See the video review of the R. Taylor Style 3

At a Glance

The Specs:
Solid Adirondack spruce top. Solid Madagascar rosewood back and sides. Three-piece tropical mahogany bolt-on neck. Ebony fretboard and bridge. Scalloped Adirondack X-bracing. Bone nut and saddle. Gotoh 510Z tuners. UV-cured polyester finish. 25.5-inch scale. 1¹¹/₁₆-inch nut width. 2¹/₄-inch string spacing at saddle. Taylor ESNC (Expression System, No Controls) pickup. Medium-gauge Elixir strings. Made in USA.

This Is Cool:
Powerful but balanced tonal spectrum.

Watch For:
Lack of fretboard dots may take some getting used to.

Price:
$4,480 list (base price)/$4,250 street. $6,730 (as reviewed)/$5,400 street.

Maker:
R. Taylor Guitars: (619) 258-4032; rtaylorguitars.com.

R. Taylor Style 3 Review

In 2006, Bob Taylor launched R. Taylor, a shop housed within Taylor Guitars’ El Cajon, California, campus, to handcraft a line of exquisite custom guitars. Although R. Taylor has access to Taylor Guitars’ best tonewoods and machinery, the actual design and building is done in a small-shop environment by a team of the company’s best luthiers personally selected by Bob Taylor (for more on R. Taylor, see Acoustic Guitar November 2006). While R. Taylor guitars include some design traits found on Taylors (the most obvious being the company’s bolt-on NT neck and ES electronics), they feature unique construction details (such as non-kerfed linings inside the body and different bracing patterns) and, in some cases, body shapes that differ from Taylors.

R. Taylor’s first two models were the mid-size Style 1 and small-bodied Style 2. Now in its third year, the company decided to tackle the classic dreadnought shape and introduced the Style 3 with the intention of producing a guitar with the volume and projection associated with vintage instruments.

As custom-built instruments, R. Taylors are available in a wide variety of woods. The base price includes a choice of a Sitka spruce or Western red cedar top and Indian rosewood, tropical mahogany, or flame maple back and sides. For our review guitar, the company chose an Adirondack spruce top and Madagascar rosewood back and sides (a matching piece of the same wood is also used for the peghead veneer and backstrap). The guitar also arrived equipped with Taylor’s ESNC (Expression System, No Controls) pickup system.

ELEGANT DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION

The Style 3 is all about beauty, class, and substance. The subtly contrasting light and dark streaks in the Adirondack spruce top are perfectly book-matched between the two top halves, and the wood’s beauty is obstructed only by a small teardrop pickguard and a ¹/₄-inch-wide mother-of-pearl rosette. The guitar’s back and sides reveal a higher level of contrast, with wavy black lines in the Madagascar rosewood creating a three-dimensional effect. The sleek black, unadorned fretboard (the only position markers are on the side of the neck) and Madagascar rosewood headstock overlay, which matches the wood used on the back and sides, contribute to the understated, refined look. A thorough inspection of the guitar revealed no flaws in the materials or craftsmanship; it’s apparent that the builders at the R. Taylor shop take care in each detail.

The Style 3’s 65-foot radius Adirondack spruce top is braced with R. Taylor’s hand-shaped, modified-X pattern. The guitar is available with one of four neck shapes: RT Standard, Slim V, Thick V, or Slim Carve. Our review instrument had the RT Standard neck, which is thinner than some vintage-style dreadnoughts and felt comfortable under my thumb, allowing for easy fretting in all positions.

POWERFUL, BRILLIANT TONES

The Style 3 will satisfy players looking for a dreadnought that will hold its own against louder instruments, like a fiddle or banjo. Even when digging in with furious downstrokes on original up-tempo pop-rock songs at high volume, I couldn’t overdrive the Style 3. And while it works great for driving rhythms, when I relaxed and let chords ring out and picked single-note lines—whether I was pickin’ through Kenny Smith’s “Me and My Farmall,” playing ringing single-note backup to one of my own songs, slowly playing through a Charlie Christian solo and relishing every note, or just playing arpeggios up the neck—I really appreciated the guitar’s ringing overtones, that indefinable sound of vibrating wood you tend to only hear in high-end or vintage guitars. The Style 3 has the focused tone that Taylors are known for but offers a richer and broader tonal spectrum than the relatively bright voice often associated with Taylors. A focused, well-balanced bass allows some thump without the muddiness heard in some dreadnoughts, and the high end rings through clearly.

Guitarists who play fingerstyle or who use a gentle attack with a flatpick often feel that dreadnoughts are braced too heavily to offer the kind of response they need to coax out solid tone, but Style 3 surprised me in this regard. Fingerpick­ing a jazzy song or playing Travis-style backup simply sounded superb on the Style 3. But the real test was when I slowed things down and played quiet, brooding fingerstyle passages—the style most likely to get swallowed by large-bodied guitars and stiff bracing. Again, I was stunned at how open this guitar sounded.

SIMPLE, NATURAL-SOUNDING ELECTRONICS

The ESNC version of Taylor’s Expression System electronics combines two propretary soundboard transducers with a magnetic pickup installed under the fretboard. Free of onboard controls, this system uses only a standard endpin jack and an internally mounted nine-volt battery.

I tested the ESNC through a Centaur Acoustic A1204V amp, and the first thing I noticed was that the ESNC provided a relatively low amount of gain, requiring me to adjust the amp accordingly. But, when I turned up the volume, I was pleased to find that the ESNC provided a natural and transparent sound. The Style 3 didn’t have that boxy sound sometimes encountered with acoustic guitar pickups, and it sounded well-balanced with flat EQ settings. It was also very quiet, exhibiting only the faintest amount of hum. The ESNC responded well to dynamic strumming and picking; the only hint of a “quack” I could coax from the amp happened while playing percussive single-note lines at fairly high gain—something that may not sound the same during performance with other instruments in a hall that accommodates those types of volume levels.

BALANCED RESONANCE

The Style 3’s open, played-in resonance and well-balanced power suit many styles and techniques. This guitar will appeal to players who are looking for a guitar that can tackle their primary flatpicking and strumming duties with ease, but will also shine during softer fingerpicked tunes.