Inventive bracing, uncommon tonewoods, and a shorter scale make this small-bodied flattop both big voiced and super playable.
RatingsPros:Loud for its size. Ringing, detailed top-end. Punchy, defined bass. Super playability. High quality. Cons: Hard picking can generate harsh, compressed overtones. Street: $1,399 street; $1,599 street as tested with Expression System 2 electronics and included AeroCase Taylor GTe Urban Ash taylorguitars.com | Tones:  Playability:  Build/Design:  Value:  |
Taylor’s new GT Urban Ash breaks a lot of ground for one guitar. It marks the introduction of another specialized Andy Powers-devised bracing pattern. It introduces a new-for-Taylor 24 1/8" scale length. It also underscores Taylor’s recent adoption of, and commitment to, shamel ash—a beautiful wood harvested from Los Angeles street trees.
But the GT, or Grand Theater, is also evolutionary—an extension of a concept for a compact, portable, sweet-playing flattop that was born with the Baby Taylor and evolved into the GS Mini. Unlike those guitars, the GT is a U.S.A.-built, all-solid-wood guitar. And with dimensions similar to a 00 Martin, it isn’t exactly a travel guitar anymore. But its design enhancements make it a more complex and forceful sounding instrument than the smaller GS Mini.
Bridge Building
Taylor design maestro Andy Powers has a pretty restless engineering mind. His V-Class bracing, now just a few years old, grabbed the attention of an acoustic world that rolls with change reluctantly. In very general terms, V-Class bracing was designed to deliver even resonance and greater projection. Powers adapted some of the lessons from the V-Class design process to the asymmetric, cantilevered C-Class bracing on the GT. And if you’re even vaguely accustomed to peeking at a flattop’s innards, the deviations from the norm are plain to see. The bracing sections are arrayed irregularly. Even the back bracing is, unconventionally, slanted aft on the bass side. The build quality inside and out is, no surprise, near immaculate. Setup and intonation are perfect, too.
Though shamel ash appears elsewhere in the Taylor catalog, Taylor made it a featured option in the GT line. It’s beautiful wood, with lots of cool figuring and walnut-like dark, deep grain that make it fun to look at and hold. The satin finish enhances its rustic qualities to lovely effect.
Tonally, it’s probably more akin to mahogany than anything else. But it also seems to emphasize fundamentals and sounds more responsive and full of reflective energy than mahogany. Combined with the C-Class bracing and the Sitka spruce top, the shamel ash enhances the snappier, more detailed facets of the GT’s personality. For players that want to chase more familiar tone recipes and explore the way they interact with the GT’s dimensions and bracing, there are also rosewood (GT 811e) and koa (GT K21e) versions.
Big, Bright Little Buddy
One of the striking things about the GTe Urban Ash is its occasionally forceful personality. Pick hard and it can be downright brash. But in general, the sum of the GTe’s wood recipe, bracing, and scale is a harmonic profile that’s punchy in the low end and full of energized, ringing treble tones.
When you use light-to-moderately-intense touch, the pronounced bass and trebles co-exist harmoniously with the body’s natural midrange. Not coincidentally, fingerpicking, hybrid picking, and strumming with a thin pick bring out the most balanced version of the guitar’s voice. Using these gentler approaches also mean you can utilize the instrument’s ample headroom to very dynamic ends.
Playing hard activates a very different personality—emphasizing the fast, punchy bass and the high-power treble at the expense of some midrange presence. If you play or record a lot of rhythm-driven rock songs acoustic style, you may well dig this aspect of the GTe’s makeup. The GTe is flat-out loud. And thanks to the low action and the beautifully shaped neck (which has more than a few echoes of a shallow, vintage-Fender U shape), it feels incredibly fast.
While there is no denying the GTe’s overachieving loudness, heavy pick attack tends to compress into a very punchy but washed out whole. That said, if you love Pete Townshend’s most aggressive rhythm playing, or Peter Buck’s and Johnny Marr’s flurries of arpeggios, you might find this sound an asset, and it’s easy to hear how the GTe would excel at layering extra-exciting rhythm parts in the studio.
The Verdict
The Taylor GTe Urban Ash tackles many tricky feats with aplomb. It almost manages the feel and speed of a well-set-up electric—even with .012 strings. It achieves head-turning volume and projection for a guitar of its size. Its bright-with-punchy-bass voice is unique, too, allowing opportunities for creative arrangement of acoustic rhythm and melody parts in performance and the studio.
But by growing in price and size, the GTe enters the ring with many formidable, top-quality small-guitar challengers, with more traditional tone palettes. If you like an acoustic with a lot of high-end definition, crave a small-bodied guitar with more detailed bottom end, or want to get the most possible projection from a smaller-bodied instrument, the GTe can deliver in spades. For players of such proclivities, the GTe’s fast, comfortable playability could awaken many creative possibilities.
Be sure to watch our First Look demo of the Taylor GTe Urban Ash:
With off-the-charts numbers of folks playing guitar, and buying them as soon as they hit the shelves, these days have hints of yesteryear.
At first glance, the folk revival of the 1950s/early ’60s and the COVID-19 pandemic seem to have nothing in common. Last century’s folk revival was about hootenannies, folk festivals, and coffeehouse open-mikes. And obviously nothing like that is possible during the pandemic. Instead, the 2020 surge of interest in playing music is about Zoom lessons and home recording, or simply sitting on the bed in your pajamas since you can’t go anywhere. But if we look at the growth of homegrown music during these days of pandemic lockdown, and compare the resulting changes to what happened during the highly social folk revival, some similarities stand out, along with the extreme differences.
One of the more interesting similarities between the pandemic and the folk revival are that both caught the guitar industry flat-footed. With COVID-19, guitar factories both here and abroad had to shut down for several weeks this year, and it’s clear that many new guitar models are going to be in short supply.
In the early ’60s, when I was trying to buy my first Martin, that company’s factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, was so back-ordered there was a two-year wait for a new D-28. The list of folk-revival icons who played Martins ranged from highly commercial performers like Bob Shane (Kingston Trio) to purists like the New Lost City Ramblers. Martin’s big competitor, Guild—a newcomer barely 10 years old—was able to fill some of that gap. At the same time, Gibson responded to the increased demand with plastic bridges and other production shortcuts that even today leave die-hard Gibson fans shaking their heads in disbelief.
Thanks to modern guitar-manufacturing technology, and online guitar forums thirsty for news, there probably won’t be a repeat of the 1960s decline in quality as companies scramble to fill backorders. But there will be some long delays. Taylor, for example, has announced that in June and July alone, they received half the orders they had projected—pre-Covid—for the entire year.
Other guitar companies are reporting similar off-the-scale demand.
It’s clear the current demand for guitars is driven by people wanting to play them, but without folk festivals and hootenannies for inspiration, what’s driving their newfound interest? An abundance of free time to play, since folks are stuck at home, is the obvious answer, but new technology plays a role nobody could have imagined 60 years ago.
For many musicians, inspiration for a nightmare is imagining today’s pandemic restrictions without YouTube. In many ways, that vast catalog of recorded performances is the online equivalent of the folk festivals, hootenannies, and coffeehouse performances that powered the folk revival. And while all those Folkways Records back in the day opened countless doors to the music of other cultures and the earlier music of our own country, such explorations were not free and took considerable effort.
Aging boomers may long for the good ol’ days, but when comparing then and now when it comes to chasing musical inspiration, now wins by a huge margin. Even if you did have access to a gigantic library of recorded music during the folk revival, it’s a lot easier to swipe a screen or jiggle a mouse than it is to move the tonearm on a turntable. Whether it’s a song or a technique, endless versions and variations are just a click away, and you can cover more musical territory in an afternoon than attending a week-long folk festival. Best of all, the only cost for taking that musical odyssey is the fee for a decent internet connection. Maybe that’s why the recent explosion of growth in homegrown music has only taken months, while the folk revival simmered on the back burner for years before it lit up the airwaves in the ’60s.
COVID-19 is easily equal to the folk revival in terms of guitar playing and guitar buying. There is, however, another angle where the pandemic leaves just about every other social and musical movement in the dust. I’m talking about guitar modification. Here’s where the abundance of available time, an almost endless store of video rabbit holes to descend, and how-to resources and supplies have aligned to produce a new wave of guitar players who relate to their gear in ways they may not have imagined a year ago.
Of course, there have always been tinkerers, and the DIY movement has been gathering steam for years now, but the coronavirus has inspired a much higher percentage of guitar players moving beyond simply changing their strings. This certainly leads guitar players to a greater understanding of their instrument, but it also raises the bar for guitar manufacturers. The downside is that you might have to wait quite a while to get that guitar you’ve chosen after hours of online research.
