Horswispr's Full Review: Taylor Big Baby Acoustic Guitar
These days, whenever I play a $300 Yamaha or Takamine at the local guitar store, I want to flee in horror and return to the safety of my home, where my Martin dreadnought and and my little Larrivee LS05 await me.
Older Yamahas are great. I've met some that I wouldn't have any qualms about performing on. They're mostly in the living rooms of 20-something folkies, passed down from an older sister or parent who played Joan Baez and Judy Collins songs on them in college, and then retired them to the closet until they were passed down.
Early '80s Takamines were also pretty darned good. Since Takamine mercilessly imitated Martin's headstock and body style in those days, they pretty much had to make decent guitars. My 1984 Takamine 12-string (with the imitation Martin body, pick guard and headstock) sat in my closet from roughly 1988 through 1998. When I moved, I took it out of the case and played it. It was IN TUNE, sounded great, and still had low action. We're talking ten years in a closet! Give older Takamines a look in you can find them.
But contemporary Yamahas and Takamines under $500 aren't quite the same. You'll find a good one now and again, but most are pretty sorry pieces. So what's a person to do who wants a decent $300 guitar?
My recommendation is simple: Go to the back of your local Guitar Center, play every Taylor Big Baby you can find, and buy the one that sounds and plays best.
The Taylor Big Baby is a small, cute, humble looking guitar guitar with absolutely no binding. It is fairly light in color, and finished matte. Its back and sides are sapele veneer, and its top is made of solid spruce.
What is sapele, you ask? I searched Google and this is what I found on the Dean Hardwoods, Inc. website:
"Description: Heartwood a medium to fairly dark reddish brown to purplish brown; sapwood whitish or pale yellow, distinct.
"Working Properties: Works fairly well with hand and machine tools, tends to tear interlocked grain in planing, saws easily, finishes well, good gluing and nailing properties, satisfactory peeling and slicing.
"Durability: Heartwood is moderately durable, resistant to termite attack variable. Sapwood liable to powder-post beetle attack."
So it's a hardwood, like mahogany and rosewood, and it's sometimes used in flooring. Good enough. The fingerboard is ebony. That is not a Horswispr typing mistake: this is a $350 guitar with an ebony fingerboard.
So how did this little guitar play and sound? Well, as soon as I started playing, I started laughing. This little guitar is light as a feather, has essentially NO ornamentation, and it sounds...really good! It's bright, and not particularly loud, but it sounds like a solid wood guitar. There was character to the notes, and chords were nicely in tune, even up the neck. The bass was light weight, to be sure, but it had some resonance. What a nice sounding little guitar!
Playability was typical Taylor: The slender neck, low action, Elixer strings and ebony fingerboard yielded remarkable playability. More laughter. I was thinking of the little chicken hawk that Foghorn Leghorn used to tease all the time (he wanted to be a BIG chicken hawk), but I was enjoying every note I played.
And then I looked more closely at the fingerboard. There are two Phillips screws THROUGH the 16th fret into the guitar. They are painted matte black and sit nicely flush with the fingerboard. I have never seen any such like before on a guitar. Still more laughter. It must be part of the neck-to-body joint system. The truss rod appears to be accessible through the sound hole, as with Martin guitars.
I played several samples of the Taylor Big Baby, and there was some variability in terms of how well the action was set. On some, the strings buzzed a bit. On others, the action was set perfectly. The necks seemed true and straight on all samples I examined. A truss rod adjustment probably would have fixed the buzzing samples.
Does this guitar compete with Taylor's full sized guitars, like the 310 or 510? No. It's not as loud and it doesn't have the bass or sustain of the bigger Taylors. But would I recommend it for someone learning the guitar, or as a "kick around" instrument for someone who also owns a big Taylor, Martin or Larrivee? Absolutely.
For about $350 retail (about $250 on sale at Guitar Center), this guitar has no right to sound so good and play so true. And a solid Sitka spruce top and ebony fingerboard on a $350 guitar is unheard of.
If you are looking for an inexpensive guitar, you must play the Taylor Big Baby.
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