Taylor Guitars 50th Anniversary Showcase on Saturday, May 18

On Saturday, May 18, from 1 pm to 5 pm, come to our Taylor Guitars 50th Anniversary Showcase. We'll have Eric Sakimoto from Taylor on hand to give you a personal guitar consultation. He will also have some new models to show off. We'll have lots of free swag and we'll be raffling off a free Taylor 50th Anniversary GS Mini-e Rosewood SB LTD.

Eric will help you find the Taylor that’s right for you. He will identify your player profile and explain which body shape and wood pairings best match your playing style. And if you’re not sure where to begin, he can help you understand the basic.

We're very excited to help Taylor celebrate their 50 years of crafting guitars. We think we started carrying them around 1982, but when we called Taylor to check, it turns out their computer records don't go back that far. (Ours don't, either.) Still, we remember the days when Kurt Listug would show up in his Volvo station wagon to hand deliver the guitars that he, Bob Taylor and their small crew built in the small Lemon Grove workshop.

Even then, we could tell Taylor guitars were something special. The first ones we stocked already had the slim, playable necks they are still renowned for. Along with the standard six-strings, they built amazing 12-string guitars that set a new standard for acoustic jingle-jangle. We also liked the way they used then rarely used tonewoods like maple and koa. 

Over the decades, we have seen Taylor grow from a tiny operation into one of the largest, and most respected, guitar makers in the US. But even as they grew, they never let the quality slip and they strived to innovate and make better guitars. Their adoption and refinement of the bolt-on neck made the construction technique a viable alternative to the venerable dovetail neck joint. They developed two new bracing patterns, the V-Class and the C-Class, that introduced new tonal subtleties to the flattop guitar.

Taylor is an industry leader in the use of sustainable tonewoods such as maple and walnut as well as more unusual varieties like ironbark and shamel ash. And their ebony mill in Cameroon is a model for the careful husbandry of scare tropical wood.  We don’t know where Taylor is going to go in the next 50 years, but we do know it will be an exciting journey and we will be honored to take the ride with them.