>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!