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Taylor Guitars is an American guitar manufacturer based in El Cajon, California. The company was founded in 1974 by Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug, specializing in and semi-hollow electric guitars. It is one of the largest manufacturers of acoustic guitars in the United States and sells guitars in 65 countries around the world."Wood & Steel: Inside the World of Taylor Guitars", 50th anniversary edition 2024
Needing a compact logo for the guitars' headstock, they changed the name to Taylor, which they thought sounded more American than Listug. Kurt Listug said, "Bob was the real guitar-maker." Listug became the partnership's businessman and Taylor handled design and production. They began selling their guitars through retailers in 1971. In 1981, facing financial difficulties, Taylor Guitars took out a bank loan to purchase equipment.
By 2012, Taylor Guitars had more than 700 employees in two factories; in El Cajon, California, and in Tecate, Mexico, where lower-priced models and guitar cases were made. In early 2011, the company opened a Taylor distribution warehouse in the Netherlands to serve the European market. In January 2014, the U.S. State Department honored Taylor Guitars with an Award for Corporate Excellence (ACE), citing the company's commitment to responsible practices in obtaining ebony for its instruments, which included purchasing a sustainable ebony mill and increasing its output of usable timber from 10% to 100%.
On January 1, 2021, the company became fully employee-owned. In May 2022, Andy Powers was made CEO, President, and Chief Guitar Designer of the company.
In January 1999, Taylor began making guitars with a patented, bolt-on neck called the NT (new technology) neck. This differed from conventional guitar necks in using one continuous piece of wood from the headstock to the 19th fret to support the Fingerboard. The usual practice in guitar neck construction was to support the fretboard up to the fourteenth fret and glue the unsupported remaining length to the soundboard. The NT neck fitted into a slot on top of the guitar body, achieving the desired angle with small shims. Guitars sometimes require neck angle realignment (neck reset), and the NT system achieved this by changing shims. Prior to 1999, Taylor Guitars had a simple bolt-on neck design which could be adjusted without the complex process of ungluing the neck joint.
The Taylor company uses its own pickup, the "Expression System", which is a Humbucker induction pickup mounted in the neck, and a pair of dynamic soundboard transducers wired to an onboard preamplifier, designed by Rupert Neve. The entry-level 100 and 200 series of guitars have an externally similar system, known as ES-T, which uses a single under-saddle pickup and no soundboard transducers. The first-generation ES system was introduced in 2004. It had two transducers, one mounted to the bridge and the other on the lower bout of the sound board, with a small, single-coil pickup mounted in the neck joint, all wired to the onboard preamp, which had knobs for volume, tone and blend. This early ES system was available on the higher-end 500 series and above, as well as the 30th-anniversary limited-edition series, starting in the fall of 2004. It was a custom order for the 300 and 400 series, and could be retrofitted to some older Taylor guitars with the NT neck design.
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