STREETS AHEAD

Guitarists are notoriously conservative, but Taylor – as a brand that started life in 1972 not 1872 – has always enjoyed the freedom to create the guitars that it wants to make, not the guitars that tradition dictates it should build. Over the years, founder Bob Taylor has made good use of that freedom to move the guitar maker’s art forwards – usually in the direction of greater sustainability and an open-mindedness about tonewoods.

Bob Taylor may have taken a step back from hands-on guitar design at the Californian company in recent years, but Taylor’s master luthier Andy Powers has embraced the same mission to work with progressive materials and minimise the company’s impact on pristine forests. Taylor is already well known for its efforts to make ebony and koa supplies from Cameroon and Hawaii more sustainable. Now it has gone a step further to harvest high-quality guitar-making wood from the very streets of California’s cities.

Taylor’s brand-new Builder’s Edition 324ce looks stunning, with its low-key aesthetic and tactile contours (see review, p78). Less obvious is that its back and sides are made of a wood called Shamel ash, which is more commonly found in California’s parks and residential streets than