It started with a new Electric Pickup design!

1+1=?

Actually... it all began with a magnetic riddle so to speak.

A little over a year ago my cohort David and I (they call us Dave and Daver around the shop) were working on some new pickup designs for our T5 Guitar line and something wasn't adding up in the design process. We were building proto types using a traditional humbucking design to test some ideas and make some decisions on output and physical size when we noticed something. As long as we physically built everything the way it's always been done everything worked fine...however when the physical design was altered the audio results became extremely random and unpredictable. Understand we are not novices in this field by any means but we also admit that both our brains put together hardly equal the level of an adult chimpanzee in the space program. We do however have enough common sense and observational skill to notice something unusual and not dismiss it quickly. We also possess enough genuine naivete to raise our hand and say...eeehem...excuse me teacher....why is it doing that?

Before I bore most of you to death with a science project let me go ahead and say that as a result of our experiments I have a different view than I had previously on magnetic flux theory. Yep as you might guess...we are now branded officially as magnetic heretics and everyone thinks we are building an alien propulsion system in our area. However before history (and friends) brand us as lone loonies I want to say that I have fortunately found at lease a few other like minded nuts on the Internet who seem to have abandoned the faith so to speak and joined us in our cult of Flux theory revision. Just for grins here are two pictures and a drawing of our design experiments.

The first picture is a round magnet glued to a pencil with ferro fluid (liquid magnetic fluid) being drawn out of the tube on the left side. Notice the oblong shape it is taking on...the shape is what you would expect to see if this was a model of the Earths magnetic field like the drawing on the right...however the polar field orientation on this magnet (North/South) is on the Right and Left not the top and bottom. The drawing on the right is the way field lines are typically represented with N on top and S on bottom and the shape as it is understood in current flux theory.

The second picture of the long object with all the spikes is a bar magnet with the liquid ferro fluid taking on the shape of the flux lines. We use ferro fluid instead of iron filings to visualize the field lines because its more exact. If you click on the pictures you can get a better look. If you want to see some really cool stuff using ferro fluid hit the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5Zzm2TXh4

While I can't divulge any trade secrets until we go through the infamous and ridiculously expensive patent process the bottom line is we seem to have come up with a pickup that regardless of the science yields something even your grandmother can hear! That's the best test of good and gooder as my dear friend and diving buddy Doc Malwin use to say!

The challenge for pickup designers is really pretty straight forward...to make a pickup louder what you do is wrap more copper wire around the bobbin and magnet to cut more lines of magnetic flux and increase the output voltage. The problem is the more you wrap the longer the wire becomes and the greater the resistance to the signal or the higher the impedance. The more you wrap the coil for output the darker and less defined the pickup becomes. The less bandwidth or frequency response and the greater the weird frequency peaks along the curve. The challenge is to get the output and keep the bandwidth. In musical terms it means keep the sweetness of the vintage sound and add the output of a modern pickup. The way most people solve this issue is by using less wraps and adding a small internal preamplifier creating an active pickup using a battery, ours are passive.

We approached the design problem differently and ended up with exactly what we wanted with less work and more predictability along the frequency bandwidth! Ok...sorry for the tec talk on a blog...

Hey Bob...want to see how spaceships fly?

One day last year after building numerous proto pickups, putting them in guitars and having a few key folks try them I felt like it was time to bring Bob in on what we were up to. He was out of town on a well deserved break so I wrote him an e-mail I headlined "Magnets and the rings of Saturn". After a few paragraphs on flux theory and the reason for Saturn's rings I told him we had something new to show him when he got back. He wrote back from some pool side resort that the waiter had just brought him a refreshing and delicious drink and that he could hardly wait! Seriously...he loves this kind of stuff, it keeps him up at night too! Bob is all about invention, creativity, and new design ideas.

When Bob arrived at the shop from being out of town he came right in to see and hear what was brewing. I gave him the background on a piece of drawing paper and we dove right in! After more than an hour of playing guitar we all realized that we had developed something new and genuinely special.

Bob put it like this....this pickup deserves to have a guitar built around it!
And now...a little over a year later....guess what...

Designing a new Guitar!

OK....so it's been a while since I posted...I'm sorry.

Since I last posted a few things have been brewing that I can now tell everyone about.
A little over a year ago a new design for an electric pickup was being tested and a few of us were hard at work designing a new bridge. Sometime earlier this year Bob (Taylor) got the special "yeah let's do it feeling" and officially approved an Electric Guitar line for manufacturing and release in 2008. Pretty exciting for all of us in the product development group and now that it's been seen here and there and the official launch is coming up I can post a few pictures and talk a little about some of the details that go into designing a totally new product.

BTW: You can see some of the promo stuff on our websight.

http://www.taylorguitars.com/


Officially the product line was slated to be released at Jan NAMM 08 but sometime around July it was decided (by Bob) that we would do a pre-release the day after Thanksgiving! While the implications of that decision may seem cool...to us it means we have to make somewhere around 1000 guitars before that time so they can be in the stores ready to go! Here we were on a design and manufacturing schedule where everything was in the bag for January, (for the first time by the way) with us sitting back all fat and happy with cigars and beers and along comes BT and moves everything up by uuuu...three months! Well...as we say in product development at Taylor "It's impossible...so it might take a little longer!"

Well...manufacturing started Oct 1st! 21 a day for two weeks to 60 a day by the end of the month! The parts and tooling are literally being completed sometimes a day before they have to move into the build cycle. The first guitars begin arriving from manufacturing to shipping on the 12th and we don't have cases or shipping boxes yet...those should be ready on the 11th! Yeah yeah yeah...so it's hectic and stressful...what about the promise to tell some of the development details?

Since the development of this guitar series happened over a year and a half at least I want to write about some of the really cool moments along the way and the real specifics of what goes into something like this!

I promise...I'll cover everything over the next few weeks so keep checking back!

Here's a shot of Tommy Shaw with one of the first proto's!

I have a habit of getting lost!

I have a habit when visiting new places of pointing myself in a direction and walking until I get tired...then hopefully finding my way back to where I started. Some people do tours...I do adventure walks. I pick up a few match books or pens with the hotel name on them just in case I need to ask for help and don't know the language and off I go.
Well I hit it again...at three different times and in three different cities last week while on business. Two of the times ended up...shall I say fascinating...and one of the times was...well I should have just turned around a bit sooner!

My first walk was in Madrid Spain. After a day of business I didn't really feel like going to bed so I decided to go for it around sundown.
The center of Madrid has these amazing back alley streets that wind up and down hills and in every direction past bars, restaurants and really interesting shops. The streets however also tend to curve ever so slightly off a straight line so that you can easily go from traveling due east to due south while thinking your going in a straight line. It's always challenging but that's half the fun!
I started this tour on a side street about a block from the hotel and walked for an hour or so following it through the city. A few blocks past a poster for a concert by the band MANA (on my right) I decided to follow a flowing crowd moving toward an open square where people were gathered for an early evening drink and watching a juggling busker earn his tips for the day. I hung for a bit enjoying the quaintness of the scene then veered down a side street that ended up curving hard to the right and downhill. After another thirty minutes or so of walking I decided to use my natural directional instincts and point back toward the street the hotel was located on. Well...an hour or so later later I passed another MANA poster (on my right) and continued walking another block or so when some of the shops started looking somewhat...uuu...familiar. I quickly realized it was the same MANA poster I passed when I started my walk. I had somehow circled in a giant arc and skillfully found a way back! A short skip and a jump and wellah... back to the hotel! This one worked out just fine...due of course to my natural male directional skills. Yeah right..

Three business days and one country later in Paris, I was getting dressed for my second adventure walk of this business trip. I decided to walk from the Monmont area of Paris to the Eiffel Tower...which I estimated from looking out my hotel window to be maybe 3 to 4 miles away. It was rather chilly out so I made sure to put my hat and gloves in my pack and again picked up some match packs from the lobby just in case. As I exited into the jungle of buildings and backstreets that quickly rose to swallow my view of the Eiffel tower I decided to take one extra precaution...I asked the concierge if he had a map of the city and he did.
It's usually difficult navigating with a map in an inner city area however Paris has street names placed on buildings at pretty much every major intersection. The first hour or so was a bit difficult as none of the roads went in the direction I wanted to go. I followed the map as much as possible which helped a little but some of the smaller street names were not on the map. Unfortunately it was also a cloudy day so the sun wasn't visible as a point of reference. I decided to use instinct and veered directly left down a side street which brought me into an open square with a huge church at the center. I ended up finding the church on the map and before long I located my position and had a solid sense of direction again. From there I walked through the shopping district and on to the Tuileries. After a few moments of rest and putting my gloves on due to the cold I headed down the road to toward the Arc de triomphe and then cut over to the Seine river. I stopped for a picture of the river with the tower in the background then sat for a moment to rest. The temperature was dropping quickly and even though I could see the tower I realized my estimate of the distance from the hotel to the tower was really far off. You know...some things in life you think are big but when you see them they turn out to be small...like Robert Redford. Some things you think are likely not so big end up being REALLY BIG...like the Eiffel Tower turned out to be. Yeah it looked close enough to walk to...that's because it's so dang BIG! After 2 plus hours of walking there was no reason to do anything but just keep going. Forget the fact that I still needed to get back but now the distance and the cold had decidedly dictated that the matchbook from the hotel would be shown to a Taxi driver by the end of this adventure just to get back. Or would it?

Well this isn't a book it's a blog so I'll say yes...as you can see from the photo I finally made it, and while standing under the tower freezing tired and hungry one of my traveling companions called my cell from the hotel and said we should meet at Notre Dame! I grabbed a Taxi and headed over. They all know where that place is even if you don't speak French so that part was easy. We went through the Cathedral then did a whirlwind tour of the Louvre, to see the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and other UBELIEVABLE HISTORICAL WORKS OF ART...dang (still walking by the way) and then back to the shopping district where I decided...hey...I'll bet I can walk back to the hotel! DOH! Up the streets and alleys past the Opera house through the music district, past the Mulin Rouge and finally...I DID IT! Just shoot me but what the heck...this is what I do!

Now...I said I did 3 separate walks....well Frankfurt Germany is a place you can easily get lost in and guess what....yep.

>Circus Life

It's OK to fall while wearing tights, at least when your 15 years old and most of the people you know are circus folks, and oh yeah...there's a net! This shot is me flying at 15 in one of my first shows.

Growing up in Sarasota, Florida (Circus City) it was easy to get involved in the Circus. Ringling Bros and several other shows have made their winter homes in the area since the early 1900's. Lots of our friends were 2nd and 3rd generation circus family kids with either a flying rig, trap frame or wire to walk on in their backyard.
Not much baseball or football went on in my neighborhood but there was a lot of swinging, hanging and tumbling on the weekends. Willy Edelston an ex-circus flyer ran a gymnastics clinic at the local high school on Wednesday nights which I joined and eventually did pretty well in. When the Jr. Olympics came to Sarasota I represented our area on high bar and rings placing 1st on the bar and 2nd in rings. Before I knew it Willy had me up on the pedestal of a flying rig learning how to swing and throw tricks into the net. The net being some 35' below the trick level that is. It was pretty cool for sure with bumps, net burns and tore out hands as a side benefit.

The following year Willy encouraged me to join the Sailor Circus officially which pretty much became my life for the next 6 years. Yours truly lifting 3 close friends Jerry, Karen and Vicki. We did home shows, road shows, TV shows, heck I was even the Wonderbread boy in a commercial back then. Vicki Edelston and I did a tumbling routine to the camera then the tag line..."Builds strong bodies 12 ways!" It was a real blast being part of that era, great friendships were built that I am proud to say many still exist.

That's also where I met a really cute young circus girl (She's the one on the front sitting on the bars) who did the 5 person bike act and several other production acts. I was her web sitter for 2 years and kissed her for the first time beside a newspaper stand in Leesburg, Florida on a roadshow. She still hangs with me after all these years and still refers to me after 33 years of marriage as her first husband.

There was always a shortage of guys so most of us ended up in multiple acts. I did hand balancing with Willy's son Tommy - plus tumbling, flying, casting and a few clown acts now and again. The photo is Willy on the left, Tommy doing the handstand, and myself. Those years were a great experience and as anyone who has been in the circus will tell you "once you've walked in the sawdust it gets in your blood forever."

Sooo...the best part about being willing to wear tights and drop into a net from 40' off the ground...I married that circus girl and she still seems to think I'm that guy she fell in love with all those years ago on the trapeze. Yep...she needs glasses.

>Airstreams!

A few years back I fell totally in love with Airstream trailers. Proof of my love you ask....well...I sold my last Harley to purchase a shinny new 25' Safari Limited Edition, hows that for proof!

As much as I have traveled over the years and still travel today I would rather wake up in the bed of my 25' silver beauty than in a swank hotel in Tokyo. I can't totally explain the love affair these rolling sweeties create but it's clear I'm not alone in my feelings for them.

The Airstream trailers manufactured today come in different sizes and layouts than the classic land yachts of the past. The Bambi in this shot is one of my favorites. One thing that hasn't changed however is the great fun a group of traveling metal heads has when camped together in these silver puppies. There's nothing like sitting around a desert or beach campfire with the glow of embers reflecting off large sheets of aluminum! Mmmm yeah baby!

The local Airstream group were hooked up with is made up of some of the most interesting and eclectic characters you can meet outside of a bikers gang...well maybe not the _ _ _ _ _ Angels but at least as unique as the So Cal BMW club. It's just a great group of friends to travel around with and see the west. I'll write more on this band of gypsies as time goes on for sure.

The Airstream motto...live more, see more, do more...Airstream for life!

>Genesis of the Taylor T5

I've been asked a lot about the Genesis of the T5 concept so I thought I would post a portion of the original release article from 2 years ago.

Misc...interesting stuff
In 2006 the T5 was voted Best new Electric Guitar by the music and sound retailers in the US and best new Acoustic guitar by MIPA in the foreign market...one guitar...2 categories.

The T5's market impact is also seen by the number of T5 knock off guitars that have now entered the market. It has now become more than a guitar its a "new category".

Interesting Historical perspective...
Les Paul Standard
First 9 years = 9,557 guitars sold (1952-1960) Discontinued in 1961 (the Les Paul name was given to the SG body shape - LP shape was dropped for 8 years)
Taylor T5
First 2 years = 13,664 guitars sold (2005-2006) First 3 years = 18,428 (as scheduled)

From W&S Article

From ES to Frankenstein
The debut of the Taylor Expression System in 2002 changed everything. The groundbreaking pickup/preamp system, developed in partnership with pro audio luminary Mr. Rupert Neve, established a new paradigm for capturing the natural nuances of Taylor acoustic tone and amplifying them. Establishing a platform of exceptional acoustic electronics was a huge step that validated Taylor’s foray into the world of pickup manufacturing and set the stage for future developments.
“The ES really allowed us to take full ownership of our own product,” reflects Special Projects Manager David Hosler, who led both the ES and T5 development projects. “It taught us a lot about making things in that realm. And as Bob has always said, what you’re doing now isn’t the end of it.”
With the ES came the creation of Taylor’s dedicated electronics division, and in its wake, the K4 Equalizer.
The idea for the T5 was first hatched during the summer of 2004. What’s remarkable is that for the radical new design that it represented, the project sprinted from concept to completion in just over six months.
“Part of it is simply that Bob creates an atmosphere here that allows creative people to follow the very nature of creativity, which is to make something new,” says Hosler. “He so strongly nourishes that here, and then beyond that, we have really great craftsmen who turn the ideas into real products. That’s a powerful combination.”
Like the ES development, the essential impetus for the T5 project was rooted in Hosler’s experiences — and frustrations — as a professional guitarist and guitar technician. He had played a lot of electric guitar on stage, and understood their limitations.
“All my life, the struggle of playing electric guitar has been to get great clean tones and great distorted tones out of the same guitar,” he says.
Hosler and Taylor repair technician David Judd had actually been working on a different side project — a new design of Taylor’s acoustic-electric bass — when the inspiration for the T5 struck.
“David and I had been trying to figure out how to make the bass thinner and more useful,” Hosler explains. “It was kind of cool, but it wasn’t really happening.”
For the heck of it, they pulled a Frankenstein. They sawed the bass neck off and installed a guitar neck on it just to see how it would sound.
“We started talking about a soundhole and figuring out how big an air area we needed, and Larry Breedlove [one of our product development guitar builders] created those f-holes. It definitely looked cool, and then when we played it, we realized we had something pretty magical.”

From Acoustic-Electric to Electric-Acoustic
The early T5 prototypes had just Expression System pickups on them. Hosler had toyed with the idea of putting an electric pickup in them as well, but says at the time he didn’t know “if the market would give us the right to do that.” He got his answer one night when he went to see his son Joel’s rock band play at a San Diego club.
“Joel and Jon Foreman of Switchfoot were hanging out, and I had brought one of these prototypes out,” Hosler recalls. “And Jon said something like, ‘I wish I had a guitar that could give me some acoustic sounds but also let me put it in full distortion mode.’ And Joel was saying the same thing.
“So we went back and did a couple of iterations to try to make it go, and soon we realized we had something unique. Once you have multiple pickup components, you start thinking, OK, I can get a lot of different sounds if I just combine them in different ways.”
Hosler says that at that point, a lot of ideas he’d had for a long time as a player, as a guitar technician, and from the experience of watching some of the young rock bands and listening to what was on the radio, all began to crystallize.
“I know I’m showing my age, but it seems like with my generation [Baby Boomer], guitarists had different playing styles for acoustic guitar and electric guitar. Now, a lot of the pop acts aren’t playing guitar that way. They seem to have one style that covers both. And you don’t hear lead solos in songs anymore.”
Hosler was also tuning into the production values of a lot of pop music he was hearing, and he kept noticing a distinctively blended electric-acoustic sound. In the studio, bands have the luxury of layering tracks, mixing a crunchy electric track over a warm bed of acoustic. Getting that sound on stage, though, is tougher to pull off. So, despite the fact that the acoustic guitar tends to have a lot of presence on pop records, Hosler observed that it ultimately wasn’t getting much stage time, unless the artists played an acoustic set.
“It’s hard to hear an acoustic guitar in the mix at a rock band show,” Hosler says. “Plus, you look at some of these tours, like the Warped tour; you may have a nine-band lineup, and each group has like 15 minutes to set up. I’m looking at all of these other brands on stage — Marshall, Rivera, Mesa Boogie, Pearl — and thinking, there isn’t a chance we’ll see Taylor up there. But there’s no reason why a quality product like ours shouldn’t be. So that was a motivation factor as well.”
Much of the initial T5 development happened “underground”. Hosler had been talking to Bob Taylor about it, and one day invited him over to his work area to show him the latest prototype.
“He started messing around on it, and said, ‘this is cool!’ He caught it right away — and this wasn’t even plugged in.”
Hosler brought the guitar to a subsequent product development meeting as the group was strategizing the production lineup for 2005, and passed it around for people to play. It didn’t take long for the excitement to spread, Hosler says. Nonetheless, for Taylor to move in this direction was a major decision, and he acknowledges that there was initially a certain degree of “backing into” the domain of making electric guitars.
“But really, once there was the smallest amount of interest, I wanted to keep driving it hard,” Hosler says, adding that once the green light came on, it was amazing how things began to come together, particularly with Bob Taylor galvanizing the multi-departmental effort. It was August. If this was going to happen, the company would have to have fully developed guitars to show in time for the January NAMM show, and production would have to tool up and be ready to ramp up quickly to stock music stores by spring.
“Bob is the best ‘cat herder’ I’ve ever met,” Hosler says. “That’s what he did so brilliantly, in addition to injecting his opinions, and insights. He just knew how to keep everyone moving together in the right direction, getting it into the real product stage.”

The T5 was born!

>Death Valley

DEATH VALLEY CA.

My wife and I spent the week after Christmas camping in Death Valley CA. We spent most every day driving back trails to old town settlements, mines and amazing views. I mostly wanted to locate and visit a place known as the racetrack. It's one of the few places in the world where the phenomenon of moving rocks occurs. It's an ancient dry lake bed on the north end of Death Valley that is difficult to access. It's one of the most interesting things I have ever seen. No one has ever seen them move even though the phenomenon has been studied for decades. There are a number of very plausible theories but frankly...who cares...it's just a cool thing to see!

Heres a few more pictures of the landscape. Tami on the salt flats at Badwater.Zabrinski Pt.

>Winter NAMM 07

Winter NAMM 2007 was awesome!
The Taylor booth turned out better than we planned. Our Layout this year really portrayed our feelings about Guitars and Guitar life. It was very much an experience as well as a display of product. The artist performances were genuinely inspiring and totally different from last year. I was really captivated by Bird York and her style of writing. Marc Seal had one of his best performances ever and Mana turned out to be the performance of the show.

I only made it to the main floor once and didn't get to see much else. I did run into a few good friends and found they had been as busy as us the entire show. This year looks like a good year for the music industry as a whole.

The thing I am most proud of from our development efforts this year is the T5 12 String. It's not just another electric 12 string...it's a truly unique new approach. I think between Brian Swerdfeger and myself we have owned just about every electric 12 string made at one time or another. I have a lot of love and respect for those guitars but both of us can also look at our collections and admit that we never really fell in love with any of them as inspiring instruments to play. Sometimes I think the electric 12 has survived more on image and lore than anything else. Approaching the design challenge with the experience of ownership of those instruments and as a performing musician I can now say with true conviction...SOLVED!

I am totally proud of this as an offering of an inspiring new Guitar to play. I think one of the comments I heard this weekend really captures the essence of the experience. Marty Harrison from South Carolina commented after playing it by saying "you don't need a 12 string technique to play this guitar!" Doyle Dykes played it and instantly fell in love.

Design Thoughts
As a conceptual designer it's difficult to look at anything with fresh eyes and imagine what could be and not just reinvent what already exists. The key that unlocked this one was developing a saddle with 2 axis compensation, intonation and height.
It occurred to me when playing the 1st proto one night that my right hand had to compensate for the different heights between the octave and fundamental of each string set. As you pick across the strings it is a low high, low high, low high, experience for the player, which by the way is the reason a 12 string technique is needed. By raising the string centers to the same axis the tops become basically the same height and the entire experience is changed. Our CNC technology allows us to compensate exactly for intonation as well as perfect string to string height set up. It's a small step that produces an amazing result.
Add to that the T5 body design experience as well as a 1 11/16" neck width and man.....

Well, that's my thoughts for today. Jan 23, 2007