Taylor's new scoop cutaway/soundport

[Michael Watts]

Hello everyone,

as you might expect, Taylor's new Builder's Edition models have been causing a bit of a stir at NAMM. Their scoop cutaway and soundport combo has turned a lot of heads and I had the chance to spend some time with one a couple of weeks ago. You can find my review right here

If you have any further questions I'd be happy to answer them, I had the guitar for a few days and got to know it pretty well.

All the best

Michael

[RalphH]

Cool, thanks for that very detailed review.

I had seen that soundport and rolled my eyes. Very happy to be completely wrong about it

[DavidE]

"Even with the soundport covered the 816ce provides a great example of the Taylor sound, but with the foam removed there is a marked difference – the instrument comes to life, with an immediately open and beautiful voice, which gives us the sense of being surrounded by the sound. Dropping the tuning to DADGAD and applying a medium gauge celluloid pick to the 816ce takes the performance up yet another notch, giving the trebles a silky shimmer all the way up the fingerboard, while lending muscle to the bass and low mids. Improvements to upper-fret access offered by the partial cutaway are largely subtle, due in part to the depth of the neck heel."

[Michael Watts]

Originally Posted by DavidE

"Even with the soundport covered the 816ce provides a great example of the Taylor sound, but with the foam removed there is a marked difference – the instrument comes to life, with an immediately open and beautiful voice, which gives us the sense of being surrounded by the sound. Dropping the tuning to DADGAD and applying a medium gauge celluloid pick to the 816ce takes the performance up yet another notch, giving the trebles a silky shimmer all the way up the fingerboard, while lending muscle to the bass and low mids. Improvements to upper-fret access offered by the partial cutaway are largely subtle, due in part to the depth of the neck heel."

Yeah I shoved a piece of foam (actually a foam clown nose which was a gift from Ervin Somogyi, that's another story) into the soundport to see what the before and after response would be. Sometimes the difference is negligible, sometimes it is really quite dramatic!

[Skarsaune]

Not a question about that guitar, but the 324 builder's edition....

The article talks about the back & sides of Urban Ash....but the pictures are all of the front of the guitar. I'd like to see what this wood looks like.

[MChild62]

Originally Posted by Michael Watts

Hello everyone,

as you might expect, Taylor's new Builder's Edition models have been causing a bit of a stir at NAMM. Their scoop cutaway and soundport combo has turned a lot of heads and I had the chance to spend some time with one a couple of weeks ago. You can find my review right here

If you have any further questions I'd be happy to answer them, I had the guitar for a few days and got to know it pretty well.

All the best

Michael

Great review. I found your video before seeing the article, after noticing - is that a sound port?? - on the Taylor website. Interested to try one of these. As an owner of a Grand Pacific, I've read comments that the audience hears a very different and richer sound from the GP than what arrives at the player's ears. So I guess your review about the new 816 raises a philosophical question: should the sound be meant more for the player or the audience (and do we really have to choose)?

And you're also right to ask, where the heck DOES Andy Powers get all the energy (and the TIME)?

[fitness1]

Originally Posted by Michael Watts

Sometimes the difference is negligible, sometimes it is really quite dramatic!

I would wager a guess that was because of the VERY odd positioning of the port!

I'd like to hear the logic behind them putting it there.

I read the line about clarity being an issue with the port 90 degrees from the soundhole, but EVERY guitar I've ported on the bass side has given an increase in volume, warmth AND note separation/clarity. This, of course is very relevant to it being sized properly.

That port is over 100 degrees off axis of the players ears - and, when playing up the neck your hand/forearm will be covering it at times. It wouldn't shock me to find that it was an audible distraction during recording (slight wah-wah effect)

[lar]

I like the cutout concept: adds access (more important for a 12-fret) without too much decrease in internal volume. Washburn has a comfort series that is similar (looks almost identical) - but w/o the soundport.

Wow - the neck is 1.56" at the nut? That is this significantly smaller than even the 'std' 1-11/16". I've never played a neck that narrow. I don't think I'd like it.

[29er]

Originally Posted by lar

I like the cutout concept: adds access (more important for a 12-fret) without too much decrease in internal volume. Washburn has a comfort series that is similar (looks almost identical) - but w/o the soundport.

Wow - the neck is 1.56" at the nut? That is this significantly smaller than even the 'std' 1-11/16". I've never played a neck that narrow. I don't think I'd like it.

That nut width info has to be a typo. Maybe they meant string spacing?

[vindibona1]

Thanks for the review. The concept of the 816 is an interesting one. And while many of us buy and enjoy guitars for their natural, unplugged acoustic sound, I have begun to wonder, does much of this matter once you have a need to plug in... especially with guitars that depends on resonance of the sound-board or saddle or strings' magnetic properties (i.e. piezo, transducer, magnetic) ? But getting back to it, visually that 816 is a piece of art.

[Shuksan]

Personally, I've never liked the look of scooped cutaways and sticking a hole in the middle of one makes it even less attractive to me. They are also ergonomically and functionally inferior to standard cutaways when it comes to providing unobstructed access to the high frets. Given Taylor's track record of dubious claims, I'm skeptical about the claimed sonic effects of a soundport in that location, but I would certainly be willing give one a play and see for myself.

From the linked review:

"The aim of a partial cutaway is to offer the player as much upper-fret access as possible, without unduly compromising the amount of air in the chamber and soundboard size with a full cutaway."

If "without unduly compromising the amount of air in the chamber" is so important, then why does Taylor also make the Builder’s Edition 324ce shown in the same review which by implication must be unduly compromised with its full cutaway? (And looks much nicer IMO.)

The difference in internal volume between the scooped and standard cutaways is minimal and the difference in the soundboard size between the two is hardly anything at all.

Also in the review:
"The design here has been well executed with a single, curved piece of ebony and without the need for extra internal kerfing to support the structure, which would quickly add weight to the guitar."

The amount of kerfed lining that would be involved here would weigh something like 10 grams. Assuming a total guitar weight of around 4.5 lbs, 10 grams would be a equivalent to around 0.5% (one 200th) of the weight of the guitar.

[Alan Carruth]

That's quite similar to the bevel/port that Lo Prinzi built based on the 'multi-dimensional port' ideas of Roger Thurman. I ran some tests on a similar (although not exactly the same) configuration several years ago, as part of my 'ports' experiments.

A basic run-down on 'ports':

The fundamental of the lowest notes on the guitar have wave lengths that are much longer than the box, so those sounds go out pretty much omnidirectionally. The player hears them about as well as anybody. As you go up in pitch the sound output becomes more and more directional; out of the sound hole and off the top toward the audience. A sound port you can see as you are playing can pick up some high frequency sound inside the box and send it out toward you. That's why most makers have settled on a port in the side of the upper bout, facing the player.

There are a (large) number of internal air resonances inside the box. Some of them communicate through the normal sound hole pretty well, while others don't. A port can 'hear' one of these if it's in a location where there is a lot of pressure change for the resonant mode. The low pitched 'rum jug' resonance of a guitar is a 'Helmholtz' type resonance, which changes pressure everywhere i the box and can be heard by any port. It tends to show larger pressure changes the further you get from the hole, so a port in the upper corner, such as that one of the Taylor, will pick up a lot of it. In the process it also changes the pitch of the resonance. It's also well positioned to pick up modes that involve the air 'sloshing' inside the box, such as the 'A-1' mode, where the air pressure changes a lot at the ends of the box, but hardly at all at the normal sound hole position (somewhere around the pitch of the open high E string, more or less, for most guitars). Basically, the further a port is from the 'main' sound hole location the larger the change in the timbre of the guitar will be.

My measurements suggest that opening a port doesn't add to the overall power of the guitar, but alters the balance. A 'corner' port will tend to make the notes around the pitch of the 'main air' (Helmholtz-type) resonance more powerful, but seems to cut down the output slightly in the region above 350 Hz or so. This is hard to measure, but it does make some sense: plucking a string puts in a certain amount of energy, which the body of the guitar then converts to sound. The only ways to get more power out are to increase the power input, or the efficiency. More input would require higher tension or higher action, and there's only so far you ca go with that before players complain. The guitar, as it turns out, is already one of the more efficient instruments, and increasing that is hard to do. It also incurs costs in terms of 'wolf' notes. Again, it's hard to get good measurements on this stuff, since the power is so low to begin with.

Since our ears are set up to detect small changes near the limit of perception we do tend to pick up changes in timbre, and these are often taken as increases in power. I suspect that's what's happening here. This gets us into the difference between 'power' and 'loudness', which is another long post or six.

[Shades of Blue]

Honestly, this is the only thing I really don't like about Taylor Guitars. They introduce something that we didn't even know that we wanted/needed, and then every time I go to sell a Taylor henceforth, buyers will ask, "Does this model have the updated port? I couldn't possibly buy a used guitar without the latest and greatest appointments..."

...ok rant over.

[HodgdonExtreme]

It's a Taylor, I'm sure it sounds great. And hats off to them for continuing to tweak/innovate/improve the guitar...

Most impressive, is their ability to create highfalutin buzzwords and jargon to promote the innovations with. I recall the V-class bracing being a "new acoustic engine". Now the soundport cutaway is:

Originally Posted by Andy Powers

Andy Powers’ own thoughts support this idea of ‘freeing’ the wave: “The lung capacity of the guitar is distributed over a larger range of frequency and a longer amount of time, so the sound comes out as very fluid. It strikes us as a strong voice that is both dynamic and filled with lyrical musical quality”.

Very impressive promoting/marketing/advertising!

[ChrisE]

I like Taylor.

I'm sure the new guitar sounds fine but I don't like the new cutaway/soundport. It just looks weird to me. Maybe I'm old fashioned.