NAMM 2025: How Andy Powers created Taylor’s most “radically different” guitar ever – the Gold Label 814e
Picture a Taylor guitar in your head – the look, the feel, the sound – if you’re reading this you probably have a pretty clear picture of what it is, as Taylor has spent much of the last 50 years doing it. It’s probably got a small body, there’s probably a cutaway there too, the neck is thin and easy to play, the sound is pristine and high-fidelity, and it’s probably made of some tonewoods that wouldn’t have been chosen 100 years ago. This recipe for doing things differently, for doing things their own way, has been the engine that has powered Taylor from a pair of novices building guitars with very little knowledge in a San Diego co-op to one of the world’s most respected, popular and innovative guitar brands.
READ MORE: Andy Powers on 50 years of Taylor Guitars and running a company that’s hard-wired to do things differently
But take a look again at the guitar at the top of this article – does it look like a Taylor to you? Maybe in the loosest sense of the term, but closer inspection reveals that the new Gold Label collection guitars are some of the most surprising instruments the brand has ever made.
Because the Gold Label isn’t just a new guitar design conceived by President & CEO Andy Powers – it’s an acknowledgement of something. For the last 50 years, Bob Taylor and the brand have worn that almost as a badge of honour – they’re not for everyone, but everyone has to acknowledge the innovation, craftsmanship and quality of their instruments. But what about those left out in the cold?
“In my background as a builder, I wasn’t building one flavor of sound,” explains Powers of the Gold Label’s conception. “Having worked as a custom instrument maker, I was in the mind to go, ‘You should build what the player is asking for’. Build what suits their music. That’s why they’re here, right?
“If we look at the Taylor sound, we’ve been fortunate that for a lot of players, that sound does work very well for them. But if we say either you like it or you don’t, that means that there are players where that isn’t the right thing. And I don’t think that they’re wrong. I think they’re hearing what they’re hearing and they get to choose whether they like it or not.
“And so as a builder, I’m thrilled that many people do love this, but for those who don’t, well, there can be other sounds too. And because I like that one as well – that doesn’t mean that I dislike this one, or that this one’s worse or better. They’re just different.”
Image: Press
Gold Standard
The resulting Gold Label 814e is a shocking instrument for anyone well-versed in Taylor guitar history – because it’s a guitar that’s clearly well-versed in other history. When Bob Taylor started making guitars in 1974, by his own admission part of the reason he did things differently to anyone else was that he didn’t know any better – he broke conventions because he didn’t know they were conventions.
The Gold Label guitars however are made of things like spruce, rosewood, hide glue… the sort of materials that guitars were being made out of 50 years before Taylor even started. And that’s before you start playing it – when all of a sudden you hear a sound that’s familiar, but not necessarily in the context of a Taylor guitar – this is a sound that’s old, vintage… dare we say traditional? It speaks more than anything of the difference between Bob Taylor and Andy Powers – the latter has been steeped in the deep history of instrument making from when he was a child.
“As a player and a builder, I have loved the history of guitars,” Power agrees. “I love what the instruments are themselves. I love what different makers have done over time. It’s fun for me. It’s fun to see the different things that people come up with. It’s like listening to different recordings of different styles and different artists.
“And so you’re right. This is a guitar that feels like it knows its guitar history. It sat through all the classes and learned all the tricks and understands where it comes from. And so this sound, it is different for us as a modern guitar company, but it’s not different in terms of what guitar players have an ear for.
“Everything about that sonority is a very different sound for a Taylor guitar. And yet, as a guitar player, I go, ‘Well, that’s right in the middle of this collective heritage of what we think of as acoustic guitar sounds’. The richness and the warmth of that low end. The balance through the midrange, the fullness there. This kind of muscular quality on the high end. I like it a lot.”
Image: Press
The New Old
That last quote is the key tenet of the Gold Label concept – this isn’t Taylor throwing the last 50 years of innovation and evolution in the bin, it’s demonstrating that you can use these innovations and concepts to do more than just produce a guitar that epitomises the ‘traditional’ Taylor sound. These guitars might sound old, but the technology under the hood is completely cutting edge and completely Taylor.
“Who doesn’t want a great-playing guitar with accurate notes, accurate pitches, great fretwork, serviceable, reliable, balanced – all those kinds of things that are wonderful,” Powers posits. “But what if we want to build something with different colors, different sounds, different feels?”
One of the key components in creating the Gold Label was V-Class – the revolutionary bracing system that Powers designed that offered a remarkable leap forward in tuning and intonation stability all the way up the neck. When it was first introduced in 2018, it made sense to apply the technology to make guitars that enhanced the existing Taylor sound.
“These are the kinds of guitars and the kinds of sounds we’re known for,” Powers explains. “So it makes sense to voice these to do that, and serve our players. But as we start to make other iterations, it broadens what the thing is, what it represents and what it can offer you.
“So this one is a different voicing of a V-Class idea. It’s a V-Class braced guitar, but it’s a different revision of that. It actually borrows some elements of a classical fan bracing and mixes some of that element into this. And that sound hits me differently.”
Another striking change from the usual Taylor fare is a brand new body shape – it still looks like a Taylor, but with a twist. “It’s a new shape for us,” Powers explains. “Something we’ll call a Super Auditorium. It has a similar set of measurements as the Grand Auditorium, but the set of curves that connect all those dots are different. In my view, it’s a more classically proportioned guitar. I like the way it sits on a player. I like the look of it. I like the feel of it. I like the sound that it contributes to.”
Image: Press
Sticking Your Neck Out
But perhaps the most impressive bit of innovation on the guitar is one that’s hidden under the surface. For a quarter of a century Taylor’s neck assembly has been one of the company’s crowning achievements – a marvel of engineering, CNC precision and innovation that has made the long-term maintenance of Taylor guitars a doddle for any competent tech.
But the Gold Label 814e debuts a new neck design, more than seven years in the making, from Powers – that might prove to be even more revolutionary than its predecessor.
“For the first 25 years of Taylor guitar history, we built necks where there was hardware in the heel,” Powers explains. “You’d bolt that section on and you’d glue the fretboard down. And then around year 25, Bob and the team developed what we called the Taylor Neck or the NT Neck, where it was entirely attached with hardware and these ultra-precision shims. We’ve been building guitars successfully that way for 25 years. Those guitars work really well. But in looking farther forward, I want the guitars to serve the musicians even better than that. Can we do better? I think we can.
“And so for a number of years, I’ve been working on this design – it’s actually a long-tenon neck. And so it behaves a little differently than our classic Taylor neck, in that it somewhat reflects a more traditional neck joint – a long tenon or a dovetail or something like that – it allows you to build some of that sound in.
Image: Press
“What is different, though, is this one is more adjustable than what we’ve done in the past even. With this one, the actual neck angle or string height can be adjusted with just a wrench. So if you’re going to do a neck reset, you don’t take the guitar apart. You don’t even detune the strings – you just simply adjust it. So for the life of the instrument, the setup is going to be, adjust the truss rod and then adjust the string height, and you’re set to go. It’s wild.
“This is possibly the most innovative and new piece of guitar construction that we’ve come up with – we can put this neck on this body and adjust the string height almost like it was an electric guitar. And yet it’s the most traditional sounding, playing, feeling guitar we’ve ever built. That’s a really rich mix.”
It sounds almost too good to be true – a best of all worlds in terms of sound, playability and innovation… and Powers admits that this kind of heady brew comes at a cost on Taylor’s side.
“I will admit that it is a more difficult design to make,” he explains. “It is not a simpler thing. It is a more involved, more difficult design. So a lot of credit for heavy lifting needs to go to our team of engineers, machinists, toolmakers, who I’m fortunate to get to work with.
“I can only make a handful of these by hand with my antiquated hand tools, so we have to sit down and figure out how we’re going to make this in a modern way. And so, yeah, it’s been a process. It’s taken a little bit.
“It’s a challenge, but it’s a privilege. It’s a privilege because I get to build a guitar for myself, because that’s what inspires me as a guitar player. But what I’m really called to do is build instruments that serve the needs of players around the world – as well as our employees, as well as our suppliers and everybody else who is involved. This needs to be a great guitar for everyone. This has to be able to work for everybody to keep everybody busy and keep all the musicians busy enjoying these things and feeling fresh inspiration out of it. That’s what excites me.”
Image: Press
Good Lookin’
But even with so much radically different about this guitar, Powers still could have kept the visuals the same as the rest of the Taylor range to minimise the shock, but to his mind that would have defeated the whole purpose.
“With that sound in hand, I need to appoint the guitar appropriately,” he says “And this does feel like such a radical change for us. I need to change some of the things that we’re known for to be an appropriate match for that.”
So yes, the headstock has changed slightly, and is more back-angled like an old mandolin – there’s a new hand-drawn Taylor logo on there too. Elsewhere there are visual touches that draw from 1930s banjo design, and vintage archtops… it’s a smorgasbord of cherry-picked visual touches. But that’s not all. The guitar is made of Honduran rosewood and torrefied Sitka spruce – two extremely traditional tonewoods by Taylor’s standards – while old fashioned hide glue is even used in some places.
“It seemed appropriate for the instrument we wanted to build,” Powers shrugs. “I still love working with hot hide glue, and for the parts that are appropriate, that works nice on this guitar. Some of these other materials, it’s a mix of things that will give us the kind of sound and feel that we want to achieve out of this instrument. And so it’s as simple as picking the ingredients that suit the recipe.”
While the Gold Label series is designed to provide an alternative to the traditional Taylor recipe – and most certainly NOT a replacement – Powers also envisions a scenario where some of the innovations used in it might trickle down to the rest of the range, in the same way that V-Class has.
“A good idea that serves a player better deserves to spread out,” he insists. “So those things that do make a better, more reliable, more serviceable, better functioning guitar, yeah, we’ll watch those move out. But I don’t know over what time span or how that plays out. Those chapters in the book aren’t written yet.”
Image: Press
51st State Of Mind
Taylor’s reputation as the world’s most innovative guitar brand has only enhanced in the decade-plus since Powers came onboard, first as Master Guitar Designer and now melding that with taking the reins of the company as CEO & President. For anyone who has spent time with Powers, or read about his philosophies and interests, this feels like perhaps the most ‘Andy Powers’ Taylor guitar yet. We wonder if he sees it as his crowning achievement to date…
“I’m not sure I could put things in a rank because every time you work on something, it feels exciting and inspiring and fresh,” he responds with sincerity. “But this does feel like a bigger jump than many of the projects we’ve worked on in the past, because it reflects so much. There has been so much of the development in the last 10 or 15 years that’s really coming into fruition now. So we can go, ‘Well, that’s a radically different instrument’, and it’s exciting. So this feels particularly special to me.”
It also can’t be ignored that this is the first major launch following the 50th anniversary and especially the full-circle Legacy Collection – a project that notably had Bob Taylor’s signature on the label for the first time in a while. Does the timing of those two projects represent the end of one era and the beginning of a new one for Taylor?
“50 years is a huge milestone,” he accepts. “You know, it’s one of those thresholds that you cross over and go, wait a minute. That was more than a little blip on the radar. That was 50 years. And yet, year 51 is upon us.
“It’s important as a company, it’s important as a builder, but reality is the process of building things leads you into the process of inventing things. Every time you take your chisels up, you go, ‘Okay, it’s a new day, we’re gonna learn some things here, let’s see what we can accomplish’. And it’s exciting.
“And so some of these ideas, well, I didn’t really know when they would be ready. I just work on them, and then one day you wake up and you go, ‘Hey, you know what? That one’s ready. It’s done. Let’s set it in motion’.
So whether by chance or by fate, it’s time for this guitar to be out in the world in the hands of players, because it’s ready. And now that it also happens to signify this is the start of year 51? Let’s go. We got songs to play, we got guitars to make. We got another couple of decades to go.”
Find out more about the Gold Label 814e at taylorguitars.com
The post NAMM 2025: How Andy Powers created Taylor’s most “radically different” guitar ever – the Gold Label 814e appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
