While I admire the Taylor crew for stepping out of the box and implementing an alternative system which may be more financially efficient and probably does address the guitar’s major weakness of folding up across the soundhole, I am critical of its clunky lack of elegance, and it does not appear to me to handle cross grain stiffness as well as my modified traditional system. So I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks back, inspired by their efforts, with the idea of the Upper Transverse X brace you see in this guitar. It replaces both the UTB and the so called popsicle brace, a brace which I consider far more important than it is usually given credit for. If the popsicle brace is as important as I think, the UTX should do the job a little better.
The main reasons for this UTX are increased stiffness across the sound hole and the fact that I can now tune my main X location w/o fear of shortening the Guitar’s Lifespan. It does add a bit of labor as, so far, I have to put in the braces in 4 stages instead of my habitual 3. My method of “tuning” the braces is done in stages, which gives me correctable results in case I get too exhuberant. If I don’t ocassionally go “too far”, how am I to know where “far enough” is?
This is a “spec guitar”, which means there is no customer with expectations and that allows me to take the risk the UTX represents. I fully expect it to work very well, but there is some risk that it will alter the nature of the guitar unexpectedly. That is why I have been very careful to treat the lower bout’s bracing conservatively, in line with what I have been doing for the last several years. Of course the fact that I am using a tonewood that is new to me is a slight curve ball, but at least it is a known factor outside my body of work.
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