>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