+1 for this thoughtful reply. Taylor is a company. Any successful company markets their products to increase sales and increase profitability. When companies spend money on R&D and create a successful product or upgrade it would be malpractice to not advertise and promote the product. #stopthehating

I know. I have been a marketing professional for over 15 years for instruments worth a thousand times the price of an average Taylor guitar. My post is not about doing Marketing or not, it's about the way Taylor does their Marketing. Marketing should not be inventing BS stories to make customers spend money on cooked air only. Particularly for a quality product like a Taylor guitar, marketing should be about educating customers, and creating awareness of the true and genuine value of the Taylor proposition.

Ah, but with this you're buying into the HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE definition Taylor is making about what defines superior from inferior. Their definition is clearly balanced sustain and volume up the fret-board. I'm not a guitar builder, but I understand sound engineering enough to know that one of the nuanced things about a guitar's tone that make it's timbre unique is how the decay shifts a bit as you go up the neck. This is not something I want fixed or feel needs correcting. It comes back to a certain beauty in the imperfection and the sterile, uninteresting quality sometimes perfection can bring.

If Taylor's quest was to build a more piano-like sounding guitar then assuming everything they are claiming about V-Bracing is true, that just means this design change gets Taylor closer to their vision of a superior guitar. This just makes their guitars even more alien from traditional guitar tonal character. If a player is looking to get the great acoustic tone their guitar heros had the traditional tone is going to be what they're chasing and that's going to be a very different definition of what makes a superior guitar than Taylor's definition.

They had some many hours put into this...
So why didn't they made some simple A/B comparison videos with different styles of playing to demonstrate the difference in equal models with standard vs v bracings instead of making claims on over the top marketing videos?
You can call BS on something without playing when they can't do something so simple to show if this is really such a big improvement as stated.
The most hilarious part for me was in the "playing" video when one of the guys talk about sustain, strums a chord, and it sustains for less than 10 seconds.
Even when collings released the waterloo line marketing videos, there was actual playing in between the overly emotional statements.

So...much...crying...

It's just a matter of time.....

It is far too early to pass judgement on the overall design and concept. You never know... But I think we need to remind ourselves of a few things.

Taylor is MASTER OF MARKETING. While their guitar building skills are quite good their marketing prowess eclipses their guitar building. Just think about how Bob Taylor invested in an ebony forest and now uses all 20 trees they cut down instead of one in twenty. It most certainly had to have reduced their material costs for ebony (at least in the long run). He then says "you don't have to have all black ebony" and we all adjusted our perception of it. He was right for many reasons, but until he marketed the striped ebony it never would have gone over with the customers. Taylor has modified (IMO cheapened) many of their designs over the years, marketed them as upgrades and in some cases created a nice margin boost [814ce (in various flavors) to 814ceDLX as an example]. Look at the complexity of their ES1 system. An balanced under-neck magnetic pickup and a body sensor, ditched for an unbalanced single, bolt-on piezo pickup and marketed as an upgrade.

And then there is the ever-changing 614ce. In 2008 that guitar came with a 3-piece back, magnificent flamed AAA maple, a finger-joint headstock and the original ES pickup system. Today the 614ce, while it does have a torrefied top and shifted bracing, the maple is a lower grade from the 2008 version, camouflaged by dark stain, a two piece back instead of 3 and their bolt-in ES2 system. Actually today's 614 is a fabulous guitar, but does have some trade-offs in quality vs sound innovations.

So could the V-Class bracing have some promise? Absolutely. I don't doubt for a moment that it will provide some benefits that some of us will appreciate. But will be spend $5000 for those benefits when there are other boutique makers who build exquisite guitars in that price range? And the burning question in my mind... What will the guitar tops look like in 5 or 10 or 15 years? Will they still be flat, or will time permit bulges in the top due to the reconfiguring and minimalization of the bracing? I think, as always, they'll be successful marketing the concept. Only time will tell if it is a winner.

I agree that at the $5000 price range there are a lot of quality builders competing for that same $5k? And at the same time there are a lot of brand conscious individuals who are going to buy what they're going to buy?

It seems to me that the ultimate power rests with the consumer, no matter what Taylor may say about the new designs. Their job is to stir up excitement about the new design to get people to try it. Whether or not this design takes hold will be entirely up to the customer base. People will either agree they like the design and buy them or they won't and the design will fall by the wayside.

I applaud them for trying something new. You can't advance the art/science of guitar building without trying out new concepts.

lol to this whole thread.

Gotta love how non-guitar builders know more than the experts. ;)

I firmly disagree. Maybe they were so in the past, but during the last couple of years their marketing stories have consistently made me cringe. Anyone with an IQ score over 60 would recognise the complete BS they tell these days. But maybe the majority of guitarists does not fall into that category... ;)

Sorry, I can't resist: I'm a professional guitarist, a marketing professional, a guitar builder and a physicist. Please consider me an expert. ;-)

You forgot humorist. I enjoyed your post.

Humor is so subjective, almost like the tone of a guitar... ;)

And in the end, they’re all guitars... six strings, a neck and a box. All you need is a good player to make it sound good.

Rick