“I’m a big fan of old things,” says Danny Worsnop. “From cameras to guitars to microphones to cars, I like the stories they tell and the lives they’ve lived. I think old stuff has more soul.”
Best known as the lead vocalist of rock bands Asking Alexandria and We Are Harlot, British-born Worsnop has also released two solo albums that explore country and blues. He’s currently in the studio working on his third solo release.
With his love of vintage aesthetics and appreciation for instruments that age with character, he’s spent much of his life searching for a guitar that feels like home. “I’m always on the quest to find the perfect thing,” he says.
For years, Taylor’s GS Mini-e Koa Plus has been his go-to songwriting companion. “I don’t need a bunch of things to do the job,” he explains. “This guitar was the first one that did that, and it’s been with me for years. The finish is beat up. It’s got shiny spots from the sweat on my arm. This has been my daily driver and workhorse and life partner since I got it. It’s more than a guitar. It has a life and a personality and a sound. You pick up any other GS Mini-e Koa Plus in the world, it doesn't sound like this one.”
With his love of older things, Worsnop acknowledges the challenges of making a deep connection with an out-of-the-box acoustic. “All the nice, shiny new guitars that anyone has sent me over the years are great—I have fun with them,” he says. “But I've never loved them. I find it hard to love new stuff because it kind of doesn't have a life or personality yet.”
Worsnop’s done his best to infuse them with some of his own personality by tweaking them in different ways–chasing a specific feel and sound that makes a guitar feel more like an extension of himself rather than just another utilitarian tool. But his most recent acoustic arrival was different.
“It’s more than a guitar. It has a life and a personality and a sound.”
Striking Gold
Worsnop recently got his hands on Taylor Guitars’ new Gold Label 814e, designed by Andy Powers, the creative visionary behind many of Taylor’s guitar innovations since 2011. For Taylor’s new Gold Label Collection, Powers drew inspiration from the sound of flattop acoustics from the 1930s and 1940s.
Worsnop was immediately drawn to the Gold Label 814e’s vintage-inspired visual aesthetic—influenced by old banjos and mandolins, early Taylor designs, and Powers’ pre-Taylor archtop guitars. But the true revelation came when he played it.
“When I saw this guitar... I mean, it looks super cool, like an older guitar,” he says. “And the second I picked it up, it was different. It was like, this plays like a guitar that is so old and has stories and songs in it already. I fell in love with it.”
Worsnop says that with other Taylors he has owned, including his GS Mini-e Koa Plus, he would often modify them in some way to give them a more vintage sensibility. But not with the Gold Label.
One of the defining features of the Gold Label 814e is its new Super Auditorium body shape. The non-cutaway body bears a clear family resemblance to Taylor’s popular Grand Auditorium, but the Super Auditorium is slightly longer and wider at the lower bout, with a slightly shallower depth. The new body dimensions, combined with Andy’s version of a long-tenon neck and his new fanned V-Class bracing pattern, are all key ingredients in a new sonic recipe that defines the sound of Taylor’s Gold Label collection. The result is a warm, old-heritage voice that’s unlike anything Taylor has ever produced.
Worsnop says the guitar complements him musically because it supports his dynamic vocals with extraordinary volume and responsiveness to a lighter touch.
“Because I sing loud, having something that’s loud enough, but not so loud that when I do drop down you can’t hear me anymore, is important for me,” he explains.
The Gold Label 814e comes with back and sides of solid Honduran rosewood or solid Hawaiian koa (Worsnop has the Honduran rosewood model) paired with a torrefied Sitka spruce soundboard. Each model is available with a natural or sunburst top.
The Revolutionary Action Control Neck™
One of the standout features of the Gold Label 814e is Taylor’s patented new Action Control Neck™, an innovative neck joint design that allows for quick, easy, and precise neck angle adjustments. It marks another step forward from the patented, micro-adjustable design Bob Taylor introduced back in 1999. Unlike traditional neck resets, this system, like Bob’s, is also glue-less, and in this case enables effortless fine-tuning on the fly without having to remove the neck or even the strings, and without the use of shims. By simply using a 1/4" nut driver (or standard truss rod wrench) on a nut in the neck block (accessible through the soundhole), a player can raise or lower the action to dial in an ideal setup.
“It is a massive deal,” says Worsnop. “When it comes to traveling musicians, it’s absolutely game changing. This allows you to do a micro-adjustment without having to get in the car and drive. When I’m in the studio, I like having that precision to be able to make it just perfect.”
For professional musicians, service techs, and recreational players who want to quickly fine-tune their action, the innovative neck design marks a paradigm shift.
In Studio and Onstage
In his Tennessee home, Worsnop has an upstairs studio where he records most of his music. It’s where he’s tested countless guitars, searching for the right fit. Though his trusty songwriting guitar has been the aforementioned GS Mini-e Koa Plus—perfect for capturing spontaneous new ideas—when it comes to recording, the Gold Label 814e has taken center stage.
“I’m working on the new album right now,” he shares. “If I’m at home and I’m just wandering around downstairs, which is usually where and how writing happens, [the GS Mini] is the guitar I’m walking around with. And then as soon as there’s an idea, I’ll go upstairs, and it’s the Gold Label. Honestly, I don’t play anything else up there now. I put the album recording on hold for this guitar. It’s the only guitar on the album.”
And it won’t just live in the studio. Worsnop plans to bring the Gold Label 814e on tour, making it his primary acoustic guitar for live performances.
Performance Highlight: "Ain't No Use"
In a recently recorded performance of his song “Ain’t No Use”, Worsnop showcases why the Gold Label 814e is such a great fit for him. The song, rich with storytelling and emotional depth, aligns well with the guitar’s vintage aesthetic and warm tonal character. It explores the universal tension between who we are and who we want to be, while emphasizing the transformative power of acceptance despite imperfections. The guitar’s deep, open sound and full-bodied, muscular tone are a perfect complement to Worsnop’s soaring, soulful vocals, amplifying the expressiveness of his performance and highlighting a symbiosis between player and instrument. A video of the performance is featured at the top of this article.
For Worsnop, the Gold Label 814e represents the culmination of years of searching, experimenting and refining his sound. It’s an instrument that feels like it has lived a life, carrying with it the soul and character he always craved in an acoustic.
“I have played music since I was 6 years old, and I’ve spent my entire life looking for my instrument,” he reflects. “At 34, I’ve found it.”
The Akai MPC2000.
The best examples of these machines, which included the Akai MPC60 and Ensoniq ASR-10, allowed users to change the pitch, reverse, chop into pieces, sequence, alter dynamics, and much more. Aside from the technology that made all this possible, the intended usage, as defined by the designers, was not all that different to earlier instruments like the Mellotron. However, what hip-hop producers did with sampling technology and all those extra parameters, was wholly different.
Depending on who one asks, the age of sampling confirmed that hip-hop’s early producers were either truly lazy or geniuses. The lazy part is the most obvious and unimaginative take—they didn’t create the music they sampled, and in many cases, didn’t credit the original composer. The genius part requires a little more open-mindedness and understanding of what was actually occurring, both from a musical and cultural perspective.
Some have argued that, aside from playing traditional instruments at a very high level, there was actually very little difference between what hip-hop producers did and what jazz musicians had been doing for many decades before. Just like hip-hop producers, jazz musicians took existing music, created for one purpose, and manipulated it, transforming it into their vehicle, for another.
In the beginning, this transformation was mostly stylistic/rhythmic, leaving the original song clearly discernible to the listener. But by the time we get to John Coltrane, we were observing jazz musicians who improvised over earlier songs by other composers, which had been transformed to the point of being unrecognizable, even to the most sophisticated of ears. Take, for example, Coltrane’s “Fifth House” (1961), which was actually based on “What Is This Thing Called Love,” a well-known Cole Porter composition written for the 1929 musical Wake Up and Dream.
In the case of hip-hop, the goal was to create interesting vehicles for emcees to rap over. One of the earliest examples was “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), where the Sugarhill Gang literally looped an entire instrumental section of Chic’s “Good Times” (1979), transforming it into the perfect vehicle for 14 minutes and 37 seconds of nonstop rapping. Later on, hip-hop producers such as J Dilla contorted the samples used in their productions to the point where, even to this day, fans still argue over exactly where they came from. The most creative hip-hop producers have drawn from far and disparate sources to find the samples they use in their productions.“Hip-hop producers such as J Dilla contorted the samples used in their productions to the point where, even to this day, fans still argue over exactly where they came from.”
In my opinion, it cannot be refuted that both jazz and hip-hop musicians mastered this process by constantly pushing the envelope. All the while, they constantly used pre-existing art and transformed it to serve a completely different purpose, in aid of a completely different artistic statement. Theirs was a process of re-contextualization and this was central to both musics. Neither jazz nor hip-hop musicians were interested in simply “covering” popular songs, which audiences at the time already loved, in the way that a wedding band might. To go further, many of their transformations were so extreme that it would’ve probably just been easier for them to create completely new compositions. Many of them certainly possessed the ability to do so. So, why did they sample? I would argue that recontextualizing is not unique to literature, jazz, or even hip-hop. It is a fundamental technique employed by artists within many disciplines, and most likely has been for millennia.
The saying “There is nothing new under the sun” is apt. In reality, the actual nature of music is such that everything is based on something earlier. There are precious few artists who have actually created anything which could be considered completely new, and this is even more so the case post the establishment of the modern music industry. How many songs use exactly the same progression, or melody, or arrangements, or drum patterns, or bass lines? This is before we even consider lyrical content! There’s a reason why plagiarism within music is confined to a very narrow set of circumstances. Covering, reinterpreting, or recontextualizing earlier music is what most musicians have done for the vast majority of history.
Like jazz before it, hip-hop provided new leases on life for many long-forgotten songs. That also came with the additional benefit of more profit for publishers, but ironically, in the end, it was publishing that killed sampling. It just became too expensive, with some publishers asking so much for sample clearances that there was nothing left for anybody else. At first, producers tried to “recreate” samples with slight changes to get around this, but a few lawsuits later, it became clear that using samples was over.
Delgado Guitars’ take on the requinto romántico, the secret weapon of Mexican classical shredders.
But which one? There are so many instruments that come from Mexico, and part of what I am striving for is to help educate people on not only the instruments, but the genres, too. Oftentimes, Americans hear music sung in Spanish over a guitar, and they just assume it is all mariachi. That would be similar to someone visiting the United States and assuming everything they hear was either rock or hip-hop. Fortunately, most guitar players have a deeper understanding of the rhythmic patterns of various genres, and can recognize the stylistic differences.
With that in mind, let’s discuss the stringed instrument used in one of the most romantic genres of Mexico: the requinto romántico, which was the first style of guitar I ever built at age 12. Even the name tells you it’s romantic. While the term “requinto” is used to describe instruments from Spain, Portugal, and other Hispanic and Latin countries, the 6-string requinto romántico originated in Mexico and was made popular by trío romántico ensembles like Los Panchos. Like other tríos románticos, Los Panchos were known for three-part vocal harmonies and featured two nylon-string classical guitars accompanied by a requinto romántico. You can hear a whole spectrum of rhythmic styles within the trío romántico genre, like vals (waltz), pasillo (Colombian and 19th-century styles), bolero (from east Cuba), and Mexican ranchera. Los Panchos in particular featured the great Alfredo “El Güero” Gil, who was born in Teziutlan, Puebla, not far from the Veracruz border and the great city of Xalapa.
Requintos have smaller bodies than regular classical guitars, and their tuning is unique, too: A2–D3–G3–C4–E4–A4, one fourth higher than the standard classical. The shorter scale, ranging between 530 mm and 540 mm, facilitates the higher tuning without warping the top or neck, or causing worry about strings breaking. Traditionally, requintos have between 19 and 22 frets, and, like classicals, the 12th fret is located where the fretboard meets the body of the guitar. Their tops are typically made of spruce or cedar, while the bodies implement mahogany, cedar, Palo Escrito, or East Indian rosewood. Some older models made by my family were made with Brazilian rosewood. (My grandfather, Porfirio “Pilo” Delgado, is even credited with making the first cutaway requinto romántico.) Requintos have historically been strung with either nylon or gut strings—made from lengths of animal intestine—and wound bass strings. So, playing a requinto romántico is like playing a classical guitar with a capo on the fifth fret, but you still have the full scale and a brighter tone thanks to the body design.
“Oftentimes, Americans hear music sung in Spanish over a guitar, and just assume it is all mariachi.”
Originally, requinto románticos were built with a smaller body—not quite as small as a baroque guitar body, nor quite as long as a parlor guitar body. Today, the body size is shorter in length than a classical, but the width is often comparable, with some bodies ranging up to five inches in depth. In 1991, the Korean-owned, American-based manufacturer Tacoma came out with a steel-string version of the requinto romántico, claiming it to be the first of its kind. This is like claiming the ukulele to be a complete original, not recognizing the Portuguese machete that precipitated its creation. Plus, early on, string-maker El Cometa had a steel-string option for players who played requinto románticos.
“Sabor a Mí” by Mexican composer and singer Álvaro Carrillo, “Historia de un Amor” by Panamanian songwriter Carlos Eleta Almarán, and “Bésame Mucho,” a bolero song written in 1932 by Mexican songwriter Consuelo Velázquez, are just a few of the more popular trío romantico songs. If you’re a fan of great guitar playing, I encourage you to go down the rabbit hole and listen to some of these artists. With no effects pedals and no distortion to hide behind, these players are true.… Wait, what’s the Spanish word for “shredders?”
