The great guitars that Taylor produced in nearly 50 years of existence would probably justify cruising on the back of past successes. But Taylor still seems to genuinely enjoy pushing back against flattop design dogma. They’re very much at ease with the notion that their guitars are alternatives to more traditional fare and perceived in some quarters as “modern” sounding—which in Taylor’s case is generally shorthand for meticulous balance between high, middle, and low registers, immaculate intonation, and easy-on-the-engineer recordability.
Taylor’s 417e doesn’t look particularly modern at a glance. It looks fancy, certainly. But at most angles, the slope-shoulder Grand Pacific profile and tobacco sunburst finish make the Taylor look like a loving, upmarket homage to the Gibson J-45. Prominent as the J-45 influence is, it’s mostly skin deep. Taylor’s V-bracing instead ensures that the 417e tones shine with the modernity that sets many Taylors apart. And the combination of mid-century aesthetic, silky playability, and bright, lively personality make the 417e an inviting instrument that can be hard to put down.
Wave Relations
I once heard Taylor master designer Andy Powers liken his thoughts about sound waves to the experience of watching waves from high on a bluff. When you look inside, or at a picture of a cross section of the 417e’s bracing, it’s easy to see manifestations of that sound-and-sea point of view. The back braces are angled forward toward the bass side of the instrument like breaks coming off a point. The V-bracing on the top, meanwhile, tapers back toward the endpin like the prow of a ship. It’s hard to quantify the effects of different bracing arrangements. But Powers insists that V-bracing improves volume and sustain, and generates more even harmonic response, which is already a Taylor trademark. It only takes a few strums to hear that none of those claims are a stretch.
While the combination of Indian rosewood back and sides and a Sitka spruce top guarantee snappy response in just about any well-made guitar, the 417e is pretty bright for a dreadnought. There’s a lot of high midrange, too. But none of that top-end frequency emphasis results in harshness or stridency. And for all the push in those toppier ends of the frequency spectrum, each of the highest strings exhibits contoured attack and a soft decay. In fact, there were times I felt the attack and decay were almost too civilized on the third and fourth strings. That’s a very personal observation—I’m sure most players would dig the 417e’s even response. (I frequently gravitate toward an aggressive flatpicking touch and certain “ugly” sounds on an acoustic.) Whatever your approach, the combination of soft attack, extra sustain, and gentle decay results in great balance—almost as if you put studio compression on a recording of the instrument.
The 417e’s capacity for sustain, meanwhile, pairs nicely with its capacity for volume. While individual notes don’t always bloom the way they do on some dreadnoughts, the 417e’s sustain means there is room to let notes linger in space. That’s the kind of dynamic that can reshape a songwriter’s compositional perspective. It also makes the 417e a great fingerstyle dread—an animal not often seen nor heard in the wild.
Immaculate Execution
It almost gets boring talking about the construction quality of high-end Taylor instruments, because I never see one that’s anything less than immaculately put together. The 417e is more of the same. Go ahead, look it over with a microscope. You’re not likely to find an obvious flaw inside or out. You should expect as much for nearly $3k, and the 417e delivers. Some small details, like the inlay and rosette, may be just non-traditional enough to put off purists, but the deviations from old-school ways are subtle and distinctive. Some standard Taylor features, like the plastic truss-rod cover, seem a little cheap given the top-shelf price. I also wouldn’t mind seeing the controls for the excellent Expression System 2 electronics moved to a less obtrusive location like the soundhole, but there’s no questioning how easy they are to see and use in a performance situation.
The Verdict
Players that gravitate to the 417e in part for its handsome, J-45-like slope-shoulder profile and pretty tobacco burst finish should expect a guitar that sounds very different than the old Gibson workhorse. It’s louder, brighter, and less dusty. And for a lot of players, the marriage of traditional slope-shoulder style and a balanced-but-high-mid-forward voice will be a winning one. It’s a very forgiving guitar in recording situations. The playability is as nice as you will find on a flattop, and its dynamic and touch-sensitive qualities combine with its volume and headroom to make it well-suited to nuanced fingerstyle every bit as much as hard and heavy strumming. Such range makes the 417e a great performance instrument and helps justify the premium price. And if the 417e’s convergence of “now” tones and mid-century American style suits your own, it will not be hard to extract every penny of that investment from this beautiful and beautifully made guitar.
Taylor 417e-R Demo | First Look
The Rickenbacker 481’s body style was based on the 4001 bass, popularly played by Paul McCartney. Even with that, the guitar was too experimental to reach its full potential.
By the early 1970s, the great interest the lads had sparked in 6- and 12-string Ricks had waned. But thankfully for the company, there was still high demand for yet another Beatles-played instrument: the 4001 bass.
Paul McCartney was gifted a 4001 by Rickenbacker in 1965, which he then used prominently throughout the group’s late-’60s recordings and while leading Wings all through the ’70s. Other rising stars of rock also donned 4000 series models, like Yes’Chris Squire, Pink Floyd’sRoger Waters, the Bee Gees’ Maurice Gibb, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook, and more.
And like that, a new star was born.
So, what’s a guitar company to do when its basses are selling better than its guitars? Voilà: The Rickenbacker 480. Introduced in 1972, it took the 4000-series body shape and created a standard 6-string out of it, using a bolt-on neck for the first time in the brand’s history.
The 481’s slanted frets predate the modern multi-scale phenomenon by decades. The eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
“It was like a yo-yo at Rickenbacker sometimes,” factory manager Dick Burke says in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo. “We got quiet in the late ’60s, but when the bass started taking off in the ’70s, we got real busy again, so making a 6-string version of that was logical, I guess.”
The gambit worked, for a time. Sales of the 480 were strong enough at first that, in 1973, a deluxe model was introduced—the 481—and it’s one of these deluxe versions that we’re showcasing here.
“The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.”
Take a close look and you’ll notice that the body shape isn’t the only remarkable feature. The 481 was Rickenbacker’s first production run to feature humbucker pickups. Here, you can see each humbucker’s 12 pole pieces dotting through the chrome cover, a variant casing only available from 1975 to 1976. (Interestingly enough, the pickups had first been developed for the 490, a prototype that never made it to public release, which would’ve allowed players to substitute different pickups by swapping loaded pickguards in and out of the body.)
The new pickups were also treated with novel electronics. The standard 3-way pickup-selector switch is here, but so is a second small switch that reverses the pickups’ phase when engaged.
The inventive minds at Rickenbacker didn’t stop there: The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
Long before the fanned fret phenomenon caught on in the modern, progressive guitar landscape, Rickenbacker had been toying around with the slant-fret concept. Originally available from 1970 forward as a custom order on other models, slant frets were all but standard on the 481 (only a small minority of straight-fret 481s were built).
The 481 was the deluxe version of the 480, which preceded it and marked the first time the company used a bolt-on neck.
Dick Burke, speaking separately to writer Tony Bacon in an interview published on Reverb, only half-recalls the genesis and doesn’t remember them selling particularly well: “Some musicians said that’s the way when you hold the neck in your left hand—your hand is slanted. So, we put the slanted frets in a few guitars. I don’t know how many, maybe a hundred or two—I don’t recall.”
Even proponents of the 481 do not necessarily sing the praises of the slanted fretboard. Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, a 481 superfan, told Rickenbacker Guitars author Martin Kelly, “I don’t just love the 481, it’s part of me.... The 481’s slanted frets have made my fingers crooked for life, but I don’t care, I’ll take that for it’s given me riff after riff after riff."
Initial 480-series sales were promising, but the models never really took off. Though they were built as late as 1984, the slant-fret experiment of the 481 was called off by 1979. And these slanted models have not, in the minds of most players or collectors, become anywhere near as sought-after as the classic 330s and 360s, or, for that matter, the 4001s.
For that reason, 481s—despite their novelty and their lists of firsts for Rickenbacker—can still be found for relatively cheap. Our Vintage Vault pick, which is being sold by the Leicester, England-based Jordan Guitars Ltd, has an asking price of 3,350 British pounds (or about 4,300 U.S. dollars), which is still well under half the going-rate of early 360s, 660s, and other more famous Ricks. Some lucky buyers have even found 481s on Reverb for less than $2,000, which is unheard of for other vintage models.
With its idiosyncratic charms, the 481 remains more within reach than many other guitars of a similar vintage.
Sources: Martin Kelly’s Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, Tony Bacon’s"Interview: Dick Burke on the Creation of the Rickenbacker 12-String | Bacon’s Archive" on Reverb, Reverb Price Guide sales data.
