Taylor Custom Aged Maple Grand Symphony Acoustic Electric Guitar New

This Custom Taylor was designed by our own Michael John Simmons. Here’s what he has to say about it.

I based this Aged Maple guitar on the 816ce Builder’s Edition, which has Taylor’s redesigned Grand Symphony body shape. I’ve always loved the sound of large maple guitars, which have a richness and clarity that work well for so many different styles of music. I thought the Aged Maple would work well with a torrefied Sitka spruce top, and I am very impressed with how this guitar sounds. Like the 816ce, this Custom has a scale length of 24 ⅞”, which a little shorter than usual on a large guitar like this, and the lighter tension makes playing this guitar a little easier on your fretting hand.

I think the unique soundport cutaway, which resembles a partial Florentine cutaway, was a fascinating innovation and I wanted to try it out on a maple guitar. This design keeps the guitar’s full back intact while still allowing easy access to the high-register frets. The additional soundhole allows for wider sound dispersion than a guitar with just a standard soundhole. I’m grateful to Andy Powers who let me design a guitar using many of the features from the Builder’s Edition series of guitars like the binding with chamfered edges and the Silent Satin finish, which reduces the squeaking and sliding sounds of a player’s natural arm movements on the body.

About Gryphon’s Aged Maple:

The back and sides were milled from big slabs of figured maple Gryphon’s co-founders bought fifty years ago when they were making a lot of banjo necks. This was before the retail store was opened, and once that happened repairs and restoration quickly put most building projects on the back burner, where they stayed as demand for repairs changed Gryphon’s direction. This maple has been stored in Gryphon’s attic ever since, but Andy Powers and the crew at Taylor has helped us finally put it to good use.