>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