A Look Ahead

Twenty-five years in business is a long time. Do you feel like you're the king of the hill, that the other acoustic guitar makers are trying to knock you off?

In a lot of respects, I do feel like the king of the hill. It's interesting to think of it in those terms, because mostly I have long-standing relationships with most of the other makers. For instance, in two weeks I'm going on a Baja fishing trip with Bill Collings and Jean Larrivée. All our customers probably think we hate each other and compete with each other, but we are going fishing together for five or six days down in Mexico.

Do you talk shop on these trips?

Oh yeah, we talk about work all the time. To explain how I feel about this, I'm 20 years old, I'm a guitar maker, who on my block is a guitar maker? Nobody. I go to church, who makes guitars there? Nobody. Okay, I'm 30 years old, I'm a little more successful as a guitar maker. Who on my block is a guitar maker? Nobody. Who even has any idea, any conception of what it is I do? But Jean Larrivée does, Bill Collings does. Who do I have the most potential to be friends with all the way through life? I'm not going to give up a friendship with those guys because I feel like I need to compete with them. I think they feel the same way.

After 25 years in the business, would you say you've made it?

We have made it past our wildest dreams. We have a strong, strong presence in the marketplace. We manufacture a lot of guitars. Our dealers like and respect us. We're a profitable company. We have 350 employees. We pump economy into our local town. It's a good deal all the way around.

 

Taylor's new "Fingerjoint" mates the neck to the headstock.

You're known in the industry as someone who freely shares guitar-building information.

As they say, "a rising tide floats all the boats." Would you be doing Harmony Central if I was the only guy making guitars? No. How thick could an acoustic guitar magazine be if I was the only one making guitars? It would be very thin. I need to be part of an industry to survive. I can't be a monopoly. I can't fuel a world of guitar players. I need all the controversy. I need people to hate our guitars. I need all of that. That's what makes it all work.

I got really into building a home theater a few years ago. I researched all this high-end gear. Laser disk was the thing before DVD. I remember that Pioneer, who had 80 percent of the laser disk market, was constantly annoyed by having 80 percent of the market. They only wanted 20 percent of the market. They wanted Philips and Sony to join. They realized that with their being the only player in the market, the market would never survive. And it didn't, because other players didn't play. Now DVD is happening and everyone is playing -- and look what's happened.

Wood meets high tech: slotting a New Technology Taylor neck to the body.

What other projects do you have in the works?

We spent ten years with CNC machines mimicking the way hand tools have been used for a hundred years to make guitars. We got to a point where we decided we were wasting the potential of the machinery. With this machinery, the way a guitar is built needs to be redesigned to exploit the capabilities and accuracy of this machine. So we designed the guitars that people are hearing about now. The neck joint is different and the way the guitar goes together is completely different. You look at it and it looks the same as any other guitar. But it was a hard, expensive, train wreck of a switch, to change our factory over to making a much better guitar. We went so deep into exploring what we could do with our perfectly accurate machines that we found out they weren't perfectly accurate at all.

How do you mean?

It's sort of like your computer that is so powerful. They put software on it that demands all that power. So you need a more powerful computer. Then when you have a more powerful computer, they up the ante with the application. You can never stay ahead of it. We had the same thing. We had a very powerful factory with capabilities we were wasting because of our guitar design, so we designed a guitar that absolutely demanded this level of accuracy and precision in its construction. The tooling needed to be replaced, and that was agonizing. So generally speaking, the guitars are getting better. That helped me to achieve a life-long goal I've had. I don't want to be sitting around trying to remake those really good guitars that I used to make. I don't want to be making my own vintage reissues. I want to make better guitars today than I did yesterday. We're doing that. We're doing that in a big way.