[220volt]

Originally Posted by ewalling

I'm certainly no diehard "Taylor guy", but I did work up sufficient interest in the GA8 some months ago to put in an order with Jim at Guitar Rodeo for one with a shorter scale neck (and a snazzy tobacco burst!). Over the last month or so I've found this to be a really excellent guitar for my needs, and I'm wondering if perhaps other models by Taylor tend to suit fingerpickers like me. The thing is, the trademark "brightness", seen as a negative by many AGFers, I find to be an advantage with my brand of fingerpad + nail picking. What I find is that guitars tending towards a darker tone can sound a bit dull in my hands. In fact, I went through a few Martins that were fine-sounding with a pick but which didn't cut it with my fingerpicking. The 12-fret 000-18GE I eventually settled on is perfect, but so is this GA8 - clear, ringing, and very rich-sounding.

This is probably inviting overgeneralizations, but does anyone else find that as a result of their bright sound, Taylors may be particularly well-suited to fingerstyle?

here is a good article from Taylor's website talking about "bright" vs "dark" hands and which wood is suited for which. It is exactly what you were talking about.

“Bone Tone”
Beyond guitar materials and playing tools, what the player is physically doing to the strings is a huge source of a guitar’s sound. Brian likes to refer to one’s personal technique as “bone tone.” It’s the way we hold a guitar, attack and fret the strings — the overall physics we bring to the guitar. A player’s bone tone might be described in terms of brightness and darkness. It helps to consider how one’s bone tone might match up with the relative brightness or darkness of the shape and woods one chooses.

“Bright players have lots of attack,” Brian explains. “As a result, you don’t hear the midrange bloom as much. A lot of times they’ll complain about a quick decay, that their tone doesn’t have fullness. What can that person do? They can play darker tonewoods. They can try playing more with the pads of their fingers versus nails. I also tell people to beware of the death grip with the fretting hand. Some people squeeze so hard that they pull notes sharp. A bright player who presses really hard into the fretboard is making a bright connection there in addition to his or her attack.”

Fingerstyle players with darker hands, Brian says, can use a little more nail strike in their attack.
Dark players also can play brighter tonewoods more successfully. “A bright player on a bright guitar like koa or maple might sound thin or wimpy, but a dark player will sound fuller,” he says. “So,
by selecting tonewoods, you can take a guy who has really bright, plinky hands, give him a warm-sounding guitar, and he’ll tend to sound really good.”

Brian has also observed that with more experienced players, controlling bone tone is less about the dexterity of one’s fretting hand and more about what one can do with one’s picking/strumming hand.

“The hallmark of a seasoned player is someone who can control their dynamic levels from hard to soft, and create different degrees of brightness or darkness by the way they strike strings,” he says. “I can always tell mature players by what they do with their picking hands.”
http://www.taylorguitars.com/guitars...es/woods/tone/