic nuance that Bob Taylor loves about Adirondack is "an undeniable sweetness in every note, especially in the mids."

Tonally, Urban Ash's properties - comparable to high-quality Honduran mahogany - make it a strong contender as a high-grade guitar wood of the future. With its focused, fundamental-strong voice, it produces clean notes mostly free of ringing overtones - the note you play is the note you'll hear. This makes it supremely adaptable to the particular style of the player. Compared to the 'swamp' ash used by electric guitar makers, this species is heavier, denser and more resonant, but not nearly as heavy as the Northern ash used for baseball bats.

Bracing is the internal framework that helps shape the sound of an acoustic guitar. V-Class bracing is a groundbreaking new Taylor design - a new sonic 'engine' - that transforms the way an acoustic guitar top vibrates to dramatically improve the sound. Developed by master guitar designer Andy Powers, it marks a bold departure from traditional X-bracing, producing notes that are louder, longer sustaining, and more in tune with each other.

While traditional X-bracing has stood the test of time for over 100 years, it creates an inherent trade-off between two key elements of an acoustic guitar's sound: volume and sustain. A guitar's top (the soundboard) contributes to both. Volume comes from the flexibility of the top, while sustain comes from stiffness. The trade-off is that when you make something stiffer, you reduce its flexibility, and vice versa. With an X-braced guitar top, increasing one comes at the expense of the other. V-Class bracing changes that. Now an acoustic guitar top can be both stiff and flexible in ways that produce more volume and sustain. And as it turns out, this innovative bracing design also improves the intonation of the guitar.

The Taylor Expression System 2 (ES2) is a revolutionary pickup design that delivers the latest in Taylor's ongoing innovation in acoustic guitar amplification. The heart of the Expression System 2 is Taylor's patented behind-the-saddle pickup, which features three uniquely positioned and individually calibrated pickup sensors. The location of the sensors enables a more dynamic range of acoustic sound to be captured than ever before. Together with Taylor's custom-designed professional audio-grade preamp, this system produces exceptional amplified tone and responsiveness. On stage through a PA, plugged into your favourite acoustic amplifier, or direct into recording software, the Expression System 2 faithfully conveys the voice of this beautiful Taylor guitar.