Taylor’s big news at NAMM this year was the Grand Orchestra shape, a completely new model designed by master luthier Andy Powers. It’s a curvaceous, downright sensual instrument designed to blend power, detail and balance across the tonal spectrum. It’s also Taylor’s biggest body shape, and when you see one in person it has that kind of presence and gravity… if you’ve ever pressed your nose against in the window of a guitar shop as a kid you know the kind of presence and gravity I mean.
“We’d been reconsidering our Jumbo guitars,” Powers tells I Heart Guitar, “and we finally got to the point where we said “Okay, well, let’s stop. If we completely re-conceive what we want to do with an acoustic guitar, with no constrictions, no preconceived notions of what it should be, what it could be used for, how it could be made, what would it be like? I literally started with a sheet of fresh paper on my drawing board. I thought about what I wanted and started connecting the dots. So I started drawing curves I knew would sound good, and combined them with bracing ideas and construction elements. This is a new, fresh voice that’s unusually responsive for a bigger guitar. It sounds good if you play heavy-handed and you end up with this huge, powerful voice that’s really linear up to the higher registers. It’s an entirely fresh, original new design that’s got its own unique, expressive voice. It’s not a revamping of something that’s already been done.”
There are currently three models: the 518e, the 618e and the 918e.